Sepolia updates, Staking on low-powered devices - The Daily Gwei Refuel #397 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where we cap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem i'm your host dante susanna and today's the first of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so we have the official sapolia test net uh merge announcement here from tim that you can go check out this was published i believe yesterday um and you can go kind of like check this out for all the details and i guess all the links to everything you need such as clients and things like that uh and on the sepolia note here uh for those of you who have been paying attention over the last i guess like 24 48 hours i did say that we expected zapolia to happen sooner than i think june sorry july 6th or 7th was the original kind of like date

because there was more hash power that came onto the network but that hash power has disappeared uh overnight basically and i'll show you i'll bring up the website here i should have got it up before but bring it up here this is the website that people use to track this so it's bordell.wtf you can see this chart here that kind of like plots out the the journey to ttd and you can see how volatile the hash rate has been on the sapolia network and then if you scroll down a bit actually you can't really see it because uh because of um maybe if i zoom in there you can see that kind of like uh hash rate chart here my camera is blocking it but you can see the hash rate spiked up right and then it's just going to kind of collapse today and it's it's leveled out again so

it was going to happen i believe you know tomorrow or something like that but it doesn't seem like that'll that'll be happening now so you can see here to achieve the tt tt at this kind of like date then this is the gigahash that's needed but this is when it will reach so right now based on the current hash rate ttd will be reached on july 5th here which brings me to the next thing i wanted to talk about which was that live stream that i i mentioned yesterday that i'm going to be doing with the 8th staker crew here it will be hosted on their youtube channel there's a link here to kind of like set a reminder on youtube i'll link this in the youtube description for you but as i said it is quite hard to know when this is actually going to take place uh we can get an

estimation like what happened with robsten but the problem is is that they're not going to be changing the ttd they being the kind of like core devs or anything like that they're just going to let it happen because there's just too much screwing around so if that hash power comes back online here uh on on sepolia well then it could happen faster or if more hash drops off it could it could be slower but the target is is kind of like july 6th here on the wednesday but currently it's tuesday july 5th at this time i'm assuming this is utc uh i i think yeah it's utc time here so yeah not sure when that's going to happen we'll keep you guys updated i have a funny feeling what's going to happen is that like while i'm sleeping for some reason there's just gonna be a lot of hash that

hits it and then i won't be out i won't be awake for the kind of like stream here so i'm hoping that doesn't happen but still go and kind of like set the reminder here for the stream i'm hoping that it happens when i'm awake so that i can actually join and be part of the stream but as i said it's kind of like hard to know and that this won't happen on main net like when we do the main net merge transition because of the fact that there isn't just one entity that has like a huge amount of hash power they can put on and you know turn on and turn off right it only happens on the test nets because the test nets just have such a low hash power to begin with it's basically i think a thousand times lower than mainnet or something like that no i

think the last calculation that i did was actually like a million times lower or something so just just crazy difference so this is not going to happen on may now but it is something that we have to deal with on the test nets yeah but anyway it's in the youtube description you can go check it out for yourself so we have a great thread from bartek here again today where he asked the question can you always withdraw your funds and he lists a bunch of different protocols out there of funds that you can kind of like with uh withdraw from so with make a dallas delegate contract you can finance in celsius uh you know you won't be able to always withdraw your funds as i've seen celsius just disabled withdrawals are because of kind of like a bankrupt binance could do exactly the same thing right compound

and rv most of the time maker vault yes uh dy dxv3 yes did xb4 question my question my question mark right and then bartek goes into like this thread basically describing what can happen on each of these services you know how you can actually withdraw your funds who can stop you from withdrawing funds and all these sorts of stuff here and i highly recommend giving this a read but this is something that falls into a lot the the kind of like topic that i talk about a lot which is risk right like when you're putting funds into anything there's always more of a risk than just kind of like holding the funds in cold storage for example so putting your funds into maker i would consider to be low risk as you guys know i've used i'm a pretty heavy user of maker when i uh kind of like want to

