Reth introduced, Polygon zkEVM update and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #503 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony sassano and today's the 8th of December 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so to kick off today we have an update from the ethereum foundation ecosystem Support Program now they do these updates once a quarter uh and this is the update given for Q3 of 2022 with over 8 million dollars awarded to a bunch of grantees now you can check out the blog post for yourself um but you guys uh will know from when I've previously covered this the grants are given to a wide range of different categories CR spanning from Community Education uh to consensus develop a client development and execution layer development as well uh cryptography developer tools general research all

that stuff there but as I said you can check out the the blog post here for a full breakdown of the projects that have been funded and the total funding was about eight million dollars for Q3 now I like going through these lists uh for a couple of reasons one I love to just keep on top of what the ethereum foundation is funding because it kind of shows what they find valuable and two it's a really good way to find projects to either follow along closely because it interests you or get a lot or get involved with that so if you are looking for your next journey in ethereum and you don't know really what you want to do maybe you're already working full-time and you're thinking okay well I want to be saying on the side I want to add more value to the ethereum

ecosystem and whether you're you're a researcher or a developer or anyone in between uh doing community stuff all that all that good stuff as well you can check out this list check out the projects and maybe find your side hustle here or side gig as they say right uh so that's those are the two reasons why I like reading through these things and highlighting it for you guys but you can definitely go check this out it'll be linked in the YouTube description uh below all right next up we have an update out of the ref client so Georgios from Paradigm said excited to be open sourcing wrath and ethereum execution layer uh client in a built-in rust ref is a new Apache MIT license full node implementation of ethereum by Paradigm and the community focused on contributor

friendliness modularity and performance now I did highlight ref I think no not last week it was a few weeks ago now as this new client that's been built in rust on the execution layer side of things and it's great that we've got another execution layer client uh in The Fray here I'm going to be really curious to see how quickly it gains market share I did go over yesterday how uh on ethernodes.org you can see that guess market share is coming down and now we have never mind Basu and Aragon getting market share but with ref it seems that we've got another mainnet ready client for people to use uh and I'm going to be spinning up my own I haven't done one yet I want to experiment with it and see I know what the experience is like for it there but this should definitely help

with client diversity so I'm very much looking forward to to these but you can check out the blog post of course in order to get like a full breakdown of what's going on here and George also has a thread as well um but I do want to just quickly touch on maybe the elephant in the room that you would have seen going about on Twitter today and I did discuss this drama when breath was first announced but basically there is still ongoing drama between wrath and Aquila and Aquila is a ethereum full node that was being built wrote this sorry I should say ethereum execution layer client that was being built and then the team or at least kind of lead of the team said that they were going to stop development on it because uh the people behind reth stole their their ideas and now they're

accusing them installing their code I haven't really digested all of the drama you know too much just yet it's very fresh so I don't really want to spend too much time covering it because I want to just wait and see what comes out and who's right and who's wrong but at the end of the day like I look at this and I'm like okay well akola akula was was good it was being developed by a former Aragon devs I believed uh and people that I spoke to said it was looking talking like a you know a client that was actually um that was actually a good client it wasn't just a throwaway client but it was a very small team they weren't very well funded right and they obviously felt threatened when uh you know a competitor came along like Paradigm who is extremely well funded they have a

probably have a bigger team working on it more maybe a maybe potentially a more experienced team I'm not entirely sure but definitely on the funding side of things they have a lot more money there so maybe they felt threatened there but they also probably felt like they were hard done by because there were conversations that were shared between Georgios and uh and um uh artem from akula who that were basically looked like and I don't know if this was the exact case the screenshots I saw weren't that damning but it kind of looked like joyjos was prying uh uh applying um atom for information on How to Build a Better client or just like different kind of things got to do with execution layer clients but as I said I don't want to dive deep into that one you guys can make up your own opinion on that I may

touch on on it again when the pick picture becomes clearer because as I said it's still fresh so we don't really know there but all in all just great to see a new execution layer client here and I know akula isn't being worked on right now but I think that it didn't really I I don't know if it was actually uh mainnet ready yet I think it was just being developed and even if it was it didn't really have much market share I think just by virtue of Paradigm being really well known um uh ref being you know live now and people are talking about it a lot more than they were with a cooler I think there's going to be more I guess adoption of this more quickly than there would have otherwise been for a cooler so that's just the sad fact of how

