Why decentralization matters, dYdX growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #217 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delight refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 27th of september 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so some of you may know who virgil griffith is he's uh he's been around for a while he's like an ethereum og uh kind of uh works out or maybe used to work out now the ethereum foundation but uh the reason why i'm talking about him today is because amin solomani here is another ethereum og put together this thread about virgil and about kind of i guess like what he's facing so for those who don't know just a quick background here virgil is currently um now facing i think up to 20 years in in prison for attending and presenting at the

pyongyang blockchain conference in north korea um and the us government is the one bringing charges against him for this uh and his trial actually starts uh today this this monday so to today um and it's been quite a while actually since he was uh kind of like charged with this and i'm just waiting for the trial to begin he is being represented by some of the best uh kind of legal representation in the country the country being the us so he's getting like all the help he needs there but in this thread amin basically goes through why he believes that the us government is just trying to make an example out of virgil as they did with um aaron here and for those of you who don't know aaron schwartz is he basically unfortunately committed

suicide after he was being charged i can't remember the exact charges here but um uh there were there are some charges for him kind of i guess like um downloading some some academic journals and publishing them or whatever uh but essentially yeah you can read more about it in this thread from amino and he links to a few different kind of like posts here um but you know in in virgil's case as amin says here he's on trial for providing highly technical knowledge in quotes to north korea which could in theory help them evade sanctions which is ridiculous because it's overwhelmingly likely that virgil didn't teach them anything they couldn't have learned on youtube which is exactly what vitalik said back when um it actually uh wow this is a while ago now it actually ended up happening i think december 2019 is when

when virgil was arrested here and vitalik back then said that you know he he refuses to take the convenient path of throwing virgin onto the bus because i finally believe that that would be wrong um and he was signing this position and then he gave his reasoning here or at least one of the reasons he said i don't think that what virgil did gave um north korea any kind of real help in doing anything bad he delivered a presentation based on publicly available info about open source software there was no weird hackery quote-unquote advanced tutoring um and i mean i agree with this like uh there's literally nothing that virgil could have told these people that they couldn't have accessed online themselves uh through youtube or through forever whatever else uh so from that point of view i do believe that these charges being trumped up against virgil are kind

of like not um not something that should stand i guess like again in a court of law but we're gonna have to see how that plays out obviously as i said the trial starts today i take the position that i i think that virgil shouldn't go to prison for this i don't but like um but i'm not sure of like all the exact details and everything yet that's going to come out in the trial and i'm going to be following it quite closely because i actually did meet virgil for the first time uh back in like early 2019 it was april 2019 when i went to edcon in sydney um and he was just awesome like a really nice guy uh like i you know he he's been in ethereum for quite a while has a very colorful history i'm sure if you google it you

can probably find um a bit about his history uh but yeah i mean and what he did as i mentioned i don't believe it to be anything worthy of like 20 years in prison because of the fact that the information that he gave at a conference essentially was uh obviously fairly available now like there's the other side of it like what is what he did like really stupid was it like really naive um yes of course it was like you don't go to north korea which is a sanctioned uh country uh that obviously the u.s has sanctioned them and do anything there i mean really like going there is just a bad idea to begin with right unless you're kind of like a a journalist or anything like that and then you have like and then you know you give the us government a heads up and

say you're going there whatever but even then like i just i don't know i feel like it's just not a great idea in general to go but that doesn't mean that he should be you know sent to prison for 20 years for uh presenting at a conference where the information available uh the information he gave is already freely available for these people to access but anyway uh as i said like he's being represented by uh one of the best kind of like attorneys in the u.s brian klein clean klein um and for those of you who don't know who brian is he's actually the one who represented eos against the sec and won and basically only ais only had to pay a 24 million fine uh out of the four billion dollars that they raised and they didn't have to admit that their um sale of the eos tokens was a sale of

securities now we all know it kind of like was right and also on top of that the eos sale was like really dodgy there was wash trading going on eos just in general was like very dodgy like very scary but um you know brian was able to argue against the sec and win in in you know win the case essentially uh but in general apparently he he's a very very good lawyer so great to see that virgil's getting representation from from brian here i'm you know interested to see how the trial goes and what happens there i'm not sure how long the trial is going to take but i'll definitely keep you all updated but i just felt it was necessary to kind of like highlight this thread you can go read it for yourself it'll be in the youtube description but i really think

that if virgil does actually end up being you know um convicted of this and goes to prison over it it just sets a really really bad precedent going forward um and it just becomes worse for like everyone within this industry uh especially educators in general like i'm an educator as well like uh you know if if kind of like i'm educating people on how to do things uh like i mean not evading sanctions obviously but like i had to do things like uh uncensorable payments on these networks like am i gonna come under fire for that sort of thing so it's kind of something that i mean as an industry we industry we should all be talking about paying attention to and making sure that there aren't like really bad precedence set here but we'll have to see i mean obviously the us government is really

powerful but they still have to go through the courts just like everyone else does um before they can do anything so you know before they can actually sentence someone so we'll have to see how that plays out but uh i mean yeah i quote tweeted this by saying free virgil because i do believe that he doesn't deserve to be in prison just like i believe people like ross albrecht doesn't even deserve to be to be imprisoned for like i mean he's in prison for life right it's not 20 years it's it's like multiple life sentences and i believe he should have clemency as well but in saying that that's that's a whole different kind of like bag a bag of worms there or can of worms um i'm not gonna get into that but yeah go give this a read uh links in the youtube description below

all right so another bit of i guess like i wouldn't call this drama but something that was talked about a little bit over the last few days on twitter was around decentralization and uh this came about because of the fact that china's you know cracking down on crypto trading venues they're cracking down on centralized exchanges apparently huabi is going to stop accepting uh trading from mainland china chinese investors and things like that so uh you know from that perspective people have been painting this narrative that wow okay well decentralized exchanges aren't affected by this china can't shut down the centralized exchanges so people are just paying the narrative there and basically saying you know let's just all trade on these dexes which is true to an extent i mean some of them have i i guess you could say most of them have

like admin keys and central points of failure still unisop doesn't of course and i've spoken about that before but you know it all kind of prompted me to put out this tweet where i said decentralization matters and and cyrus basically uh i put out another tweet you know in in kind of like same vein here where he says you know imagine thinking that that quote users don't actually care about decentralized decentralization end quote in a world where china just banned all the exchanges and gensley similarly trying to crack down in the us congrats on being tricked lied to and misled into buying centralized vc bags um cyrus takes a very colorful and and straightforward approach there which i actually agree with i mean there's a lot of kind of like that stuff going on this in this ecosystem where people are just trying to trick you into

buying all this different sorts of stuff but i'm not going to focus on that aspect on it of it what i wanted to focus on is this kind of like narrative that people kind of try to perpetuate where they said that users don't actually care about decentralization at the end of the day whether users care about it or not is not actually i i think that that really is worth talking about like usually either care about it or they don't like and we can try and convince them we can try and educate them we can try to basically show them the benefits of of what the you know what having decentralized decentralization does but most people just simply either won't care uh at you know at that point in time or they uh they simply um not that i don't care they simply kind of like see it and like okay well cool

whatever like i'm making money over here so i don't really care about it for now but when it really comes into focus and comes into view is when this stuff starts happening right like if for some reason uh the sec classified a popular token as a security say they classified the uni token as a security and that would mean that um coinbase would have to either delist it or create a whole another venue for trading it um and basically become like a a registered exchange for trading securities and they'd have to go through all this compliance stuff and they would only be able to accept us users from certain places and it'll be a whole mess right it would be very very ridiculous but the uni token would still be able to be traded on decentralized exchanges like unisop and things like that there's nothing the sec can do to stop that they

have absolutely no power there at all um and you know obviously you have to take over the ethereum network to be able to take over uni swap and you know the us government potentially could do that if they put all their resources to it but uh the sec itself can't can't do that so that's just like i guess like one of the most obvious examples of why decentralization matters even if users don't actually care about it because it just because they don't care maybe they don't care about it now doesn't mean they're not going to care about it in the future it's kind of like an insurance policy at the end of the day it's like when something goes wrong you really wish you had insurance uh and you know and and kind of like um the same with with centralization versus decentralization when something goes

wrong that decentralization could have uh you know avoided then you you know you really wish you had it it's the same what happened with kind of like i guess the the solana outage where they were offline for 18 hours and i'm sure a lot of the people that were using solana really wish that they were you know they were using a network that that doesn't go offline for 18 hours he's decentralized he's kind of like more secure and has a better liveness kind of assumption around it uh and that kind of like falls into this whole thing so from that perspective as well i saw someone kind of quote tweet um cyrus's tweet i think and said um we aren't giving users what they care about we're giving them what they need uh like when we're building these sorts of stuff because uh even if the and i've always said this

about kind of like especially when it comes to developers i've always said that developers have a lot of power in this ecosystem where they basically get to dictate what they uh what they kind of put out there some will take shortcuts and build centralized stuff and all that sort of stuff some won't even know that they're building centralized things because they think that they're building on a decentralized platform and then later on it kind of like comes to light that the base is actually completely centralized and doesn't matter how decentralized their app is if the base is centralized then everything else built on top is so the developers i think within ethereum especially the more ideological ones are making sure that they build decentralized things on purpose because they really want to be able to kind of like uh give users what they need or what they believe that

users need without requiring them to to even care or be aware of it so i think from that point of view it's very important and of course like people will often say oh well decentralization is a spectrum not everything needs nation state level kind of like resistance and okay like i can agree with that like that's the pragmatic approach for sure but at the same time i don't actually think there's many things that require a blockchain uh that can't just be done with a centralized database that has a bridge into a blockchain if you want to be interoperable uh you know if if you're basically sacrificing this centralization then using a blockchain is is just like using a shitty database at the end of the day uh and you know obviously we have the layer 2s coming online now and everything which are going to make this more scalable and

actually polynomial had a good tweet here we where he said uh basically you know the likes of dydx and immutable x have far and away the best ux on the internet uh yes even better than web two so even better than their centralized counterparts uh it has sign-in with with web three wallets assigning kind of like with your metamask it's instant transactions gas free transactions uh there's no kind of like ads to subsidize that no one's gonna like farming your user information or whatever whatever um argent and zk sync are coming soon uh and this is you know not only about ethereum it's about the paradigm uh shattering zk roll ups and volitions uh which can retain kind of like the decentralization and security properties of whatever layer one they tap into and obviously they're gonna be tapping into into ethereum

so from that point of view as well even if you say oh well these apps need like a lot of scale so it's fine that we sacrifice decentralization to achieve this scale for the for these apps i mean even if that was true i mean it probably is true for some apps you can do it better at layer 2 than you can on some of these kind of like a centralized kind of chains at the end of the day so even from that perspective i think that as long as your base is decentralized as long as like the ethereum base remains decentralized and secure then you can build whatever you want on top of it uh you don't have to start like a whole new network and just like centralize the whole thing and then try to kind of like convince everyone that oh well no we

actually are decentralized even though you're not because you sacrificed it in order to achieve scale uh we can have the best of both worlds we you know with these layer twos especially with like zero knowledge technology as i've talked about a lot recently and i'm sure a lot of you have been doing research into it as well which is a definitely very good use of time and i think that just generally people really don't realize that it's not just blockchain scaling we're talking about here when it comes to to uh you know zero knowledge check it's literally disrupting web 2 related things like offering a better service that what web 2 can offer but doing it in a decentralized and slash distributed way where basically everything becomes super interoperable with each other and we basically get back to where the internet

was supposed to be because over the arc of i guess the last 20 years the internet was supposed to be decentralized it just didn't end up that way because the incentives were skewed uh and and kind of like it wasn't architected correctly and it got captured by centralized vested interests whereas with kind of like these crypto primitives that we have and with crypto economics and things like that we really do have a good shot at basically re-decentralizing the internet taking power away from these super mega corporations that basically owned everything i mean like the top 10 companies account for most of the uh centralized companies i should say account for most of the activity on the internet uh and you know they they obviously own multiple websites like google has google and they have youtube and they also have android right they

have all these sorts of things going on uh and from that point of view it just like very much centralizes so with kind of like web 3 with crypto with with decentralization we have like a really really good shot of fixing all of this and we have the tech to do so and you know maybe we see these kind of like centralized web 2 uh apps and stuff like that eventually either migrate or deploy or develop using these technologies and they just use ethereum as their security backbone and maybe some data availability layer like polygonal veil or celestia or some other ones out there uh as kind of like where to store their data as well so there's a lot of this stuff going on i think as i said the it's not really uh it should the conversation shouldn't be really

framed around like if users care about decentralization or not we should assume that most users are indifferent to it but we should build as if that you know the worst for the worst case scenario that's why i believe that uh and that's why i kind of like i'm so ideological about ethereum and i follow it so closely is because i believe ethereum should be built with the worst case scenario in mind ethereum should be built to resist nation-state attacks if we can do that then that's kind of like the final boss like there's no one there's nothing bigger than a nation-state in terms of uh the amount of capital they can they can have the amount of um people they can throw at it uh if you can resist nation states especially big nation states like i mean obviously the final boss would be like a

superpower like the u.s or china if you can resist that then the network is just like it becomes incredibly resilient and it signals to the world like you can build on this and you can have like nation state level resistance and obviously there's arguments around like what apps actually need that not every app does like does your you know nft profile picture need nation uh nation state resistance maybe it doesn't i don't know but i think that ethereum should still be built in that way and then you can build all of the other things with various trade-offs on top of it we shouldn't sacrifice ethereum's core properties just because it's a generalized platform and there's going to be some things on built on there that don't require nation state resistance we should um always uh i operate from the assumption that the ethereum network itself should be able to resist nation

states because the sum of all the value being built on top of it will be greater than probably the sum of like uh most of the world to be honest like eventually like decades into the future uh and from that point of view there'll be nation states that want to take it down so we have to resist that and obviously we have to resist that for users as well because it will just disrupt users if it got taken down so yeah anyway i'm going to leave that at that for now a little bit of a kind of like not a rant but like a little bit of a tangent there about uh decentralization generally and kind of like how i think about it all right so ben edgington is back with another what's new in eth2 newsletter as i've mentioned before this is my favorite way to keep up with eth2 i

think the major update in here is that altair the eth2 the first e3 network upgrade now has a main net date of wednesday 27th of uh october at uh blocked seven four two four oh sorry not block seven four two four epic seven four two four um which will be the uh 10 56 uh utc on the 27th so yeah this is going to be exciting to see it go live as i've mentioned before once this is done in dustin and live on the network all focus turns to the merge from all the ether1 and e2 teams and they're going to be full steam ahead on that and there already is a lot of kind of like progress happening there you know uh ben has kind of like the merge uh uh merge updates in his newsletter as well he has other updates around staking

client diversity that i went over on last friday's refuel i believe or thursdays links to different kind of like research explainers and stuff like that as i said this is my favorite way to keep up with eth2 if you aren't subscribed to this i suggest doing so you can find this link in the youtube description but it's really really great and i uh and i love just being able to kind of like keep up with with everything that's happening because easter is a big effort like just generally between like the merge and sharding and like ongoing research around the bleeding edge stuff and obviously stuff like altair like upgrades and things like that there's a lot to keep on top of and ben does a really great job of curating it so definitely go check this out all right so dydx is having a really big

last few days so as antonio the founder of diy dx says here uh five years ago he left coinbase and eventually founded dydx and today being yesterday for the first time diy dx is doing more trading volume than coinbase so you can see here that at the time of the screenshot dydx was doing 3.6 uh almost 3.7 billion dollars of 24 hour trading volume and coinbase did 3.6 billion dollars now there's a few caveats here one dydx has liquidity mining uh where uh people can earn tokens for trading on the platform uh and two coinbase doesn't have perpetual products so dydx is a perpetual exchange so it's a derivative exchange whereas coinbase is pure spot so there's two major differences there but i think i saw before as well that um

the idx has also overtaken bitmex which is a perpetuals exchange in volume and they're not as big as they once were i think the most impressive thing would be dydx overtaking binance or ftx uh or even by bit i think the three leading kind of um perp exchanges but they also have spot markets too so it's a bit of a you know it's a bit of a nuance comparison here but this is crazy i mean it just shows the power of a token remember like a few months ago on the refuel when i was talking about doa decks is growth and how i said to you guys that i expect this to absolutely explode because the diy dx experience basically is like a centralized exchange but without the drawbacks of a centralized exchange because you have like easy signing with ethereum deposit your funds straight in

self-custody the whole time get free transactions all that good stuff because it's on a zk roll up uh and you know and then you can withdraw to layer one and all that good stuff there so from that point of view i mean i've loved using dydx as i said i've been i've been just toying with it with like a small amount of funds and and stuff like that i haven't really been doing anything to too crazy on there but there are a lot of people uh you know trading lots of volume on here for you know half for the tokens half four because it's a good experience but it's just funny like how fast the volume grew i remember as i said i remember like back when i spoke about this a few months ago i think diy decks was doing 10 or 20 million dollars

or 24 hour volume on their top markets i believe yesterday the bitcoin market did over two billion dollars of 24-hour volume so these things can can really pick up steam when there's a token involved in and we've all seen this play out it's not just with dydxes with anything if you add a token to it you can really bootstrap and kickstart growth but you have to do it in such a way that that growth kind of like becomes sticky and i actually think it will for doa dx because they offer such an amazing product that no one else kind of does right now like a decentralized exchange on a layer two that feels like a centralized exchange um i really do believe they're gonna have a bunch of sticky capital there but we won't be able to know for a while i think that they're kind of like

incentive program runs for quite a while uh and their token price is crazy right now i think the fully diluted market cap is like 20 billion dollars or something so that would be second to uni swap in terms of valuations of i guess d5 tokens as what you can call them there but uh you know most of the tokens aren't circulating yet you know a lot of them belong to the team and investors and obviously liquidity mining program and stuff like that and there's a bit of drama around how the dydx token doesn't actually give holders any share of the revenue and apparently there's no plan to ever give holders a share of the revenue so all the trading fees are currently just going to dydx the the foundation so there's a bit of drama around that and apparently it's just meant to be like a pure governance token and but the

thing is governance can't even vote in value capture like they can't vote in fee capture either this may change in the future maybe the ui dx is just doing this for regulatory reasons i say maybe but like i suspect that that's the reason why but uh you know regardless of that i think it's just been amazing to see uh their growth and kind of like see how fast it's been as well it's only been like a a little while since they've been kind of like on layer two and since they launched their token it hasn't been very long either so yeah crazy growth here shows the power of layer twos as well at the end of the day all right so speaking of layer twos i put out this tweet i think it was on friday where i said 2016 to 2021 has been the era of layer ones i think that

2021 to 2026 will be the era of layer twos compute execution or slash execution is a commodity decentralization and security are not now i want to unpack this tweet a little bit here and this goes into some of the stuff that i was talking about last week i believe around what paulinha had said about modular blockchains and things like that but essentially what i mean by this is like 2016 and 2021 you had those monolithic uh or sorry not model i guess monolithic but you had all these l1s competing with each other right and obviously ethereum is the clear winner here there's really no competition at all um of what ethereum is trying to be uh that kind of like base you know maximally decentralized secure data availability layer for for layer twos but there's been a lot of uh a lot of projects been spinning up there uh

and i did mention last week how i think that going forward it's gonna be both more profitable and more pragmatic to be a layer two instead of a layer one and this is because compute is it a commodity now what i mean by this is like i mean you guys know what commodities are all right this is kind of like uh wheat and oil and stuff like that these things are like uh uh uh you know easy to come across and it's it's you know it's not something that uh uh how do i put this in in a way that relates to blockchains i think you know in a way that relates to compute the way i'm thinking about it is that like any of us can can do computation like i can do computation on my pc uh you can do your computation on

your phone like everything i mean everyone has like a a super computer in their pocket with their smartphone right so from that point of view compute and execution are a commodity but decentralization and security are not because i can't run a decentralized network just from my phone or my computer i can't run it on my own i not everyone can like to actually create a decentralized and secure network takes a lot of effort and a lot of time it is not something that can just be easily spun up it's not it's not a commodity right it's not something that just comes comes very easily think of a theorem for example it's taken now from 20 you know 14 uh since ethereum kind of like uh i did their ico and they started building and then launched in 2015 to today for it to get to a point where it's as

decentralized and secured it is it is today and by the time the merge comes around it will have been like probably eight or so years since uh kind of like ethereum started being built to getting to proof of stake where we where we truly believe that that's kind of like the most decentralized and secure um uh kind of like outcome for ethereum now there's other networks as well that are trying to be decentralized and secure and to spin this up it's just like very expensive you have to have a native token you have to get people to build it you have to get people to build clients for it they have to build the whole stack out right you have to have developers kind of like building on and everything like that to gain those network effects so to build something that's decentralized and secure is like

infinitely harder than to build something that just does compute and execution and it's exactly what layer twos do as i explained last week layer twos uh just do all of the compute off-chain they don't do it on chain because doing it on chain is nonsensical for with ethereum because we've seen that if you just do it on chain the fees just skyrocket because we're trying to basically do two things that are odds with each other we're trying to create the maximally decentralized and secure base layer but we're also trying to fit in everyone's transactions into it but it's at odds with each other because you can't do that because to retain the decentralization and security you need to limit the throughput you need to limit the compute of layer one but at layer two there's none of these limits because as i've explained before layer

twos allow you to do as much computation as you want you can you can only you can just have one note it doesn't even matter because what really matters is the fact that you're deriving your security from layer one so essentially you've commoditized the compute at layer two but you've kept uh the decentralization security of the base layer which is extremely hard to replicate if not impossible at this point to replicate and as i've mentioned before the only two networks that i believe are actually truly decentralized and secure and would stand a chance at resisting a nation-state attack a bitcoin and ethereum but bitcoin doesn't have an expressive platform it probably will never have an expressive platform you know all they really would need to add would be to some way to kind of like uh uh uh uh verify um or at least allow these layer twos to

kind of like put their their data and put their kind of proofs onto onto bitcoin but i don't think that's probably ever going to happen uh and because of that it really is just ethereum at the end of the day ethereum is the only decentralized and secure network right now that is good enough for an l2 ecosystem to blossom around and that's what we're seeing so that's why i believe that you know these monolithic layer ones that have tried to do compute at layer one and have sacrificed all of the ideal properties of a block chain are gonna fail in the face of these layer twos who basically say well i can just leverage ethereum security i can do everything that i would love to do in a you know in a more centralized layer one where i scale out the compute as as high as i

can get it um but i can do it at layer two and i don't have to worry about securing decentralization i can outsource that to ethereum i can just worry about my my compute i can just worry about uh the best way to to compute these transactions to execute these transactions and then post them to to ethereum at the ethereum base layer so i wouldn't be surprised to see an absolute explosion or in the layer twos over the next five years um you know we have a lot of teams today but there's still going to be other teams that come out of nowhere and kind of like surprise people and maybe they disrupt other teams maybe they're kind of like working in stealth right now and they come along and they just have all this awesome tech that they they bring to bring to the table and then the later

tweaker system just gets crazier from there so that's kind of like what i mean meant by this tweet at the end of the day because i think that people really uh overestimate the f sorry underestimate how powerful layer twos are if you're just focusing on um the the compute and execution side of things because i don't have to focus on anything else uh and you know there's obviously hybrid models like the volitions and validiums that allow you to basically or allow users to choose where they want to steal their data or have data kind of like stored on a on a data availability community but i'm talking about like pure roll-ups here like zk roll-ups and optimistic roll-ups where you just basically offload that all that compute and execution from ethereum layer 1 to layer 2 but yeah because because it's a commodity um and i guess like on that

note as well another example of this is like is that all these other kind of okay actually this is the perfect example and i should have mentioned this at the start but the perfect example of why i say compute is a commodity is because look at the evm side chains that have spun up uh avalanche c chain evm side chain polygons pos chain evm side chain uh xdi evm side chain all that sort of stuff like that doesn't take anything to spin up a bsc you know avm side chain all it takes is them forking the evm forking the ethereum chain um you know uh basically spinning up a few nodes or whatever running it and they're able to process the same compute that ethereum is able to do they're able to have all the same apps on there they have the same kind of rules they have the gas

limits and they can play with the gas limits right they can do whatever they want with it but they don't have ethereum's decentralization security that can't be forked you can you can fork to compute your heart's content but you will not be able to focus this decentralized decentralization and security that ethereum has you have to build that from scratch so that that's why i think that's the perfect example of what i mean when we have these kind of like two things that are split and why it makes more sense for uh layer twos to be built going forward rather than focusing on these kind of like monolithic layer ones and hoping to do everything at layer one like the the layer ones like solana they wanna do compute and execution uh you know data availability uh decentralization security all that sort of stuff they want to do it all at layer one uh on

without sharding nothing and and kind of like just scale it up from there i've explained before why i don't think that's gonna that's gonna work at all even if that even if you take away the decentralized decentralization aspect of it i just think generally it's not going to work from a tech standpoint and why i believe that the hybrid approach where the layer 1 is just the data availability and security layer and the layer 2 is the compute layer is the way forward anyway i'm going to run out of time if i keep going on about this so i'm gonna leave it at that and go go through the rest of these things um here's just a quick note on like competitor networks ramping up their fud of ethereum base layer twos that i've seen recently and it was in reference to actually emin gancia uh the founder and

ceo of of ava labs which built avalanche um where he put out a tweet where he says one could try to deal with the the the cantankerous l2s most of which are terrible centralized value leeching our ones in waiting but they don't let you compose contracts don't let you withdraw funds easily and fracture your funds or one one could just bridge to avalanche so this is obviously fud here all avalanche has right now is their c chain i don't know what their other chains are going to look like but it's just like they don't have anything except their c chain which sorry the evm fork c chain which as i said is just like ethereum um you know just compute it doesn't inherit if you're in security decentralization and then paulina quote tweeted this with a good thread where he said that this is uh very

myopic in the long term all of this are faults roll-ups and volutions can can and will be fully decentralized and inherit the security decentralization properties of whatever is the most secure and decentralized security layer hermes is already there and then probably not i mean goes on and he's threatened about this so definitely check out the thread but this just speaks to what i was kind of like saying before and on top of that a layer 2 has a much much easier path to decentralization than a layer 1 does um because a layer 2 to decentralize all they have to do is get other people running sequences and validators uh and even if only one person is running it it doesn't matter because they're inheriting the decentralization of the layer one uh so from that perspective there's not much that you know a single sequencer can do as we saw with

arbitrary sequencer went down it doesn't matter the you can just withdraw your funds from layer one if you wanted to so just give this thread a reader link in the youtube description and i also put out a tweet uh saying that i love make a dao and die because maker and i were getting a bit of hate last week or over the weekend i mean i don't know why it's such an amazing product i get like there's too much usdc backing dye and it makes dye not fully decentralized and all that sort of stuff but maker is the most battle hardened flap we have today they've never had a hack i think the only bad thing that's happened to them is during the flash crash black swan in march of 2020 where the um uh there was kind of like uh the bug with the keepers uh and i i've

spoken about it before i won't go into it now but generally i think they just caught too much flack i think it's amazing i use maker all the time i manage it through uh through the oasis app i've never had an issue with it i love the product they build i love dye and i just felt like they copped too much flax so just wanted to give a shout out there uh seller network put out an update that they're introducing see bridge 2.0 i've talked about kind of like this bridge before um yeah it's one of those kind of bridges that allows you to kind of like bridge between side chains layer twos and all that um but seabridge 2.0 comes with even better user experience with lower costs simple and efficient lp experience with option to not run a node a generalized sdk for crosstrain nfts

and more you can read i guess like the full breakdown in their blog post here which will be linked in the youtube description and the last thing i wanted to talk about was this interesting chart from token terminal showing the uh ethereum fee burns as a percentage of total transaction fees paid you can see that it's actually higher than 75 sometimes here which and much higher sometimes i mean on uh you can see what is that september 20th and 21st it looks like it was like over 90 percent of the fee revenue was burned which is crazy right like there were estimates that it would be 70 to 75 which it seems to be the average is around that maybe a bit higher some days it's a bit lower but generally it seems around that but it's crazy to see these spikes going up and

yeah we're at like over 370 000 total eath burn now and everything it's just crazy right it's just absolutely insane um which is built obviously over a billion dollars at these prices as well um but yeah cool cool little chart from token terminal here uh if you want to check it out you can link to the youtube description but i think i'm going to end it there because i've gone over time so thank 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