take on uh you know debt or want to take out i mean i don't really i don't leverage trade it's more just kind of like i want to borrow against my eighth or something like that make is the first stop shop for me uh and then i consider compound and rv to be low risk as well but binance and celsius i mean celsius i always considered to be extremely high risk because just like there were too many red flags for me binance look i mean binance has been around for a while it's a pretty legit centralized exchange but it still carries with it a lot of risk like your funds could be frozen for any reason like it doesn't even have to be part of um finance i don't know becoming insolvent or or running with people's money it could literally just be that your account gets frozen for

whatever reason and it stays like that and it's very hard for you to have any recourse here with that sort of sort of stuff there uh and then as for like something like dydx i mean this is going into layer two territory right where we talk about escape hatches and being able to withdraw your funds to layer one if the layer two goes rogue and things like that most of the layer twos don't have escape hatches i believe uh yet they will obviously but they don't have them right now uh and there's no kind of like really nice interface you can use to exit or anything like that it's kind of like has to be done through the contract if it exists but that's just due to that i guess like it still being early days but that is kind of like the way it is here

so you can give bartek's thread a read for more of a kind of like deep dive on these sorts of things but it's definitely something people need to be more aware of and need to be paying more attention to especially in the wake of celsius going down right uh blockfi also having troubles a bunch of other services having troubles uh that were kind of connected to that and all the fallout from three rs capital and then also the terror fallout like it all it feels like over the last few months it's all just come at once and it's really opened people's eyes to the fact that wow you know you should take your risk management seriously and even if people have a lot of money doesn't mean they're actually necessarily doing proper risk management like you would think that three hours capital had way better risk

management than what they did but apparently they did it and then you would think that all of these lenders would have better risk management than what they did and they didn't again right so never assume that there is kind of like risk management happening for you you need to be your own manager of your own risk you can't just kind of like outsource that to other people in other organizations and expect them to do what's best by you because then at the end of the day if they're in trouble they're going to look after themselves they're going to look after you they're always going to look after themselves first and then maybe worry about the customers later and the customers really in kind of like events like what happened with celsius they're never made totally whole right like if celsius wants to get themselves out of the hole they dug they

first have to get the you know themselves out of it and then they can go to uh in whatever way they can and then they can worry about their customers because at the end of the day their company is on the hook for the for the funds right the customers aren't so that's the kind of like first priority there and something's like three hours capital for example right their first priority i guess if they want to kind of like fix what what happened is paying back the lenders but they don't have the money to do that so they have to kind of pick and choose which lender to pay back and then those lenders lent that kind of like money out and then they've got people that they've borrowed that money from that they have to pay back and they have to kind of balance that as well so

there's all kind of like forms of risk management that goes on but you need to manage your risk before something bad happens there's no point doing it after the fact like doing it after the fact is kind of like oh well we lost all this money let's start managing our risk now to make sure it doesn't happen again or to make sure we can fill this hole it's like well if you just managed it properly to begin with you most likely wouldn't have ended up in this hole right so it always puzzles me when people just take risk management or don't take much management as seriously as it needs to be taken and it doesn't just go for centralized lenders and places like that it also goes for individuals interacting with different d5 protocols interacting with different smart contracts in general you always just need to be aware that as soon as

you put your funds into a smart contract guys there is more risk associated with it than holding it on your own kind of like eoa they're called externally owned account or your own wallet vastly more risk um but then there's also nuance to that where depending on which wallet you're holding it in there's more risk associated with it like if it's a hot wallet such as metamask obviously there's much more risk in in that than just holding it in kind of like a ledger or a lattice or a hardware wallet for example but then it depends how you secure your seed phrase uh and that could be risky because you didn't secure your seed phrase correctly and all those sorts of things so definitely something to keep in mind uh always i think i think it's just it's not supposed to be an afterthought it's

supposed to be something that's always on your mind you're always considering and it's not just got to do with with crypto itself it's literally with anything you do on the pc that you interact with crypto with especially if you're using a hot wallet of any sort like you know being mindful of which programs you install being mindful of which website you go to being mindful of of kind of like who you let access to your uh your computer being mindful of other things like your email being compromised and stuff like that a lot goes into these sorts of stuff guys and at the end of the day the services can try and help you there are services out there to help you there are kind of like protections in place for say gmail for example they have their own protections in place for preventing people from accessing your