things work if anyone has spent any time in this ecosystem or any kind of online ecosystem in general you know it's all about the attention economy and I think that I I think I might have touched on akula once or twice in the past but they didn't really make much noise on Twitter uh they were obviously very heads down building but I think you can be heads down building but you still need to make noise noise you know puts it on my radar I cover other people to cover it and it will use it and then you get market share and you feel better about what you're building obviously because no one wants to build something that no one uses right so I think taking all that just all in all um yeah I think it's not a negative that I I think when you look at it like a

negative positive thing and maybe I'm I'm maybe you disagree with me on this but if you look at it as a whole you know the drama included the the clients um included and look at a cooler not being developed anymore but ref being developed I think on net it actually ended up just being positive for the ethereum ecosystem because we now have a really strong client in in ref right a really well-funded client that's independent of the ethereum foundation independent of any of the other teams building uh execution layout or even consensus layer clients which I think is very very important now there's one last thing I wanted to touch on where people I saw some people say that they believe this move from Paradigm uh basically means that they bought a seat at the Accord devs table so to speak and I kind of saw those comments I was like this is

a weird take because you can't just buy your way into the court devs right just because you've developed a client you know maybe you'll get to sit on the core Dev calls and give your opinion on those calls but that doesn't matter right there have been people invited to those calls such as miners to give their thoughts give their opinions on things but they didn't really have any sway on anyone right they didn't have any real say in anything they were invited I believe over concerns about 1559 and then the merge and nothing really changed from that so it that you know it's one thing to get invited to a call and be on a call on the call Deb's call I should say and it's another to actually have influence over it and there's you know the core devs they've been around for so long they're not just

going to be like oh well you know paradigm's developing a client now let's listen to them let's let's make sure their voice is heard you know your voice is determined sorry the power of your voice is determined by your Merit and determined by a bunch of other factors as well you know how good of an ecosystem could Jupiter argue how are you a good Steward of the ethereum protocol it's not like Paradigm said okay we're gonna develop this client we're going to buy our way into the core devs and now we have more sway over things we can push things in that we want I don't think that's the case at all and it's kind of silly because if that was the case then I'd be really bearish on ethereum anyway because that would mean that ethereum governance got captured a long time ago if you could

just buy your way in right or you could just develop a client and automatically get a seat at the table so I just thought that was a bizarre take from it from a few people that I saw on on Twitter and I think they were just saying that because they were taking the side of their cooler um devs which is fine I mean you can take whatever side you want but I think it clouded their judgment over that uh and I don't think there's any capture of ethereum governance going on just because a big obviously VC like Paradigm has put their money behind a a client now and basically come up with a with a client um and that gets them I guess like a seat at the table so to speak but they said that the table is not there because of the money that they have it's there

because they developed an ethereum client and anyone can do this obviously it's not easy right but anyone can develop an ethereum client and as we've seen like there are there are a few teams out there developing ethereum clients that aren't you know extremely well funded or anything like that and they and there are other people that are sitting on the core dev's calls as well and other people that are that are that aren't even paid by anyone in ethereum ecosystem to be there but they just you know community members that are just really interested in things so I think taking all that ethereum's governance process is definitely very merit-based and I don't think there's a way to buy your way in and buy your buy influence there uh but you know maybe they could be in the future but right now I don't think there is and as I said if there

was I would be bearish on ethereum to be honest because I think I've said it before and I'll say it again the social area is the most important part of a blockchain and the part of the social layer or a big part of the social layer is the governance process so if the governance process is compromised uh and if it's basically bought and paid for well then there's no point being part of that ecosystem anymore because you're basically just at the whims of actual oligarchs right and we're just recreating the existing system so you know I'm not saying that it can't ever happen to any chain right right they get to that point where they've been captured but I'm not seeing that happening within ethereum today so that that's the last thing I wanted to talk about on on that one I may retouch on

the drama surrounding breath and the court the akula client if more comes to light on that front all right so ashine I put a tweet out today where he said looks like Lido proposed its first block with a distributed validator on Gurley yesterday so you guys will know that I've covered uh opal Network being live on girly and bringing on a bunch of pilot validators in order to test their distributed valid validator technology AKA DVT so what does this mean well ashine said in the comments it means seven lighter operators each holding a fraction of a validator private key work together to produce a block cooperatively learn more about the tech at this link here that and then um the person who asked that question said

that's amazing and I agree that is amazing that's so awesome that you could have a probably secure distributed validator private key where you basically have redundancy here so these seven lighter operators were holding a fraction of the key and able to produce a block um you know cooperatively here which is just amazing and I've talked about DVT Tech before and how it's going to benefit the ethereum uh Beacon chain uh with more you know more decentralization both on the I guess validated front but also the geographic distribution front which is becoming more and more important in the wake of the ofak sanctions of course uh but yeah just great to see that uh testing is going well on Gurley for uh for um for opal Network here yeah and I think opal is waiting until withdrawals are enabled and are enabled to go live

