Stackr Network detailed, New Sismo badge and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #457 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host the Anthony 29th of September 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so a few things to go through today uh with regards to core uh ethereum development here and I just wanted to start with this tweet that was put out by Brock Elmore here who is the Chief Architect at nascent which is a um a fund in the space so he said lukewarm take Geth needs to adopt or die akula and Aragon are an order of magnitude better or more on multiple axes axis and get will hold back and slow down improvements to l1s and l2s hats off for what is done it's done for the ecosystem but now it's 661 000 lines of tech debt this is obviously a pretty scathing

tweet uh towards Geth but I completely disagree with this uh and for a number of reasons and I'll go through the tweet that Peter obviously the team lead at Geth put out here first before I dive into my own thoughts here he said can you guys please just make that better client than Geth already and everyone can switch over to it you've been saying if they in years now I just want to retire and it's annoying that everyone keeps promising me that I can but nobody delivers the Salvation client already obviously he's being tongue-in-cheek here there is no such thing as a perfect client and he knows that uh but he has a point the ethereum execution layer client diversity as we all know is still pretty bad right it's 80 percent dominated by Geth but what that really shows is that people are using Geth over

the Alternatives right such as Aragon such as a cooler such as Bay suit right so Geth must be doing something right like Geth mustn't be as bad as everyone says it is uh because 80 of the network is using it I mean like I've used Geth plenty of times in the past uh and and there's never mind as well of course um and I've used I mean I've used all of the clients but the reason why or at least one of the major reasons why Geth is still so popular is because it is stable it has a very estate it's a very stable client that's been around since day one uh it's reliable uh it doesn't have all the these Edge case bugs that a lot of the other clients have and the other clients such as Aragon are actually a fork of Geth obviously it's

been modified since but it's still using the Geth code base under the hood so I think it's very very uh I guess like um harsh by bro of broccia to say that Geth is Tech debt or death Geth needs to adapt or die I think Geth should keep doing what it's doing by being a stable and reliable client and leave it up to the other clients to do other things like maybe making it easier to sync an archive note which is what Aragon has done right and on top of this during the merge testing process uh Aragon and the other clients I believe had many more bugs or many more kind of like issues than Geth did and that again speaks to that stability that Geth has and that and that um reliability that Geth has

the other clients just don't have at this point in time they're not up to the same level as Geth in that regard and I believe even like right up until the the merge happened and even post-merge Aragon was having issues with uh block production right having bugs there on mainnet now I don't want to bash Ergo or anything like that it's a great client uh and I I think all the execution layers our clients are great but if you know if you want to come at the King which is Geth you uh you've got to do a lot more than just uh I build a client for a couple of years and and you know make it sync maybe an archive node fast or anything like that the true measure I think of a client is its stability and reliability everything else is just a

bonus on top of that that is basically table Stakes you have to be a stable client and you have to be reliable or else especially in a post-merge world where if an execution layer client Falls over well if you're a validator then you need to get that back up and running or else you're not validating anymore you're actually uh offline as as viewed by the network and you are not earning rewards anymore so it's extremely important for things to be stable that's again why Geth is at 80 because people know that it's stable they know that it's secure and they know that it's reliable so I don't know why Brock put this out I I really don't think that this was a very very nice of him to put this out I'm all for giving constructive feedback but he's basically just said that Geth just needs to go away because

it's it's Tech debt when that is the furthest from the truth like it doesn't matter the gether's been around so long and that it has a lot of uh maybe I guess like in the objective sense of the word Tech debt or redundant uh kind of things that it does or it could do things better that's again not the point of the Geth client the point is to be stable and reliable and on that front as well I think this is one thing that uh people who aren't in software development don't understand is that you can add plenty of features but you have to maintain those features right uh you can't just add a feature and then that's it like it's done and there's nothing to maintain that's not how it works at all and if you want to do software like that then it becomes extremely limiting so

for example the Bitcoin Network extremely limited but it's stable and reliable right it's still producing blocks it has it has had bugs in the past but they've been relative actually might not there has been a a couple of critical ones but they've been fixed but uh it's you know it's stable and reliable because but in in turn it's extremely simple because features aren't added very often to the Bitcoin code base whereas within ethereum features are added all the time to the protocol air I mean we just did one of the biggest or the biggest feature operating ethereum's history with the merge that stuff doesn't just happen once you can't just deploy the feature and that's it there needs to be maintenance there needs to be um uh someone kind of making sure that things are running smoothly and there needs to be someone there to fix things