account things like that but it's still your responsibility at the at the end of the day if someone gets access to your email account you can't just go to google and expect them to make you whole like that's not going to happen you have to be responsible for that at the end of the day but anyway going to leave that one at that but this segues me nicely into something that happened today on uh uh what they've got to do with polygon and phantom so the public rpc gateway provided by ankar for polygon and phantom were compromised via a dns hijack earlier today the polygon and phantom foundation have no control troll over services provided by others use alchemy or others while this is fixed so i've talked about rpcs before and about how you can there's a bunch of different rpcs um and there's plenty for like all the

different chains out there but this particular one that's being uh provided by ankar that's a-n-k-r got nothing to do with terra provided by ankar for polygon phantom was unfortunately dns hijacked which means that so dns hijack essentially means that when you're kind of like pointing out to something or you're kind of like talking to something you're expecting to get uh kind of like the correct thing back like for an rpc you're expecting to be able to relay your transaction and everything to go through smoothly but instead what happened because of this dns hijack uh the attackers were able to inject uh kind of like this arbitrary text into people's kind of like um when they when they hit this rpc into their metamask or something like that uh and then kind of like direct them to something uh to somewhere to do something nefarious and

i think there's a screenshot here of that uh somewhere i believe of what it actually looks like i'm not sure actually um no i'm not sure uh it doesn't seem to be a screenshot here but i'm sure you'll be able to see this flying around twitter here i'm just gonna scroll through and see if if there's anything going on here um no no apparently more information has come about come out about this as well uh that ganderbar changed their customers email addresses without their approval yeah i mean there's a lot of stuff going on here like this has just happened like a couple of hours ago so i'm not gonna try and kind of like do a full breakdown and i think this account yeah here we go this account see a cia offer size who shared this so you can see here this is

what kind of pops up this is the rpc era that will pop up uh with and say you know funds are at risk restore your wallet at polygonapp.net which is a scam website do not go to that website uh and that will basically ask you for your seed phrase so this is one of the more sophisticated attacks i guess out there and one of the more kind of like subtle things that people don't really talk about but it falls into what i was saying before about the fact that if a website ever asks you for your seed phrase just don't just don't put it in there like it's just especially one that you've written down on a piece of paper from a hardware wall and then it's never touched a computer just don't like the the rule of thumb for a hardware wallet seed phrasal form for any seed phrase

really is to write it down or to secure it in some way offline that is it's there it's secure it's resistant to things like fires and stuff like that and then never ever input it into a into a kind of computer that's connected to the internet ever and even if it's not connected to the internet just don't because monday you might connect it to the internet and for some reason uh there was a keylogger on your machine and then it kind of like speaks out and then your seed phrase gets compromised and you thought you were safe but if someone has your seed phrase they can take all the funds from your hardware wallet anyway it doesn't require you to physically sign those transactions or anything like that they can kind of get taken out because they have control of your your wallet so that's a good thing to keep in mind a

good rule of thumb there as well uh but don't i guess like just just be just just use common sense at the end of the day like i think people kind of get scared sometimes over security and they're like oh my god there's so much to think about but really it's just just common sense just like you don't cross the road without looking both ways because you know you're going to get hit by a car the same kind of i guess like instinct should trigger when you go to a website and the website's asking you if you're see phrase you should be like well no no i'm not going to give my seed phrase because that is essentially the same thing as getting hit by a car right except for your finances so so yeah anyway this is a developing story about the polygon uh the polygon and phantom

rpc here but yeah it's not a great uh great thing to happen and hopefully not too many users have been affected by it so i forgot to cover this the other day but there is this kind of project that i invested in a little while ago that i really want to talk about today so it's called macro and they kind of like announced their public launch on twitter on on june 24th here so basically what macro is is a boot camp for web 3 builders essentially that's like kind of like very high level stuff but they do more than that so they're kind of like doing like you can see here the tldr of what they do but like the the top of funnel was like macro engineering fellowship you know learn basically uh how to develop in web three learn how to um how to work in web