on mainnet here so we'll have to wait uh until that happens which isn't too long away I mean March aprilish by the looks of things right now so we'll see about that but yeah great to see the testing going well on girly here and just I forgot to disclose it before I'm an investor in opal networks just a disclaimer there for you guys all right so there is this Twitter account zprize that I came across and they were running a competition uh that they've got some winners for here so the winning submissions uh will be open source for the benefit of all and here is a list of winners from this competition so what was this competition well uh it's as I said I just came across this uh recently it seems like it was a competition for um coming up with uh new ways of doing a z uh zero

knowledge stuff basically across the whole gamut here so you can see here that the winners include people or that have built accelerating proof generation operations on GPU fpgas uh accelerating entity operations on an fpga uh you know and there's accelerating elliptic curve operations and finite field arithmetic these are definitely very technical things very in the weeds of the cryptography side of things but uh there were three prizes here and you can see that our first prize was given to oh man I don't know how to say that name there starts with Y and then it's double r i d rid software maybe the Y is silent second prize went to Gregor Mitchell I've said that wrong as well but independent third prize went to a man to network and jump that's funny that jump crypto's in there uh jumper hasn't

really got the greatest of reputations in crypto these days and then there's a bunch of other um kind of things in the thread here but yeah you can go check this out for yourself I just wanted to hire this I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so I've got to cover this the other day but uh a16z released this collect.t.test.eath.org uh resource the other day which is basically uh a test net claim for prior ethereum developers so addresses that have deployed one or more contracts on Main net clearly chipolia before November 15 2022 eligible for a one-time claim of 10 Gurley and sapolia test eth girly eighth is supplied by R3 here and so polia either supplied by Tim baiko so yeah if

that fits the bill for you if you were someone who deployed or have an address that deployed to these test Nets before this date well you can get some test net APR and the reason why this is being done like this is because the market on girl the aid for Geth it's uh was was kind of cornered people were speculating on it was actually making a gath being incredibly scarce and the price of it go up which was just weird I think people doing it for airdrops and things like that and I think sapolio was maybe going to suffer the same fate so this is just an easy way for developers to get some test net eth if they were have deployed to these other test Nets oh sorry to these test Nets into mainnet uh before this date so if that applies to you go

collect some free girly Eve and sapolia eth I'll link this resource in the YouTube description for you below all right so the Fe language here uh announced that they're a fun bun Bounty program are written in Fe so in other news for the first time Fe code has hit the ethereum mainnet and they announced this uh I think 24 hours ago or so uh I'm not a bit a bit more than 24 hours ago now and then just before there someone took the jackpot of three eth and ran away uh on this so you can read the thread about what happened with the bug Bounty program there but what is the Fe language here well basically it's an alternative to solidity and to Viper which is already being used on ethereum

so if you're a developer this is definitely going to be interesting for you and you can check them out at their Twitter page and check out their blog posts and all that good stuff as well but a lot of developer stuff today I just noticed but yeah you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but if you want to know what happened with the bug Bounty program as well you can check out the the thread here which it does a good job of explaining it I'll link that in the YouTube description uh below as well all right so something I missed yesterday was that uh David Schwartz here from the polygon Hermes team announced the progress of uh I announced an update on the progress of evm equivalence in polygon ZK VM effort so currently uh the polygon ZK evm is

passing 99.5 of ethereum test vectors that apply to their type 3 implementation which means almost 10 000 tests have passed here this is an absolutely massive Milestone I think the polygon ZK stuff is making some really big strides here and I think they're doing this for a few reasons one the the polygon POS chain is great but it's obviously not a long-term solution and they want to migrate that to a ZK thing one day and I've talked sorry as a KVM one day and I've talked about this before on the refill so I won't rehash it here um and also they want to the race is on to get like a ZK VM to mainnet and then get start getting adoption on it it's like getting an ecosystem built around it and it seems like the polygon dkm evm is getting closer and closer here which

is awesome to see we can't up on the end of the year I believe they said that I think they said that their ZK VM would be on mainnet by the end of the year maybe even early next year but I mean it's it's going to get there eventually I don't think honestly I don't think the race is as the uh sorry I don't think the race to deploy is as important as people make it out to be because there are ecosystems that came later on the I guess like L2 front I should say uh that out competed ones that came earlier and I think with with polygon it's funny because they have such a strong BD and marketing team already they have such a strong relationship base with different projects already that it's not going to be hard for them to get adoption on