if anything kind of goes wrong and that all falls back into something being stable and reliable which is what I think Geth has I mean that is what Geth has earned since Genesis being a stable and reliable client and being an enduring client I mean the other only other client that was around since then uh was the parity client which actually uh I've gone through this before but was retired and then it became open ethereum which ultimately became uh uh well ultimately that effort was put to towards what's Aragon here because uh the people that were supporting open ethereum gnosis have a supporting Aragon now uh and now we have a cooler as well and then there's never mind of course which are in the other mind is definitely independent uh they've been around for a little while now but Geth

has been there since Genesis uh sorry has Peter Peter has literally been working on Geth since Genesis back in 2015 so I think that he knows a thing or two about ethereum core development right and I think that uh he you know his points around why haven't people switched is very Salient like it's because Geth is reliable and stable and I've said that enough times already I think I've made my point but uh yeah I just wanted to go through that for people that may have seen this thread today and may not realize why people are still using get it's got nothing to do with uh uh you know it just being around the longest uh right otherwise people would still be using parody in open ethereum uh what's it got to do with is the fact that it has been maintained it is stable it is reliable and people love

using it especially in a post-merge world where the reliability and stability of an executive layer client is what makes or breaks their validators right in in simple terms so yeah anyway moving on from that uh to another tweet from Ryan Sean Adams today where he said we need fewer eth Killers we need more killer apps this is so true I've talked about this on the refill before but like how many times have these eath killers come out right or these other layer ones come out and say we've got unlimited scalability we've got all these blog space blah blah and that block space never gets filled up we have way more block space available in crypto than there is being used right like obviously A3 on block space has been at 100 capacity for a very long time but literally no other chain not even

Bitcoin during the bear Market is at 100 capacity all the time right nothing else so they've got the block space but there's just no demand to use it and the same is true for Layer Two so Layer Two still have plenty of block space especially with arbitrary with Nitro they've got plenty of block space available but the demand isn't there now of course we're in the general bear market right now so demand is generally lower but the thing is is that people and and funds and developers and Builders have just way over indexed on these layer ones and under indexed on actually building killer applications right now I would say there's only really two things that you could say with certainty having during product Market fit and that is nfts and D5 and even nfts some people will say that it

was a fad I don't believe it's a fad but people will say it's a fad so really you could just say that defy and the things that fall into that such as a money or a story value such as Ethan BTC are really the only things in terms of use cases that we have and then you can argue well that's why ethereum has such the ethereum's block space is so valuable because that's where D5 is that is literally like where the majority of D5 sits today right no I'm not just talking about tvl I'm talking about all the metrics surrounding that so when you think of it like that uh like we I don't just want to see less eight Killers because I think they're totally pointless but I just want to see more killer apps I want to see things taking advantage of the block space that is

already available today not more protocols spinning up more sorry not more protocols being spun up with more block space that no one's going to use paid for by a token inflation uh with VCS that got in early and then they're just dumping on everyone like it's just so toxic and so extractive it doesn't actually add any value to the ecosystem all it does is make the early buyers into these things uh richer because usually it's the same VCS the same funds who just recycle through these things they call every new L1 Next Generation and all that crap right uh and there's just been way too much focus on that rather than focusing on those uh on more applications doesn't have to be a quote unquote killer application but just more applications in general that actually use the block space that we have today

rather than trying to create more block space just to become a ghost chain uh but yeah I just wanted to make a comment on that because I see this way too often in crypto and I was thinking about it just before actually like the amount of people that like shill these l1s and you see them like on Twitter you see them on Reddit and everywhere like that and then I reckon the majority of those people haven't even used the damn thing because you look at the on-chain usage and it's basically non-existent so these people are just literally buying into an ecosystem that they've probably heard someone talk about on YouTube or they've heard someone uh maybe someone showed it to them in real life or something or maybe their friends are all about it but they're just buying it on an essentialized exchange and they're not

even actually using the chain at all uh and in that world like you can see why we have this saturation of block space because even the people who are saying that they're the most bullish on a particular L1 aren't even using it like I mean I use ethereum all the time I'm sure all of you do as well we use layer twos we love it we love getting amongst it but from my experience most of the other L1 ecosystems they're participants or their community I really just speculate is it really just mercenaries they don't actually use anything and if they did I think they would quickly realize how broken a lot of these things are I mean I have actually explored these other l1s and holy like people say the ethereum ux and UI is bad and he's poor and doesn't lend itself to

mass adoption which is fair but compared to the other layer ones it is so far ahead guys like I don't know if you've used some of the other layer ones out there I'm not going to name names because I want to don't want to go down that path but like some of them are just absolutely atrocious like they're just so confusing and and you when you use it you realize that all these top level narratives that people always talk about aren't true they break down extremely quickly when you actually try to use the thing think about I will name one name because it's a perfect example think about cardano all the hype leading up to their smart contract launched and then smart contracts launched and people realized that it was extremely limited because it uses the utxo model accounting model right and it could only

do whatever it was one transaction per block was something on chain and things like that so like people finally realize like oh oh The Narrative of Cardona getting smart contracts and automatically taking over the crypto space is actually not true and oh wow it's not as scalable as I thought it would be and all these other things that happen it's because narratives are easy to spread like words are cheap but actually using the thing and realizing that those narratives are false most people won't do most people will just keep listening to the YouTubers that tell them everything's gonna be all right everything's gonna pump you know buy this thing blah blah and they're going to keep getting uh I guess like fed those narratives perpetually but until you actually use the thing you don't know what's true and what's not whereas I have used most of them and I

can tell you that most of them are garbage like not even just because they've got no product Market fit they're just impossible to use so complicated and I just come back to ethereum and I'm like okay I can see how ethereum is easy for me to use because I'm so used to it but like just taking a step back and looking at it metamask and and interacting with ethereum generally all the tooling all the infrastructure around it is so far ahead of all these other ecosystems that I think that's definitely something that is not praised and often not brought up enough within the crypto ecosystem all right on to a fresh regulatory update here so uh yesterday the cftc filed a declaration informing the court that it seeks to perfect Services of process of a lawsuit on every voting

member of ukidao a virus chatbot and foreign posts so I talked about this I believe last week or the week before about how the cftc is going after ukidao formerly known as bzx but not only the uh operators but I guess not only the centralized team behind it but everyone that participated in the Dow which is obviously scary because if they're going after people who have just voted on a snapshot proposal for example or being participants in the Dow via foreign posts and chat Bots uh that means you potentially are liable here which is crazy because all this is going to do is do that chilling effect again which is going to scare people off participating in governance and the problem is is that we've already had really low governance turn out for a lot of these things for

other reasons and now this is just another reason on top of it so the meme of like governance tokens is has taken another hit I mean if no one wants to vote on these things because they could have could draw the eye of regulators well I mean that just is really really bad for the ecosystem generally but not only that it's also bad for any kind of value accrual for these tokens that's the bearish take here the bullish take or I guess like the other side of things is that this doesn't actually happen the cftc uh steps back or they lose or whatever uh but right now it's not looking too too good uh based on what they're trying to do here and I had hoped that the cftc wouldn't go down a similar path that the SEC has gone down with regards to coming on hard against

crypto uh but it seems like they're going even harder I mean I don't even think the SEC went this far like this is pretty far guys charging people who or I guess at least going after people who voted on things within a dow even if they were a small holder and didn't really have much I guess like say in the matter that's that's pretty crazy when you think about that um but we're gonna have to see what shakes out here and how this program addresses but not very not very good news that's for sure all right so I came across this project uh the other day uh called stacker Network and this is basically something that I spoke about a couple of weeks ago where I said that I I was quoting uh Ryan B's tweet on Twitter where he was talking about a tool that was uh allowed

people to easily deploy their own roll up on ethereum right well that's exactly what stacker network is building they're building an SDK for building application specific Roll-Ups uh using a independent sorry a decentralized network of independent sequences uh and this is really cool I mean this is this thread from katukia who works at r d in the uh private scaling privacy and scaling Explorations group at the ethereum foundation who's also working on stacker Network here and he says excited to finally share what I had been working on in the past few days and more so because L2 infrastructure Made Easy App specific Roll-Ups for all right on ethereum if you're interested in the project and want to collaborate or just want to chat about it DM's always open so that's a shout out there for uh for participating there but what this basically does and I

watched the demo video of the is it basically gives you this tweet from from Ryan berkman's yeah who I just mentioned well you basically go in the command line as a developer you say I want to essentially spin up and roll upright or spin up a um a a roll-up that's ready to go and have specific roll up and I want to do it on ethereum mainnet and then all that happens in the background and you're ready to go now the reason why we would want this is because we want to compete with networks such as cosmos that actually offers this functionality for their own application specific chain so obviously not a rollover but a chain and you remember dydx cited one of the reasons that they weren't um I guess like uh sticking with ethereum sticking with a roll up was because they believed that the cosmos

SDK has better suited their needs because they allow them to do all this sorts of stuff and allow them to I guess like plug and play and edit or I mean configure their Rob whichever way they wanted to well that's exactly what stacker network is trying to do here so I'm super excited about this I am really glad that someone is finally building this because it's definitely overdue uh and I think that uh it hasn't been around for very long yet but they seem to have built a lot from the demo video that I watched and they were also a finalist of Heath Global I have the heath glow sorry of the eth online event held by 8th Global and I've got the Tweet here of all the finalists but you can see here that stacking network is one of those so obviously a project that has also been

noticed by the eth online judges which is very very cool but I think generally this is needed for so it's not only needed for developers and to make developers lives easier I think it's just needed for ethereum to be able to compete uh on this front with other things like the cosmos SDK if I had to say one nice thing about Cosmos I don't hate Cosmos or anything like that but I think just Cosmos generally their model doesn't really make much sense and their architecture doesn't really make much sense but if I had to say one nice thing about it is that that Cosmos SDK from everything that I've heard is very uh appealing to developers so if we can take that concept and apply it to a roll-up or a specific roll-up SDK and SDK stands for software development kit

for you non-devs out there but essentially if we can take that and apply it to roll ups well then we should in theory get a much more vibrant app specific roll-up ecosystem and have much more competition in the ecosystem as well so very cool to see this you can read this thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below and I'll also link the Tweet with the eth online finalists as well as there's more than just stacker Network in here there's a bunch of them and they're all linked and talked about in this thread all right so uh Tamer here and she has introduced a metablock Mev dashboard which is a set of aggregated Mev stats on ethereum now I think I remember highlighting an early uh an early um iteration of this a few weeks ago maybe a couple months ago at this stage but

essentially what this allows you to do is enter a transaction hash or block number to look at all the Mev around that now I don't have one handy right now but there is a dashboard you can kind of look at and it shows you here uh various metrics around Mev yeah I remember I showed this on the on the refuel a little while ago but there there's an Explorer here as well that you can plug into and tamir's thread goes into a bit more detail about this as well so just wanted to highlight this because I know Mev is always a big topic on everyone's mind you can check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right an update here out of sismo today so they've got a new ZK badge that you can uh that you can you qualify for

if you participated in Bitcoin grounds around 15. so this is really cool so say you donated to get coin grants around 15 from a private wallet from a while that you don't want associated with your identity at all but you still want to prove that you participated in the round well now you can you can mint this get coin contributor ZK badge to your Public ENS wallet and Signal your support to ethereum because the way uh this is my protocol works is that it basically cryptographically guarantees that you did participate in the round but on a different wallet and that badge is minted from that wallet but it doesn't reveal what that wallet is it won't actually reveal anything about that wallet so people can see that the proof that you participated in this round cryptographic proof that you

participated in this round but they can't actually see from which wallet you participated from this is super cool like this is one of the things that non-financial things in ethereum that I'm most excited about like the use cases of this are massive and I was talking about this in this in the Delaware Discord channel the other day we were talking about this uh recent uh uh Optus uh is a large Target Communications company in Australia they recently had a massive data breach of I think up to 10 million customer records or I guess like customers records were were breached here and I was saying how that with this technology that sismo is working with you can basically imagine a world where you have a thing where everyone stores their data on their own personal device there's no need to store it on a centralized database within you

know optus's servers or some other server out there you can install all your personal data on your device and then when you need to kyc with a provider or AML with someone you can basically have a badge in in this context that proves who you are without having to reveal any of the information and on top of that you can actually revoke that badge at any time from that provider so you can basically take away uh their their view of things uh from from them at any time this is huge guys like like data protection data privacy is a massive issue you in the normal web 2 internet world like it's huge the the amount of hacks that go on the amount of data that's leaked everywhere the little digital Financial Pro not Financial private little digital privacy that we

have is is I mean we basically don't really have digital privacy right it's basically non-existent uh and I think people were looking more and more as time goes on for tools to protect themselves so if I had the option to be able to keep all my data on my local device protected by secure elements such as on the iPhone uh through face ID or passcodes or anything like that where only Whoever has access to my device can access that just absolutely massive and This falls into something uh like sign in with ethereum or like your ethereum wallet in general where when you've got your Hardware wallet for example and you've got your private key stored on there in a secure element but the only way to access that private key or to access that that element or to access the um the uh the signing infrastructure

which is the button that you press to sign a transaction is to have physical access to that device so the most important part it stays on the device which is the private key you sign a transaction with it and then it goes off and you have cryptographic proof that you actually own that address because you've signed that with your Hardware wallet and there's no need for your private key to be exposed to a digital infrastructure to infrastructure that's connected to the internet and that obviously is very good for security but the same Concepts apply to uh data we can protect data in the same way we've just got to build the infrastructure to do it and I I I've disclosed this before but another disclosure I am an investor in sismo but it's because I mean I'm not an investor uh sorry I'm not chilling

them because I'm an investor I'm an investor because I'm super excited about what they're building and I want you guys to know why I'm excited about it and why I think it is one of the best non-financial use cases of uh of ethereum and obviously it has Financial use cases attached to it and you can do a bunch of things around that but the fact that we have this infrastructure that we can use leveraging ZK technology is awesome and I can't wait to see uh this get built out more and I can't wait to see more and more projects use this all right so a new protocol called gravity protocol was announced today and they're calling themselves an eth Centric borrowing protocol so they I've got a little thread here describing what they are but basically they start to throw it off by saying shortly post

merge Lido and coinbase had produced just under 50 of rambling random sampling of 1K blocks excess concentration among eighth liquid liquid staking derivatives or lsds is not ideal for any decentralized protocol it's not Lido nor coinbase's fault that they're dominant they offer great products it's the result of uneven distribution of use cases liquidity Integrations Etc by acting now we can reduce LSD concentration and improve the health of ethereum DFI succeeds when it succeeds so they're introducing gravity which is an eighth Centric borrowing protocol focused on fueling decentralization for ethereum it's inspired by liquid liquidy and gravity will allow holders of Ethan LSD such as R8 St Etc to borrow in an interest-free and capital efficient way and by providing shared access to leverage and liquidity across lsds we

can reduce centralization risk for ethereum so basically tldr here is that they're trying to bring all the liquidity and of lsds together so that it doesn't concentrate into any one LSD just for liquidity reasons so for example obviously stf has a lot of liquidity because it has a lot of dominance within the ethereum is taking space as opposed to something like our wraith and that means that liquidity you know we all know liquidity begets liquidity and it means that light uh stage dominance can go up because of that so how do we reduce that well there's a bunch of other ways that I've talked about before of how to reduce Lido's dominance but I'm not going to go into that now how do we reduce it on the liquidity side of things well we bring it all together in something like gravity protocol and we use uh different

mechanisms and the mechanisms are detailed I believe in the the thread and the blog post TR to enable uh shared liquidity across these things in order to basically say to users hey you don't have to worry about liquidity go with any staging provided you want that's supported by this protocol because we've got your back that's my understanding of it if I'm wrong please call me out on that but that's definitely uh how I understand it after reading the thread red and uh the uh the the blog posts here but I think this is a cool idea I think if it can work it's really it really is great and it really will encourage more decentralization on the LSD space uh and it's just another tool in our toolbox to essentially encourage decentralization on the ethereum core protocol layer which is the whole point of uh I guess like us doing anything

right like if we can't maintain decentralization of the base layer then we can all pack up and go home but luckily there are so many different efforts happening across so many different parts of the ecosystem that I'm more confident than ever that we can actually make ethereum even more decentralized than it is today when I do consider it to still be extremely decentralized today uh and I'm and I'm very confident that we can fight off decentralization concerns using all of these tools that we have today and the more that are coming out over time all right so speaking of application specific Roll-Ups I came across this project called Avo I don't know if that's how you pronounce it but uh I'm going to say Avo for from now on so basically this is an options uh app specific roll-up uh that's being built

on ethereum here and I believe the team behind ribbon Finance is uh is working with Avo or maybe even building Evo themselves but this is really cool uh they're calling it a Next Generation options exchange and this exchange is built from the ground up for pro Traders with a high performance audible robust margining system daily weekly monthly and quarterly up options built on a custom roll-up designed for scale so where dydx is leaving ethereum right and going to Cosmos uh Avo has come along and said well no we're going to stick on ethereum with roll up with a custom roll up and we're going to do eight entire options exchange on here which is very cool now obviously Dy DX is not an options exchange they are a derivatives exchange for uh for perpetuals products but I do believe they want to uh expand

their Horizons as well but I guess I Ava wouldn't be directly competing with them once they go to Cosmos but uh that's a whole nother discussion but generally excited to see another roll up guys like as I said before our specific Roll-Ups uh are going to be a thing are they going to be huge but we need better infrastructure for people to be able to build them so we can get more of them it's obvious that the Avo team here has just taken upon themselves to build their own custom roll up but if we get the uh the stacker Network Vision here and uh we're basically going to have an easy way for people to just deploy Roll-Ups on the same infrastructure but make it their own they can configure it they can do things with it they can do whatever they want on it and then we'll

get like a much more vibrant app specific roll-up ecosystem which obviously I want to see I want to see thousands of these things proliferate and I think that it'll be really cool to have obviously just a handful of the generalized Roll-Ups as I've talked about before there's not going to be many of those uh but I do believe there's going to be lots and lots of these at specific Roll-Ups because it just makes the most sense uh for a lot of these things but uh yeah you can check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below 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 Disco Channel and I'll catch

you all tomorrow thanks everyone