three and and kind of like graduate from that and then kind of hopefully get a job within web web3 right that's the top of the funnel there and then there's there's other things that they do such as audit so they basically uh sell audits to uh i guess do audit services for all types of projects out there they have talent as well so they have like a talent agency where you can kind of like hire this the the web 3 talent that comes out of the engineering fellowship here and they also have a ventures on that's coming soon that will obviously invest in projects so it's kind of like reminds me of the y combinator kind of model but for for crypto and for web3 and they've had a lot of success like i said as i said i'm one of i'm an angel investor so i get

their investor updates uh they've had a lot of success they're just just kind of like pros uh they're um getting lots of people through their courses they're getting lots of audits done and it's just really really cool to see something like this because it's very different to what i think we're typically used to within crypto of obviously these on-chain protocols and things like that whereas this is actually training these the kind of like next kind of kind of web 3 builders to go and build these protocols themselves so this is kind of like the front door for people to get into it so if that's you if you're interested in doing something like that definitely check out macro here you can go follow their twitter account i'll link this in the youtube description below and you can read the rest of this kind of uh thread here as well but

i think this is one of the better kind of like um services to use if you're trying to upskill like there's plenty of obviously blockchain courses and web three courses and stuff like that out there today but i think that most of them are really just kind of like generic stuff they're not really kind of like uh up to date with what you need to know when you're in kind of like web 3 and working within web3 and i've also talked about how i think working within web 3 is like half basically the the kind of like hard skills like the technical stills and and half kind of like soft skills such as the culture i really do think that the people who know crypto web 3 culture have a will have a much easier time working within the industry than those who just don't know it so i think that's

what macro can give to you as well now this isn't kind of like me trying to show you too hard on this sort of stuff or like a paid advertising or anything like that this is just me being excited about something that will educate people like you guys know i love i'm an educator i love educating and uh i think that this is just a really cool structured way for more people to be able to build within web3 so definitely go check this out i'll link it in the description so an interesting tweet here today from jcrtp who is a blockchain engineer at rocketpool so he starts the tweet off by saying for those who have been following me in the rockapool discord server for a while you know i'm obsessed with setups that can validate the beacon chain with under 10 watts today i'm excited to

share some news on that front and you can read this thread for news of this but i think this is really cool and again this speaks to just how cool the ethereum staking community is because it's full of hobbyists and hobbyists don't just want to do kind of like the run-of-the-mill stuff they want to see how far they can push things and being able to validate on the beacon chain using a low a very low power device you know under 10 watts is a noble goal and apparently it it can be done right if you if you look through kind of um kind of these uh these kind of threads here you can see that last year uh jcr kind of demonstrated this where they used a uh raspberry pi and it uses five watts and performs very well it was an overclocked raspberry pi uh and then the

past few months they've been working on a developer prototype for a new board called the rock 5b which you can kind of get more information about about here so this board basically has um a 8 cpu core 16 gig of ram a full pcie 3.0 uh uh and four time slots for nvme ssds as well so and apparently it's about four to six times as fast as the pie on par with most nuts and validates using you guessed it five watts of power so that's really really cool the fact that it has that it's on par with most um nux uh which are these kind of like intel nok things you can buy and they're little boxes little pcs that people like to stake on while this is on par with it uh it's four times four to six times as

fast as the pie and it only consumes five watts of power which is really really cool especially for people who just want to be able to validate without chewing up too much power it's awesome so definitely check out this thread thread here i'll link to the new description below for more information about this but this is what i love most about the hobbyist staker communities just projects like this so people actually go out there they do something different they don't just kind of do the run-of-the-mill stuff where they build like a normal pc and just let it run and don't worry about the energy usage uh because at the end of the day like one of the i guess motivations to moving to proof of stake from proof of work is because we're trying to use uh you know as less amount of energy as possible and

to that end doing uh staking with these devices with these really really low power devices is one way to kind of like achieve that so very very cool to see this i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check out the full thread below all right so this is an interesting thing and this basically speaks to what i kind of i talked about yesterday with regards to arbitram but i put out a screenshot on twitter where i said arbitrary's block space was more valuable than bitcoins yesterday and it's a screenshot of the crypto fees.info website where you can see that uh bitcoin block space has 260 thousand dollars of fees whereas arbitrary one block space has 478 000 of uh of fees paid here now obviously that was because of the odyssey event and obviously it

wasn't um it wasn't ideal for end users because of the fact that fees went went up and the odyssey event had to be paused and all that sort of stuff but i want to talk more broadly about the concept of block space here because it's one of the things in crypto that interests me the most for a number of reasons and i think the main reason is simply because it's very very difficult to fake uh block space usage right because it's expensive like to fake block space usage on basically any network except like the ultra cheap ones uh it would get very very expensive very very quickly so for example on arbitram1 if a swap is costing you a dollar and you want to fake a hundred thousand swaps well that's a hundred thousand dollars in just fees now depending on what exchange you're using if you're

using uni swap you're then paying the exchange fees as well so i mean it gets it tallies up very very quickly here as you can see so to that end i think that it's just a really really great way to show chain usage and show block space demand because at the end of the day layer ones and layer twos they sell one product block space now block space demand is how we measure the popularity of that product but also there's a lot of nuance here as i said yesterday arbitrary money is throughput limited right now and the thing is i should clarify this when i say throughput limited all of all chains are throughput limited if they have a fee market right and it just depends how much throughput they can get out of their chain before the the fees start going up nothing has

unlimited scalability not even fully centralized services in the web 2 world has unlimited scalability and there's different ways that we can scale and there's there's a bunch being worked on but right now arbitrary one could process more than what they are doing but they were throughput limited for a number of different reasons and obviously nitro is coming to to help with that and a bunch of other upgrades as well i believe especially for other layouts who's out there uh but you know because of that that this fear of a new on arbitration one is obviously not sustainable it happened due to the to to odyssey it happened due to uh the fact that like it was throughput limited uh very you know i think i was it was on average doing like 10 tps or something like that uh and that meant the fees went up and that was kind of like an

outlier so you really want to look at block space demand over time and i'm not talking over weeks or even months i'm talking years of to kind of get a good picture of what block space actually has lasting value obviously i think the only block space in crypto that has proven to have lasting value is ethereum block space because if you look at bitcoin here it just has like hardly any demand for it the the demand right now for bitcoin block space all that fear of a new that you see there or at least most of it would come from arbitrage of bitcoin between different centralized exchanges basically i don't see any other reason why uh people would be using bitcoin bitcoin is something that you buy and hold if you want to spend it then you probably are

going to spend it on lighting network or something like that i mean that's what they say i mean in practice it's different but like hardly anyone is using bitcoin for commerce so when you look at what it's actually being used for it's mostly got to do with with centralized exchange arbitrage and people kind of like sending to and from exchanges as well to you know buy bitcoin off an exchange return to their wallets that obviously cost a fee or send bitcoin into an exchange and all that sorts of stuff now the most dangerous thing here for bitcoin is that the fee revenue has been dropping over time and long term uh bitcoin is going to rely on fear of a new for its security because the bitcoin block rewards go down over time right every four years the bitcoin block reward halves so fear revenue is

supposed to make up for that to secure the chain but it's just not happening that way the block space demand it's all in competition with one another and not all block space is created equal on the bitcoin network you cannot do what you can on the ethereum network and what and and just by virtue of that the ethereum network's block space is more valuable same with arbitrary one like you can do whatever you can do on ethereum on albertum once and with bsc even like bernard smart chain here right same with polygon same even with with avalanche and optimism you can do much more with those networks with their block space than you can with bitcoin so i don't want to pick on bitcoin too much here but the the the thesis that you can survive off fear revenue on a network like bitcoin has

always been fundamentally flawed to me it doesn't matter how popular bitcoin got if it's trying to be a digital gold that you kind of like hold and you don't really do much with then where's the block space demand going to come from like who's going to be buying and selling selling bitcoin block sorry who's going to be buying bitcoin block space not selling obviously the network sells the block space but you know who's going to be buying it that i just don't see anyone right and then people will say our lighting network and then settling back to bitcoin all this sort of stuff was like yeah but the thing is aligning network doesn't really do many transactions on layer one like and the landing network itself is very is is is very flawed and has abysmal adoption so whenever i see this i'm just like this is just crazy to

me that the bitcoiners would stick to wanting to secure the chain with fear revenue when it's been shown over the long term as i said over years that the fear revenue is going down it's not going to be enough uh and and and kind of like ethereum and other proof uh smart contract change is just eating bitcoins lunch in the block space uh department because you can do so much more with it it's kind of like if i had to use an analogy right like think about how many uh how many things you can do with uh a smartphone as compared to a dumb phone like a million more things well are dumb phones around anymore yeah in some capacity do many people use them no like no not even um you know older people use the dumb phones anymore they were like

the last adopters of smartphones and they all have smartphones now um so when you kind of like think about that it's the same kind of concept you know bitcoin is this old kind of like thing that doesn't really do anything as compared to ethereum so why would you use this block space you wouldn't so anyway i don't want to pick on on it too much as i said here but i think that when talking about block space you need to look at the yearly trends more than the day to day or week tweak or month to month trend month is okay but i think yearly for a better trend here but a lot of this block sales demand is also tied to speculative activity like obviously ethereum is still number one still doing millions of dollars a fear of a new a day but it was

doing much more than that during the bull market it was doing 50 60 70 million dollars a day that was obviously not sustainable at that point in time and then it crashed with the speculative activity crashing alongside it so if we want block space demand to be more i guess sustainable we need more non-speculative applications as i've discussed before as well but i'm going to leave it at that i just wanted to have a little bit of a discussion there all right we got a tweet here from stani who's kind of like teasing something today where he's basically teased a screenshot of a phone and he says what if secured by ethereum so i don't know what he's kind of like getting at here it seems that there's kind of like rv protocol in the uh in the background here i mean this smartphone is like one

of those flip fold phones for those of you listening uh you probably can't see the screenshot basically on the front screen screen it looks like he's got uh rv there photoshopped in obviously and then on the front screen it's got uh lens protocol i believe and then on the bottom it's engraved it's got powered by ethereum with an arvo logo so i think this is kind of like a response to the the salina phone right like uh what if there was an ethereum phone and honestly i don't think i gave my take on the refuel of what i thought about the solano phone like my tldr take of it is that okay it's kind of like interesting that they're doing something different i guess uh and like their mobile sdk especially is is is is pretty cool

because it'll bring more people on board but i don't think people realize just how difficult it is to launch a smartphone and do so profitably i believe the break even for an uh smartphone is that you have to sell 500 000 units just to break even because of the the the production cost right like they're not going to sell 500 000 units for the solana phone like if you look at most of the smartphone market as it exists today it's dominated by two two two companies samsung and apple like and then everything else just takes whatever samsung and apple don't have there and there and the thing is is that it's it's the majority like 99 of the markets only dominated by a handful as well there and then all these smaller players have come

and gone over the years it's very very hard to do a smartphone to build the hardware profitably scale that you know get option for and everything like that software side of things is probably easier i think because you can just bolt it on to existing hardware and i think building mobile sdks is is pretty cool uh but i'm just yeah i'm curious to see what what stan is standing he's teasing him maybe he's making i'm making a joke out about it this line of thing or maybe he's just playing on it or maybe this is actually real i'm curious to see as i said i'm not really bullish on hardware plays like like the hardware player of a smartphone but i am bullish on mobile sdk so sdk stands for software development kit so just basically ways to make developers lives easier when developing crypto related

things but we'll have to see we'll have to see what stanley's got here um and i don't you know i don't know if this is going to amount to anything maybe they're thinking about it but it doesn't seem like it's going to amount to anything it just seems like a cool little mock-up i think all right finally here i just wanted to quickly shout out that i had my twitter spaces with ben edgington just a couple of hours ago hosted by ssv network you can now play the recording i'll link it in the description below it was an awesome conversation guys we talked a lot about merge related stuff and post merge stuff and also all the stuff that ben does on a day-to-day basis he's doing a lot across the uh i i guess um ethereum ecosystem and you probably know him best for his work on the watchdown

e2 newsletter but he also is working on an ethereum book and also uh he works on an ethereum consensus layer client named teku but we go into all of that on the twitter spaces so you can go catch the recording i'll link it in the youtube description below but i think that's gonna be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone