StarkNet alpha live, New $1.5bil crypto fund & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #263 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 30th of november 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i think the biggest piece of news over the last 24 hours is not directly related to crypto but i think it's a pretty big deal and i'll outline why but basically what the news was was that jack dorsey is stepping down as twitter ceo to be replaced by um you know someone else in the company i can't remember their name but uh yeah it's someone else in the company it's not they're not getting a ceo from outside the company now this is obviously a very big deal and i kind of quote tweeted this and said this is good for ethereum because you know jack has been a pretty vocal

bitcoin maximalist for for quite a while now right he has implied that he thinks ethereum is a scam before he has made fun of ethereum before for not having the kind of like the logo if you do hashtag eight there's no eth logo there there was a ethiopian flag next to it during the olympics and things like that so he's obviously not been a big fan now the reason why i think him stepping away is good for ethereum is because obviously twitter wants to do more with web3 with ethereum because they've done the you know the nft integration that they've kind of um oh they haven't done it yet but they've announced it um they've made their own nfts they have like ethereum address um if you go to like the tipping on the um the product uh the lead product designer's twitter profile um

i've actually got a tweet showing it if i go to my twitter profile uh you can basically see if i scroll down a bit uh you can see like uh yeah if you go click here on jane's profile you can see a theorem address pop up next to bitcoin address so obviously twitter has a lot of plans for theorem web3 and you know i'm not gonna say this is the reason jack dorsey stepped down but he's a pretty big bitcoin like it's not a side thing for him it's actually like a pretty big part of his life i mean he talks about it a lot he promotes it a lot his bio is literally just hashtag bitcoin there's nothing else in it so i don't think it's a stretch to say that maybe there were disagreements here about where to take the company uh or maybe jack wants to just focus on

other things more than he wants to focus on twitter he's all you know he's also got his other company square and then he's doing all the bitcoin stuff and maybe there was disagreements internally about about sort of what you know twitter's path would be throughout crypto and everything like that and you know the the best thing about this is that the new ceo coming in is actually heavily what was heavily involved in getting those web 3 nft integrations done and pushed forward so i think that this is going to be really good for for ethereum going forward for for the web 3 vision to have like a more i guess like forward-looking uh ceo someone who you know as far as i can tell is not a bitcoin maximalist right um and to get like kind of this adoption going now what i what i thought was quite funny

about this is that people were kind of like on on two sides about this people were saying okay this is good for ethereum because obviously you know jack's a known bitcoin maximalist and the bitcoin maximus was saying uh oh no now like twitter's going to go full kind of like ethereum for web full web 3 or full crypto which as i said i think it is and i think that's fine i think that's a good thing i think it's a very very good thing for ethereum for for twitter and i think that twitter is going to be better off for it so i guess um i'm curious to see what jack does next like does he go full time into doing his bitcoin stuff which seems like he you know that's a high chance that he would do that or does he kind of like

take some some time off uh re-evaluate whatever he wants to do and everything like that i don't know you know i've got no idea i don't know jack very well at all all i know is you know him from his twitter presence of course uh and i think that just by based on his twitter presence a bitcoin is not a side thing for him it's like literally one of the main focuses of his life so i wouldn't be surprised to see him do something in the bitcoin arena but good for i guess good for twitter good for ethereum that he stepped down uh there all right i put this tweet out today where i basically uh i was getting frustrated because no matter how many times i tell people that the gas fees on l1 are like a good thing and i explain the reasons why uh

they just you know they don't listen to me like a lot of people just don't listen that's why this isn't a reason why i stopped replying to people in my in my um kind of like replies here on my tweets and everything like that um but i basically put out this tweet where i said um you are selling eight because you think the high gas fees are bearish i am buying eight because i understand that ethereum is burning tens of millions of dollars worth of eat every day at layer one and is scaling for users at layer two we are not the same no matter how many times i repeat this over and over again on the refuel in my newsletters you know on ether on twitter doesn't matter how many times i repeat it there are still so many people who just don't get it and i don't

really understand why because it's not hard to understand why this is the case like ethereum layer one is a uh is a settlement layer it is the layer for robots for kind of like layered twos for machines it is not the layout for users users have a really cool layer two ecosystem that they can use and tap into so and then you know some some people will hit back and say well ethereum was gonna scale at layer one now the road map change and it's like okay well the road map loosely has been the same for quite a while but the reason we we kind of like chose the roll-up centric roadmap path is because we as an ecosystem believe that it is the best path to scale a blockchain so it changed based on new information so what would you rather have happened like it not changed based

on new information and stayed the same and then we basically centralized the theorem to achieve scale or we kind of like went down a path that ended up not working then we wasted all that time doing the r d i just i don't get it and i think this is simply because a lot of people aren't used to seeing a public development like life cycle for things this big i've used this example before but could you imagine if you were privy to the public development life cycle of when the iphone was first conceptualized to production i think from first conceptualization to production took about five years for for the original iphone to to kind of like come to fruition there the amount of features that were cut during that time the amount of uh things that were changed during that time in both the hardware

and software layer and the amount of things that we're missing from the first iphone that we all use and love and take for granted today and but that was all done behind closed doors right like no one knew about the iphone until it was basically ready to be announced and released whereas with ethereum since day one um or even since before kind of like it was live it has been a completely open and public development process completely open source everyone can scrutinize everything and it is done in a decentralized way where it's kind of like a chaotic way there's no central kind of like person at the top saying what the roadmap is it's the community coming together to figure out what the best way is to to build ethereum into what we want it to be so from that perspective uh i think that's

i think that's you know looking at looking at it from that perspective you can understand why people may push back against this but at the same time i just don't understand why people think that we should go down a worse path just because they think ethereum should scale at layer one it's just not how blockchain scale blockchains uh uh should scale at the at the kind of like layer two at least scale execution at layer two and then leave layer one as a settlement layer but that's not to say that ethereum is not settling at la uh sorry he's not scaling at layer one either it's doing sharding at layer one um but to enhance the layer to ecosystem with data sharding and you know i still come across people lots of people actually who think that sharding is going to solve all of ethereum's gas

fees and it's going to like make ethereum uh you know super scalable and all that sort of stuff and then when i push back on that and say well no it's going to enhance the layer 2 ecosystem they kind of um you know push back on that and be like what i didn't know about this what the hell when did this happen when i mean that roadmap change has happened like years ago and it's not hard to find this roadmap you can literally go to ethereum.org and check it out and you'll be able to see it all there um but also on that note as well uh i don't i don't know why people would want ethereum to scale by shouting at layer one anyway because execution sharing is complex it breaks composability it is not exactly like uh the the great path forward and i yeah i

just i just don't get it i really don't um get it get most of it i understand from their point of view because they see with you know people see everything um be developed publicly but at the same time that is the beauty of all this it means that you as an individual have an opportunity to be involved with ethereum like anyone can submit an aip uh and a network change essentially or a theorem improvement proposal which could be included in the network upgrade to do something on the network whether that be to you know upgrade uh something or change something or put you know even something as big as eip1559 anyone can do this you just have to rally support around it and make sure that it's something that's actually desirable to go into the network um but even if you you know and layer one does

move slow don't get me wrong but even still you can build at layer two and with a layer two construction you can do whatever you want and just like settle to layer one ethereum and it just gives you so much free more freedom because at layer one it's i mean as i said you can you can submit changes but it's hard it takes probably years i mean erp-1559 took over two years to get to mainnet from when it was first proposed and even before that there were like uh instances of vitalik talking about improving the the fee market for years before that so all in all it probably took like four years from when vitalik first thought of a new way to do a fee market to when it actually got implemented on main net uh so if you wanted to do anything else at

layer one you want to do any experimentation there that's just not gonna happen in the short term but it does happen at layer two so there's so many benefits here that i just you know these people who kind of like uh push back i'm gonna keep educating them i'm gonna keep telling them things and i know there's a lot of you out there that do this as well but i just kind of like get a little bit frustrated at times and you know i'm not even gonna look at the comments of this toy because i know a lot of the replies are gonna be people complaining about the gas phase saying oh you know my you know uh this is crap like i want to be able to do stuff at layer one and you know what if you want to do stuff at quote unquote

layer one then there are plenty of kind of like these cheaper evm side chains that you can use but at the same time they're not going to be cheap forever once they fill up as we saw with avalanche they get more expensive to use because they're literally just the same thing as ethereum and the problem is is that people want to keep using layer one because they're just used to it but the thing like the thing is is that most of the people coming into the ethereum ecosystem going forward are going to be onboarded to layer two they're not gonna even touch layer one so they're not gonna have this issue anymore so i just think it's kind of like a a non kind of like issue it's not really a talking point that needs to be uh kind of like uh discussed you know

adding finium but at the same time it's something that needs to be refuted because i really do believe that if people understood ethereum's roadmap if people understood why ethereum has chosen to go down the roll-up centric roadmap path they would understand that it is the best path forward that we know of currently they will understand why the decisions were made to do this and they won't you know they wouldn't fight ethereum like they do but unfortunately uh you know that they do that unfortunately a lot of people get their information from crappy sources a lot of people watch the really kind of like scammy youtubers right the big ones ones with like hundreds of thousands and millions of subscribers who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about a lot of the time but they spread that information out there and they just confuse all these people and then

there's people like me who have to pick up the scraps later on and kind of like make sure people are thinking about things from the right frame of mind when as i said literally all you need to do to get um your head around the ethereum roadmap is go to ethereum.org go to the roadmap section and it's all there updated it's got links to everywhere else you don't even have to kind of like uh dig much for this and i know you shouldn't just trust one website to show you things but as i said it's got links to other places you can kind of um go read other writings i mean bankless recently did a great uh blog post uh trent van gaaps did a great blog post in bank list discussing the ethereum roadmap that i highlighted on the refuel so to me there's literally zero excuse

for not being up to date with it it's it's the only excuse is laziness because if people are too lazy to go do their own research into the ethereum roadmap then who you know people can't help them right like who can help them in that in that kind of scenario but but yeah anyway i'm gonna stop the rambling there for now i just wanted to kind of like cover that there um i think it's always worth repeating those sorts of things but anyway on to more positive news is some news around the merge so tim bico posted a blog post today titled how the merge impacts ethereum's application layer now as i've discussed before the merge is being done in such a way where it's going to have minimal disruption for the application layer on ethereum basically zero disruption but there are some things like

infrastructure providers and some other kind of like stuff out there that needs to make sure that they understand what's changing and there's very little changes but still they're they're kind of like important changes so this is a blog post for them but i did want to highlight that whenever you're talking to someone about the merge and the merge being kind of a theorem changing for proof of work to proof of stake you can tell them that literally their experience is not going to be interrupted at all it's going to be you know at block blah blah blah number proof of work and then a blah blah blah number it's going to be proof of stake that's all that's changing the user stuff isn't changing you're still going to use ethereum like you use it today whether that be at layer 1 and layer 2 and users don't have to migrate funds or

anything like that the merge is literally being done in the most simplest way possible to avoid all of that disruption but for application developers it's a little bit different where they have to kind of infrastructure providers they're going to have to be aware of some of the things that are changing such as kind of like these minor mining and omar block fields or uncle fields uh that sort of stuff is definitely not something an end user has to worry about but for those running full nodes and infrastructure like the inferiors of the world right they kind of like definitely need to kind of um be aware of this and be aware of how it all works so that's the first update on the merge the second one is adrian sutton i put out another screenshot here with geth and teku doing optimistic sync on merge devnet one fun

for two reasons http tracing is included showing the actual execution engine calls being made it looks indistinguishable from full sync at this point because geth has finished syncing so again more progress being made on the merge as i discussed yesterday it's happening in the background there'll be screenshots posted here i'll keep you guys up to date i'll be retweeting a lot of these screenshots but progress is being made very steadily um community outreach is already being done like with this blog post as i kind of mentioned before um which is always a good thing to do earlier than later because you want to make sure that all the parties are going to be affected by this change are aware of it uh can we can make sure that their infrastructure is all set up to support it and so that there's like no disruptions for them but

i like in in the in the proper case there's literally zero disruption for for end users maybe some apps may not work because they didn't update their nodes or something like that or they didn't update their kind of like rpcs or any or something that they needed to update but the network itself um should be exactly the same pre and post merge as i said the only thing changing is the consensus mechanism everything else stays the same and even with kind of like all the upgrades coming to the network for end users things should never at like layer one and even at layer two things should should never feel different for them they should never have to migrate funds or anything like that it should always feel the same and that's exactly what's being done with sharding and

statelessness as well so i like that path and that's again going back to what i was saying about the ethereum roadmap we've chosen to do it this way because it is the safest and securest way to do it and also the way to do it without uh causing any disruption for users because ethereum is no longer a small network it is a half a trillion dollar network settling trillions of dollars of value every year with hundreds of thousands if not millions of of users uh over the course of like a year so it you can't just play hard and fast with it you can't have uh users being disrupted you definitely need to take your time and that's why these things take longer than we we would like because uh you know we're not in kansas anymore we definitely need to kind of like take that into account i think the

core developers do i think the rest of the ecosystem does and the rest of the ecosystem also understands it so so yeah really really cool to see some more merch updates here today all right so another massive crypto venture fund has been announced from a former wall street banker it's a 1.5 billion venture fund a crypto venture fund comes in at a smaller kind of like pace than the paradigm and a16z funds which were a two and two and a half billion dollars or maybe even both of them were two and a half billion dollars but still this is absolutely huge so this uh wall street banker was from citigroup he was a citigroup executive his name is matt zhang he launched his venture fund called hive mind capital partners and apparently they're going to be having a specific specific focus on

four different strategies yield staking trading venture capital investments and play to earn gaming which is obviously a very big theme right now very big kind of like narrative playing out there's a lot of froth in that market like a lot of froth in the play to earn market there was a coin that pumped up to like a 30 billion dollar fully diluted valuation and there was no product for it so guys be careful with these sorts of things that's all i can say there because uh the the market's getting crazier again i mean just as i'm recording this eats price is like breaking out pretty hard it's over 4 600 right now so market's getting crazy again but i mean the thing is with these funds is that they represent like a secular kind of shift within crypto and the crypto macro environment and this is why i

don't believe we're getting the long-term bear markets anymore at least for like eighth right and you know potentially bitcoin but i mean ethio is just absolutely slaughtering bitcoin at the moment but just from an eighth perspective because there's just so much demand and so much money pouring into this ecosystem and a lot of it makes its way back to eat when people take profits from other investments that they make as i mentioned yesterday they can either go to cash of course but like why would you want to sit in cash for longer than you had to or you can go to eth of course you're going to go to eighth if you're like okay well i'm taking profits from here but i'm really bullish on 8th so i'm going to take profits into eighth that's exactly what a lot of people do it's exactly what i do all the time a

lot of my friends that i know do this and they do it uh pretty regularly as well so that's why you see a lot of things bleeding against as well as i mentioned yesterday but a lot of these you know you may look at this 1.5 billion venture fund and think okay well a lot of this money is not you know pretty much all this money is probably not going to go directly into eth but it's going to go into other things and invest in other things and that money will you know will find its way to eth and just kind of like the fact that more money is pouring into this ecosystem means that more money is sloshing around more money's kind of changing hands um the teams kind of like pay their employees maybe their employees are uh by each with that with

their kind of like paychecks and things like that so it all finds its way back to an asset like ethan and other assets of course as well but if you're working in the ethereum ecosystem and you're kind of like working to whatever layer layer to the the app layer uh or any kind of stuff like that you're more likely going to be buying eight than anything else so from that perspective that's how the money kind of like uh comes back into eighth but i mean man like it's it's still amazing to see like these massive funds kind of like coming you know even i guess at this stage of the market where we've been basically in a bull market for 18 months at this point right 18 straight months i know we had that kind of like crash down um during kind of like may

and june but we kind of recovered pretty quickly from that like i i'll be honest i i mean a bear market is is kind of to me anyways like a six month plus period of downtrending we down trend for like what one or two months and then we basically just kept going up and then we went sideways again now we seem to be going up again so uh this kind of like um you know raises being done here doesn't surprise me too much but again it's still kind of like wild to see it's coming at such a late late late stage or maybe it's not even a late stage just coming so kind of like um so much into the bull market since it's been 18 months so yeah really really cool to see that um and as i've said before about these razors uh about these

funds they have to deploy this money they don't have a choice uh their investors want this money deployed they want to make a return and that's the whole reason of having a fund to begin with is to invest that money you don't just sit on it and do nothing with it so yeah as i said this money is finding its way into the market it's going to find its way back to 8th and i think all this sort of stuff is just like bullish for eighth in the end so loopering has put out a really cool guide here i just wanted to give a quick shout out to on youtube uh where you can learn how to connect metamask to loot rings l2 deposit to loop ring l2 transfer between l2s and withdraw back to ethereum l1 uh now you can click on this this kind of like link here to be

linked in the youtube description to watch this video i thought it was a really great video i i kind of like um how to add a brief view of it and then uh and then basically just skipped over it because obviously i don't need to i don't need this guide for myself but the amazing thing is is that i just thought it was very straightforward and we need more of this we need more of kind of like this education around how to onboard to l2s and we need obviously the centralized exchanges to support this to make this even easier because imagine having an onboarding kind of guide where you just say to users hey binance coinbase kraken whatever put your funds in there then we draw them to this layer too and there you go you're on layer two you can experience cheap and fast transactions with the security

of ethereum so so yeah but in the meantime these videos uh you know explaining the more detailed steps of how to get onto something like a loopering l2 is definitely much needed and i definitely recommend going and giving this a watch all right so arjun announced yesterday that they are the first smart contract to be to be deployed on starknet's uh mainnet alpha uh uh and there was an it was this was an arjun account so uh basically you can see the wallet here on on github and the contract here um you know this is this is really cool because arjun has been working with starkware for for for a little while now they've also been working with zk sync of course but it's really cool to see that uh uh they're kind of like the first smart contract to be deployed as i kind of

like have mentioned um oh did i cover this yesterday no i actually don't think i covered this yesterday this happened after this is funny this happened after i put i kind of recorded yesterday's refuel and for some reason i don't have it in my tab so i'm going to bring it up quickly guys i should have discussed this earlier but um it related to the argent thing the stark net alpha is on main net i don't know how this didn't make it into the video it's very very weird or very weird um but yeah the first version of stark next alpha is on main and that's what i was talking about with this argent kind of like smart contract being deployed here so you can see all the details about it here this is a very early alpha version this is the one i've been talking about i did

say it would go live late november and it went live november 29th so i'll take i'll take some points for that i'm just kidding but um it basically is a developer platform right now there's not much you know kind of end users can do uh and it kind of like it does support general competition computation and composability out of the box but additional features will be rolled out kind of like over time so right now uh as i said this is kind of like the developer thing not really much me and you can do on it we can still use starkwear's products like immutablex and and and diy decks and all that sort of stuff there um they're all kind of live and have been for quite a while but in terms of like stock net itself still probably going to be a little while away

before we're using it regularly which is fine i mean these are the first steps right this is the kind of like first steps to getting something like this out there and obviously it's a big deal because it is a generalized zk platform and uh we've been waiting for uh sorry generalized um our zk rollout platform and we've been waiting for these things to go live for a little while now um and it's come a lot sooner than a lot of us would have expected to so very very cool to see this um and yeah sorry for not talking about it earlier uh i definitely somehow missed it missed this in my tabs but if you want to learn kind of like more about it you can check out the blog post there's kind of like a roadmap here there's links to all these different things links to the discord and

everything like that so definitely go check that one out so a tweet here from brantley from the ans team uh so budweiser the company that purchased the beer.e8th ens name i think it was a little while ago i did talk about it on the refuel when it happened have changed their twitter name to beer.eth you can see here budweiser usa is beer.ethan they're doing nfts as well if i remember correctly i think uh you can kind of like see uh some uh some details about i think they sold out yeah this thing here so they had like uh budweiser cans heritage edition collection on openc which is really cool to see so you could have bought some nfts there again another example of a company that is not crypto native getting involved with crypto native

things the fact that they changed the ens name sorry their twitter name to the ans name being beer.ethy is really cool to see uh i always love seeing e s names everywhere all over twitter it's just it kind of like signals to people that you know what you're doing within the ethereum ecosystem that you're deep into the ethereum ecosystem and you have kind of like an affiliation there it's kind of like a a kind of like tribe signaling thing as well not in the tribes like the bad tribal sense but like the good tribe sense um and i you know i just always love seeing it especially when it's big companies doing it uh i'd love to see places like coinbase do this as well or they have like coinbase dot eighth or some of the other kind of like major exchanges and stuff like that it just sends a strong

signal it's good advertising too right i mean think about the amount of people who follow budweiser's account and interact with it and then we'll see a say beer.and they're like okay what's beer.e they might google it they might check it out and same thing goes for the nfts as well so this is just like a very cool new user onboarding vehicle and uh i you know i i'm pretty excited to see it as well just as excited as brantley was i mean and the tweet got a lot of engagement as well so it seems a lot of excitement out there for for these sorts of things but yeah who's who's going to be the next company that does this i'm i'm sure about budweiser's not going to be the last i'm sure there's going to be plenty more out there as i mentioned just today

coinbase's nft platform is definitely gonna work to bring in a lot of new kind of like people uh into the ecosystem because they're gonna partner with big companies uh maybe they're even gonna partner with budweiser now and do do more nft jobs with them we'll have to see but yeah really really cool to see that um out of budweiser here and the last thing to talk about is another video from hideyoshimoria with him kind of like unlocking his home door using kind of like his ens ownership so you can see he assigns a message and that message signing that message unlocks his door you can see the door being unlocked so yeah i think yesterday's video was about uh him unlocking his tesla or something like that or starting the tesla so i mean this again is another example of uh things kind of like being uh sorry the

crypto world kind of like merging with the real world and the funny thing is about um unlocking the door is that a lot of you may not know this and i think i'm going to get i think i'm getting this right but basically in 2016 there was a company or a project called slockett that wanted to do this they basically wanted to be like a dao and they wanted to kind of like uh have like a smart unlocking system tied to your ethereum address for kind of like physical locks and stuff like that and um slockett was the a major player behind the dao and you know the infamous the dao that got drained and led to the ethereum classic uh hard fork a drama and all that sort of stuff so finally to see us come full circle back to this and i think it's actually the right time for

something like this to kind of take off we have the tools we have the infrastructure and signing an ethereum kind of message doesn't cost any gas by the way guys like this isn't it's not gonna cost you five thousand dollars to unlock your home in gas fees right i see those jokes made all the time but um yeah so this is just awesome to see i'm i hope to see more more of these sorts of stuff i love people when people tinker with kind of like the quote-unquote internet of things and connect it to the ethereum world because it just shows that we are kind of like breaching past the kind of digitally native stuff and going into the physical world which is always awesome to see and and you know we're going to see more of that with the anime metaverse stuff and augmented reality and virtual reality

but it's you know blending into kind of like real life especially with with ar but even these sorts of things uh get get me really excited to see as well so yeah i think that's going to 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 tomorrow thanks everyone