their ZK VM whereas other teams may not have as much success as polygon does and polygon may be able to come even later than the other teams to mainnet with zkbm but have more success because they're going to leverage those relationships so I think that speaks to the importance of not just the building and deploying the tech but also making sure that you have a really great business development and marketing and relationship kind of pipeline uh and and the reason why polygon has that is because of the POS chain see how what I've I I I've said this for a long time that the POS chain even though it's not a layer two right even though it's just a side chain like as they call it right uh it still adds a lot of value to ethereum for a bunch of other reasons that I've outlined before but a big

reason is that polygon gets to leverage that to bring people into the ethereum ecosystem to use the layer twos once they're ready and as I've said before the POS chains end state is to become a ZK VM so once we get there maybe it's not going to happen anytime soon but once we get there then everyone just comes along with it the user base the ecosystem the projects that are already on the POS chain they just automatically migrate across it's the same thing as what happened with the ethereum merge and we merge the chain but like nothing changed for end users it was all still the same for them they were just using it and the chain was just secured by previous take instead of proof of work so when you take it like that uh it's obviously a very big positive there so just great to see polygon making a lot

of uh progress here and I can't wait to play around with their ZK VM on mainnet myself and in other polygon news as well this is on their POS chain side of things but this applies to EVMS in general so they basically were able to make the uh evm or up to twice as fast uh with a few different technical things that they've um that they've kind of done here and there's a blog post explaining this but this is very cool because as I've said before the evm has pretty much already won it has a massive mode a massive Network effect there are so many people building on it and working with that so how do we improve the evm what are the biggest improvements we can bring to the evm well one of the things and and probably pretty much the a major thing is this

it's very slow as as um as compared to other virtual machines that are out there it's quite slow so how do we make it faster well there are a bunch of teams working on this right now polygon obviously being one of them because they've managed to crack up to two times speed increase on the polygon POS chain which is evm based uh by paralyzing the evm and paralyzation of the Eva M has been a holy grail of sorts because uh the AVM doesn't have paralyzation which means it has to do things sequentially which is obviously slower than doing things in parallel and by things I mean uh transactions you can see here what this looks like so in a Serial execution it executes the transactions sequentially but in a parallel execution it can execute transactions uh obviously in parallel

right so you can see the speed benefits from that and because uh the polygon POS chain uh is evm based this applies to that as well so that's what polygon has done here and you can see the differences in speed uh between uh serial and parallel lower is actually better here on this chart and parallel is is is much better yeah and this doesn't just apply to polygon's POS chain I'm sure they're going to be using this with their ZK VMS I'm sure this Tech's going to be open source for other ecosystems to use this and the fact that people are innovating in a really really big way on the evm is really promising because look I don't think we need to bring these upgrades to layer 1 ethereum anytime soon but the beauty of both alts uh l1s that use the evm side chains that use the evm and

layer twos that use the AVM is that they can move faster right and they can move faster they can deploy new things because ethereum layer one is going to always and and and keep just moving slower and slower as time goes on for obvious reasons so how do we experiment with the evm well we do it at the higher layers or we do it at the alternative layers such as uh the polygon POS chain so taking all that into account uh it's very very positive yeah and it's very awesome to see polygon innovating so if you want to read about exactly what they did you can check out this blog post which I'll link in the YouTube description below all right so I forgot to cover this the other day but chain link finally had a staking version 0.1 uh go live in Early Access so this is a cap staking pool and

I believe the staking pool already reached that cap so there was a 25 million link uh uh cap here available for Early Access so you can stake your link today to secure your spot noon rewards for securing the chain link Network and the larger web3 ecosystem I don't talk about chain link too much on the refuel I don't know why that is I I think that the funny thing is that channeling is such a uh an important piece of critical infrastructure for the ethereum ecosystem because it Powers a lot of defy that it tends to just sit in the background and you don't hear too much about it but it and and obviously they're an oracle network but they're trying to do more than just being Oracle Network and something like staking has been a long long time coming they'll have their native token where you stake

it and then you can earn fee Revenue I don't I don't know for sure if there's inflation rewards being paid out either I assume that they're probably we will be but yeah you're unfair Avenue from the people and the services paying chain link to access that Oracle data so it's basically training wants to be a decentralized Marketplace for I guess like off-chain data so to speak so not just price data with their oracles but any kind of off-chain data any kind of off-chain agreements and and Contra real life contracts all that sort of stuff they want to be a service to bring that all on chain and to do that you need to perform an economy you need to form a Marketplace which is what they're doing with their which is what they have been doing but also what they're doing with their staking uh yeah so yeah if you own

link I don't think you can stake it now if you haven't yet because it's reached its cap but I'm sure they're going to increase this cap as time goes on so definitely keep an eye on this if you haven't yet and you can read the thread and the blog post for a full breakdown on what's involved with chain link staking version 0.1 all right last up here was a tweet that I put out today where I said teams really need to be acutely aware of how much activity happening around their project is organic versus airdrop farming if the project doesn't have a token yet High chance that most of the activity is just airdrop farming which could lead to a false sense of product Market fit and this was in response to a tweet that I saw from Will Sheehan here highlighting the Stargate Bridge because

the Stargate Bridge uh Twitter account basically said that hey you know Stargate is currently doing almost as much volume as the next 10 Bridges combined uh seamless liquid transfer is apparently in demand and then you can kind of see the stats here and and the number of transactions as can as opposed to other Bridges and the volume and things like that but the thing is is that you can say will showing here that demand additionally appears to be very high in increments of just over 100 tokens which means this doesn't look like organic Behavior right this looks like airdrop farming or liquidity mining or just something where people are getting rewards for doing this and that's not necessarily a bad thing but it does distort the view of product Market fit and we've seen this

time and time and time again in the crypto ecosystem where projects will have massive liquidity mining campaigns or they won't have a token yet well we should I should talk about they won't have a token yet right and then there'll just be massive amounts of airdrop farming going on and then as soon as they launch the token a lot of that activity dries up and then of course when they launch their token they do liquidity Mining and that again is just lots of inorganic demand and then once that ends or once that tapers off a lot the activity just goes to zero basically it goes back to what it was when it was actually organic and for a lot of these projects there's not much organic demand there to begin with and that can give a very false sense of security uh and false sense of product Market fit where

the teams are like oh my God we are doing so well we have so much problem I could fit it's awesome as you know we're gonna we're gonna rule the world so to speak right and then it turns out that no it was just because you were giving people free money basically right and someone in the replies I actually read uh uh made up I made a good point as well where they said teams don't care because this is easy eye candy for early investors plus leads to bigger raises that's true that it I I agree with the second part I don't agree with the first part so I agree with the the fact that it's in it's easy eye candy for investors and leads to bigger raises it 100 does I mean like fundraising is all about how you position yourself and how uh you know publicly right look at three

hours Capital they position themselves publicly as some god tier fund that was making all the best trades and making you know all this money and then they went bankrupt right and turns out they committed fraud as well well sorry I should say they they're accused of committing fraud as well uh they still haven't been arrested or anything like that uh which yeah I'm not going to go into that but anyway I don't agree with the first part where they said teams don't care I think that when I'm talking about teams here I'm talking about the ones that actually like are building something or at least trying to build something long-term sustainable I'm not talking about the teams that spin up some fork or something just to make money I'm literally talking about the ones that are missionaries not mercenaries so when looking at just those these teams are ones that I want

to basically say to hey be aware that you can create a product that you love and people can use it but if you're pre-token you know a lot of the time it's going to be airdrop farmers and if you have a token of doing liquidity mining a lot of the time it's going to be just farmers in general like yield Farmers right so uh and I think as time goes on uh and as more examples you know flow in teams become more and more aware of this Founders become more aware of this and it becomes less of an issue but it's still being and historically been a pretty big issue I think uh and it's been like that way since I guess the start of D5 summer basically when liquidity mining was popularized by compounds uh and then everyone started doing it and then I think we haven't

learned our lesson like there's a lot of ecosystems that keep doing it and I'm not saying it's bad to do I'm just saying that it distorts a lot of things uh and as I've said before like if a project doesn't have a token it's pretty much guaranteed that they're going to have a token in the future and there's a lot of these Services now like um uh that that always a lot of these Twitter accounts I see as well that kind of highlight the projects don't have tokens and give you an give you a cheat sheet of what you can do to possibly earn an airdrop and of course we have an airdrop hunting channel in the daily way Discord Channel 2 and as I've said before I don't blame people for doing this it's literally free money if you can get it right maybe there's a small upfront cost

because you have to do some Unchained stuff but basically it's uh you know based on uh previous air drops there is a chance of making hundreds thousands tens of thousands if not potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars from the these airdrops so I don't blame anyone for doing this and it's on the teams to actually work around this and make sure that they build organic lasting communities and not just mercenaries that are there just for the money um if they want to create a long lasting project if they're just there for the money well I mean I don't really care about those folks but anyway on that note I'm gonna leave it at that for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the

Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone