Withdrawals chat, Polygon zkEVM mainnet date - The Daily Gwei Refuel #541 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we cut the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host here and then it's Asana it's the 16th of February 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so Geth has a new version out uh I think this was today or yesterday a Geth version 1.11.0 this is a major release release shipping more than 300 pull requests here now some of the highlighted features here are Shanghai upgrade support uh so most of the code for the Shanghai Fork is merged into this version but activation of the fork is of course not configured yet uh the Shanghai protocol upgrade will contain the ability to make withdrawals from the consensus layer withdrawals are specified in this EIP here a new database backend that I spoke about I believe last week called Pebble um which

is replacing level DB I think this is the first major database replacement the Geth has gone through in its history uh someone can correct me if I'm wrong there but I believe that's that's what it is there there have removed some features there's some other new features here I mean all the details are in this post which I'll link in the YouTube description below low and I also saw on Twitter that because of pebble or because of this new database architecture in an upcoming release Geth will be able to order Auto prune its database which means that instead of having to manually prune the database that that you know like you currently do on get so that you can uh save disk space obviously and and kind of I guess quote unquote reset Geth uh it'll be done automatically in a future upgrade which is definitely what I am looking

forward to uh the most to be honest because it's something that has I think annoyed myself and many users in the past but great to see that that's going to be worked on now that uh now that Pebble the pebble architecture is in place so yeah if you are running Geth be sure to upgrade to this version you can go download this and I'll link the download link in the YouTube description below all right so uh coinbase is still being based again today so Jesse from coinbase basically has said or shared on Twitter that today every one of the millions of subscribers to the coinbase bites newsletter got a nudge to help secure and scale ethereum with the kzg ceremony so I mentioned the other day how coinbase basically uh uh has like a call to action on their on their website

to say Hey you know go participate in the kzg ceremony well now they sent it out as part of their newsletter as well uh and they've put it on Twitter in the past too so they really are trying their best to help ethereum kind of scale ethereum layer 2 scale things like the kzg ceremony being presented to users is really really cool and I've gone on on about coinbase obviously a lot recently but they're just kicking goals right now I mean goal after goal after goal doing so many good things for the ecosystem I can't wait to see what else they've got up their sleeves you know I know that uh they're going to be supporting the l2s uh they definitely want to nudge more people to do more on chain stuff especially within D5 with with the coinbaseball things like that so I'm just very very Keen to see where they go

next with this because they think that they have a have a kick-ass Vision here Kick-Ass team Jesse seems to be at the Forefront of it in terms of supporting ethereum and layer twos and everything that's happening with ethereum he's also been a very very big uh participant or in the erp4844 work and definitely you know being on the calls and things like that as well so very cool to to see this yeah but yeah just wanted to highlight that we should get more contributions here we're almost up to 50 000 I believe contributions and there's still there's a 28 days or 27 days left or something like that to go so we may actually hit that 100 000 mark that I said that we may hit um when this thing started so we'll see but the fact that we're pretty much at 50 000 contributions is already

huge I believe all right so Sam Richards from the ethereum.org team uh tweeted out saying that they just added their 100th page to the ethereum developer documentation on east.org uh he he goes on to say it's been amazing to see this resource come to life over the past few years thank you to everyone who contributed and Contin and continues to What's missing well get involved to to kind of see what's missing uh and then Sam says yeah my biggest critique is it's a current information architecture it worked well at 20 pages but I don't think the site structure has scaled well with the content uh and he'd love to hear proposals on how to improve this and you can join the discussion here on GitHub so yeah I mean this is always the issue when you have a lot of information get added relatively quickly it tends to get

uh pretty messy and you need to be able to to fix it up and tidy it up in order for the navigation to be a lot easier especially for like like I guess the everyday user right and that's exactly what he's looking out for a helpful with at the moment but there are obviously other things you can help with as well but all you have to really do is just get involved I mean at the end of the day I think getting involved with ethereum.org website effort is probably one of the easiest things you can do in terms of getting involved with and also one of the highest return things you can do because at the end of the day this is the main website that people see when they Google ethereum it's I believe it's all the first results on Google when you Google ethereum after the ads of course

um and uh and you need to there needs to be accurate information on this website and it needs to be easily findable navigatable and digestible as well so you can help with that of course because this whole thing is open source uh but yeah if you want to check out the developer section you can as well as I said there are 100 Pages here on the developer section which covers so much I mean if you want to be an ethereum developer and you're just getting started this is definitely the place uh to be so yeah definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so talking about withdrawals just before a test in here I put out a blog post titled understanding withdrawals now this was published by Jim McDonald of attestant and this is a really great blog post I read through it

just before it goes through pretty much everything you need to know about it with Graphics to detail it as well uh and this is something that I had asked for I believe a couple of weeks ago where I basically said that we needed an easy explainer of uh staking withdrawals in kind of one place and one blog post because a lot of people getting confused about withdrawals and how it worked with full and partial withdrawals and how there's a queue for withdrawals and how you know the partial withdrawals are automated so users don't have to actually do anything and all that sorts of stuff well that gets explained in this blog post and there's even other things in here too like the history of of withdrawals you know what a validate has been doing since the beacon chain launched uh what changes with Shanghai the withdrawal

clock all these good things here I mean it was a very great blog post I was reading it sometimes when I'm reading a blog post and and I get like halfway through uh I'll be like wow okay this is really good this is really information dense but it's not long right like you can see here the blog post isn't very long but it gets its point across that's what I love I hate the sometimes I read blog posts and they're really really info dense and it's not getting its point across and I kind of lose interest I'm like okay well I came here to learn one thing and now you've kind of sent me on these paths and I'm like I don't really have the motivation to read this anymore this is that did not happen with this blog post so yeah enough enough of

me gushing over it you can go read it for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below um there's just a note on withdrawals as well seems that we're still on on track for that end of March uh timeline here which is obviously super exciting um I I think that it's funny because I'm so curious still to see what happens and what the price of it is going to be at the time because it's going to be funny to see like let's let's let's let's do some um speculation here let's say that the time that by the time the withdrawals go live eighth is at 2500 and we just had like a nice big run up uh and and kind of like eat them sell off or anything like that but then say a couple weeks after withdrawals ether's dumped down to like 1700 or something

like that right people inevitably people are going to say oh well you know there's the post withdrawals dump we got we told you guys about and it's like okay well I mean no because you've been talking about this post withdrawal dump uh since eth was like a thousand bucks basically um and if either already run up and then dumped back down that's probably just the fact people taking profits from that run up not necessarily from uh the staking withdrawals going live so it's always funny when these events happen because people always have to point to a reason as to why the market does something like the last few days the market going up people like you know why is it going up there has to be a reason like I mean all lot of the times there isn't actually a reason for it it's just

going up because there's more buyers than sellers like that that is the reason right that's just typical typical buy uh demand and Supply there um and and then there's a there's a good book on this called Fooled by Randomness uh which I've I've mentioned before but basically uh you'll always find someone trying to find a reason for everything there always has to be a reason for Market moves when in reality especially over the short and medium term there is rarely a discernible reason that you can just point to and say um say confidently that that's why it moved obviously there are pumps like news related pumps and uh exchange listing pumps and things like that but they're usually very very short-lived uh you'll notice with a lot of the exchange listing pumps they actually don't last very long at all it can be maybe 24 48 hours but extremely

short-lived um you'll notice that some news related pumps say some project announces a partnership with I don't know some big company uh in in the real world or something like that those again maybe only the last 24 to 48 hours so it's not lasting value curl so you can point to those things okay well that led to that but there are broader things that I think that people point to and they're like you know this is why we're going up now and uh the Market's wrong here we're gonna go back down because this is wrong and and blah blah blah right and I think that's going to happen with withdrawals as well because it just depends what the price of ethies at the time what it has done like has eth run up already uh and then it you know it's a kind of like quote unquote sell the

news event but is it a sell the news event or is it just normal pullback for each because it had run up it's always tough to say and that's why you can't definitely definitively say this is this happened because of this or this happened because of that like uh and then this happens all the time right and at the end of the day if you're a long-term investor none of this should really matter to you but I do notice a lot of people in the prices and trading channel in the Discord Channel talk about this sorts of stuff so it's something interesting to talk about I think from time to time but not to get yourself bogged down in and of course you guys know I don't trade or anything like that so for me it's just a thought experiment it's never something that I'm

actually taking action on so to speak I very really will will trade anything I mean if you could call it trading it's when I kind of swap out of other assets I have to buy more eth it's not I'm not really trading those assets for more either it's more so just assets that I had then I'm like okay well I feel comfortable kind of selling them now and buying ether fit sort of thing uh but yeah personally I don't I don't really trade uh generally and I don't trade around events especially like I definitely think I would have wrecked myself a long time ago if I uh if I was trying to trade there but yeah anyway a little bit off topic but definitely go read this blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh and last thing on withdrawals actually super

fears shed again uh Eve stakers withdrawal call series and there's a one minute summary of what it actually is here and there's also the first call Linked In the thread uh and the second call will be beginning today at 10 A.M Central U.S time so that may have already passed by the time the refuel by the time you're watching the refuel so yeah you can go check this out this has more information about withdrawals uh in a probably easier to understand uh format than this blog post this blog post came it's not hard to understand but maybe you want something that's like super easy to understand maybe you just want the highest level stuff and how it affects you well these calls are definitely um definitely for you they do dive into technical things as well but I think that the fact that it's rather in a blog

post formatting kind of like a video audio form will uh will be something that people will kind of get value out of as well all right so Rodrigo here uh from the EF uh tweeted out saying that the PSE team uh or the Privacy team here is excited to share the layer two grants recipients the ethereum foundation received 130 plus proposals for tools analysis research and education on layer 2 Roll-Ups here is a summary of the 22 projects awarded um so the PSE is like sorry the privacy and scaling Explorations team that's what PSE stands for not just privacy uh and this blog post details the grants that they're giving out here uh and the grants round started on October 24th and was open for six weeks and as I said they received over 130 proposals and

this chart shows the percentage of initial applicants by category so the biggest categories were community and education and user experience at 28 and 23 ish respectively um with with other categories such as data analysis cyber security data visualization and crypto cryptography up there as well uh due to the high quality of proposals the budget was raised from 750 000 to 948 thousand dollars are and then the grantees are also listed here are under each um each category so very cool to see the EF doing this I mean these are just like kind of grants that are given out to these very promising teams under either each of these categories uh so to continue the work that they're already doing or to start up the work that they want to do in

order to make ethereum a more scalable and private chain here now the cool thing about this is that if these things actually um I guess kind of like take off and start getting product Market fit and start adding a lot of value to people but what happens is these teams can go raise money from uh investors right for General investors uh the EF itself I believe doesn't invest in projects they just give grants um but the grants are usually are really great because it basically gets the project off the ground so to speak it lets these people maybe quit their full-time job or be and to be able to sustain themselves by working on this new thing for a little while or hire more people that they need uh to to kind of scale their thing out so it's always great to see that the that these um

grants are given out by the EF and in Turtle they're were 22 grantees awarded uh a share of the 948 thousand dollars that was allocated as part of this round but yeah I'll link the this blog posts or this announcement blog post in the YouTube description below and you can go check out all the grantees for yourself all right so there has been so much kind of like fud over the last few days about this stablecoin stuff so you'll remember the other day I covered how uh the SEC swing pack sauce and the one of the New York Regulators basically forced paxos to shut down busd so they can't mint anymore binance USD or busd they can redeem it still of course uh and it was due to I think it eventually came out

that it was due to the fact that um I originally said that I thought it was due to money laundering slash terrorism financing stuff that could still be part of it but I haven't heard anything about that but it seems like it was primarily due to the fact that binance was issuing busd on chains other than ethereum which broke the I guess terms that were set forth by paxos or what paxos had stated on its website so obviously but it was binance doing the wrong thing here and because binance is not a us-based company it is a lot harder to go after them uh so essentially what the the New York regulator did was that they went after paxos which is a us-based company and because of that as I said there's been a

lot of fun since then about how usdc is going to be targeted usdt is going to be targeted all these other stable coins are going to be targeted well that doesn't seem to be the case right I said yes did I know the day before that Circle the issuer of usdc was actually the one that called this out this packs of stuff out to the regulator so that's got to earn them some brownie points right um and also tether I mean tether's a funny one because tether has been the subject of intense scrutiny for a very long time and yet here they are right tether still holds its Peg they still do redemptions as verified by many different parties within the ecosystem um and they seem to have avoided uh General regulatory kind of shutdown I mean they've never been shut down right

they've had scrutiny uh they've had Regulators go after them but it seems fun now that's not to say that I would hold tether over usdc I mean I always hold usdc over over everything else based basically as my most trusted stable coin uh but tether definitely is extremely resilient it's basically the Cockroach of stable coins so and it's still the biggest stable coin so that's that's pretty impressive right uh but the peak fud that came out I believe yesterday was that uh this fox I think it was a Fox news reporter tweeted out that pretty much every stablecoin issue I was it was uh issued a Wells notice which is something the SEC sends out to uh companies that they are potentially investigating while Dante here who's the chief strategy officer and head of

global policy at Circle said that Circle did not receive a Wells notice and this person uh this reporter deleted their tweet stating this so this is the kind of fake news that can actually be or fight that can actually be put out there by seemingly legitimate reporters that uh it that can be completely false right so what I like to do and I've mentioned this before is I always go to the source for these things I never go to these kind of reporters and believe what they say straight away because they definitely have an incentive to be first more than they have an incentive to be right so for them it's kind of like okay well I'll report this and if I'm wrong I'll just delete it and no one will really care and that's the thing right people just forget about this pretty much straight away like people cared

it's it's in the news cycle for maybe 12 hours where people were like you know this reporter was an idiot this hasn't this didn't actually happen blah blah blah but then people move on straight away so there's really there's really no I guess like um negative outcome here especially for a major Network like Fox News uh they definitely didn't suffer but I believe Fox News is actually the largest Network in the US I've I found that out out the other day uh or a few weeks ago and I was just like this is funny because I always hear people going on about how uh they don't listen to mainstream media but they listen that but they love watching Fox News and I I don't I obviously being in Australia we don't have Fox News but we have um we have Sky News which is like a a budget

Fox News I guess but I found that funny um but anyway that's a little bit off track there but uh generally um it doesn't have to be just Fox News right it can be any reporter I mean there's plenty of uh of these uh mainstream media Outlets who doesn't matter who they are that report all the time I mean the new New York Times and a lot of those um I guess like uh what is it The Wall Street Journal and a bunch of them I don't know all their names because as I said I'm in Australia I don't follow these too closely but a lot of them uh during the SPF Saga posted so much right so much that was just so bad and it was because at least the way from what I saw uh SBF had donated a lot to democratic politicians

and these news outlets uh from what I can tell are definitely uh you know more left-leaning news outlets so that led to them being more favorable at SPF because it would harm the Democrats if you weren't favorable towards SPF because he was such a big donor of them uh and and people sometimes call that a conspiracy no it's just incentives at the end of the day and I think that as I said these reporters no matter where they are they have the incentive to report something first not the incentive to be accurate because at the end of the day it's all about clicks it's all about time to to the market so to speak because at the end of the day clicks are a market right the more clicks to the website the more potential uh subscribers they take they can get them more potential sorry more

potential people that see their ads that they show and everything in between so yeah those incentives exist they're pervasive uh but yeah just wanted to kind of clarify for you guys that Dante said that Circle had not received the wells notice and as I've said before and I maintain this position I will be very very surprised if the SEC did to a usdc what they did to busd I just don't think that's going to happen circle is and usdc is so so regulated in the US um and usdc gets issued through um through coinbase coinbase does most of the market making for it I believe uh they do regular audits third party orders to station reports all that stuff I mean it's crazy the amount of stuff that they do so if the SSC does go after

them it would be probably one of the biggest overreaches ever you know in um uh that they've ever done to be honest within crypto at least and I think that both Circle and coinbase would would fight them and it probably wouldn't be a fight the SEC would be I would have a good chance of winning either so yeah I'm sure they're going to pick their battles uh uh right there but anyway enough on that one just moving on uh I get oh well this is in the same kind of um same category here but Brian Armstrong obviously the CEO of coinbase was quote tweeting this tweet that said that on June 1st of 2023 Hong Kong is going to officially make crypto purchase and sell trading fully legal for all of its citizens and then Brian quoted this by saying America risks losing its status as a

financial Hub long term with no clear regulations on crypto and a hostile environment from Regulators Congress should act soon to pass clear legislation and crypto is open to everyone in the world and others are leading the EU the UK and now Hong Kong what I find pretty hilarious about this is that if China ends up being a more Progressive place for crypto than the US that is going to be an epic failure of the US because just think about the geopolitical implications of that where the U.S Prides itself on being the quote-unquote freest nation in the world but then but what if it gets to the point where they're more restrictive on crypto than China who the US says is one of the least free places in the world

right so that would be a very very bad look it would have geopolitical consequences and it would force a lot of businesses away from U.S Shores potentially to places like Hong Kong uh you know obviously the UK and the EU and even potentially the Middle East the Middle East has actually been um pretty pretty uh embracing of of crypto lately and uh Africa as well and India as I've discussed before I know India was pretty harsh against crypto but I think they'll come around eventually to it as well uh but the US definitely needs to get their together yeah these regulators need to put Frameworks in place they need to set the rules and guide guidance and regulations properly so that all of these teams know what they what they're

doing what they're getting into what they can't will and will not get in trouble doing in the US otherwise if if it's too hard to be compliant the companies are just going to leave that's it they're just going to leave and and that's going to be really really bad for the us as I've discussed before but anyway I'm going to leave that one at that enough on that moving on to some very positive news from polygon so polygons ZK evm is going to be launching on March 27th so just about eight weeks from now uh polygon ZK VM will be live on mainnet in um in a beta fashion of course going to be called mainnet beta but it's going to be live now this is pretty big for a number of reasons obviously so first reason is

that I believe this is the first uh ZK VM that's going to be going live on mainnet uh second uh polygon has lift up to well once it's live we'll have lived up to a lot of its promises that it made last year and the year before about bringing uh these layer twos to ethereum bringing a ZK AVM to mainnet uh and third here it also just depends on what this is going to look like right like I always say that says mainnet beta here okay so what does that look like is there going to be permissionless proving on their ZK VM uh is anyone going to be able to run validators improvers and things like that will anyone be able to be able to deploy to the ZK VM I think the answers to these questions are yes from what I've seen but we'll see we'll

see once it goes live how stable it is um if it lives up to the hype obviously because there's a lot of hype around this what the user experience is like what the fees are like that's all going to be that's all going to be uh uh I guess like uh verifiable to all of our us on March 27th which is obviously absolutely massive news guys like I I can't I mean I I've said it so many times now but I can't stress enough just how much of a pipe dream people thought it was that ZK VMS were going to go live in 2023 uh right let alone uh going live uh in in mainnet fashion right and mainnet uh beta I guess like fashion here um but they are right and as I said polygon is not the only one that's going live this year we're expecting scroll to

go live as well ZK sync to go live uh we're expecting uh optimism and arbitrim to basically I don't think they're going to convert to a ZK roll-up but they definitely have the infrastructure in place at least optimism will with bedrock uh and uh arbitrim does with with Nitro uh it's definitely in place and uh and I believe that they're going to be continuing to build on that as well there so so yeah uh but there's a blog post here on this announcement from polygon that you can read as well uh all about what's kind of like uh Happening Here with a little video from Jordy balina who's been one of the people at the Forefront of building out polygon ZK team who used to be part of a project called Hermes uh that was acquired by

polygon if you guys will remember uh and he's been yeah pretty much like the one of the champions of polygon ZK effort here so I'm sure for him it is an amazing feeling to know that his technology or the technology that he has worked on for so long is going to be going live uh and in a mainnet beta fashion in about eight weeks from today so I'm obviously very very pumped for it you guys know I'm an advisor to polygon this has been a long time coming as well for me because originally when I signed up to be an advisor with polygon uh I I said to them like hey like I'm you know way more interested in your layer 2 offerings and the layer two offerings that you're going to be putting out there than I am in uh in in the sidechain obviously in the POS chain uh

but I I still recognize that the POS chain was a stepping stone but I always maintained that and I always believed in that polygon vision of the layer twos and at the time it was more about optimistic Roll-Ups than it was about ZK Roll-Ups and ZK EVMS but then polygon eventually said well you know what let's not really do optimistic Roll-Ups uh let's just go you know full into ZK robs fall into ZK VMS and that's what they did they spent all the money acquiring those teams and this is the fruits of that labor so it's as I said it's been a long journey I mean it hasn't been that long but it feels like a long journey because it's crypto time but polygon seems to be living up to their promises and I can't wait to see this going live on Main net and play around with it

myself all right so speaking of ZK VMS ZK sync uh 2.0 uh while ZK sync the Twitter account have has said that multiple announcements are coming soon uh before kicking off a new era together let's review ZK sync 2.0's recent test net data including nearly 9 million transactions over the past four months so yeah there's test net data here in a video where they've shown some metrics around this and some stats and obviously teasing multiple announcements coming soon so as I mentioned before polygon isn't the only team bringing a ZK VM to mainnet ZK sync and scroll are as well ZK sync have been teasing a lot of things for a long time now they've been onboarding a lot of apps as well it seems like they're going to be going live with a lot of projects when they

eventually do go live here a lot of Integrations I hope it's soon they've also announced that they're going to be having a token eventually don't know when that's going to go live obviously but I think that they'd be waiting for the DK sync 2.0 to to go live before they do that but the test net seems to be going really really well I'm sure they get there I'm gearing up for a launch relatively soon definitely with polygon launching their ZK AVM mainnet beta these other teams are probably going to hurry it up a little bit because we know that the first mover advantage in crypto is a pretty big deal I mean look at arbitrary and optimism right they uh they were first movies in the layer 2 space and they're still the biggest because the first mirror Advantage counts for a lot within within

crypto I believe uh especially on the on chain front of things here so yeah but anyway I'll keep an eye on zk6 major announcements that they said they've got coming soon and highlight them on the refuel as they come out as well all right last up here we have a new thing that flashbots has introduced called Mev share which is which they're calling or which they're describing as programmably private order flow that empowers users redistributes Mev and takes a step towards decentralized block building mhgv share is where transactions and bundles find their perfect match now you can read the post here for a full breakdown of what this is but essentially the tldr is in this uh in this tweet here where Mev share

Builds on Mev boost by further unbundling the transaction supply chain where Mev boost enabled collaboration between validators and Builders Mev share does the same for searches and users empowering users to be paid for their transactions with privacy users can bargain for the Mev they create without permissioning searches but programmable privacy allows users to selectively share information to enable optimization and collaboration Mev shares an exploration of how privacy preferences and commitments can enable decentralized block building its ideas are generalizable to the rest of the transactions supply chain hence it can be seen as early implementation of suave that can evolve into a decentralized network and then Burke goes on to continue here and um and basically uh describes it a bit more but from the

highest level here what this basically uh does as was mentioned it unbundles uh I guess like the fact that we currently have searches slash Builders who submit uh these uh bundles to relayers uh basically it's giving some power back to users to to bargain for the mov they create with these searches and Builders instead of kind of Outsourcing it there now I don't know I I mean I'm not going to describe exactly how this works under the hood because I don't know if I know what I've thought in my head of course there are details in that post that I mentioned here but this is really cool to see because this as Bert says yeah does lead to more decentralization in Block building which should lead to more censorship resistance in Block building now I've mentioned before how the

mevwatch.info website is a very kind of I guess simple view of the censorship resistance instance landscape because there are different ways that censorship censorship can happen essential resistance can happen so it's it's not really painting the whole picture and this is a way where it can can change as well where certain places in the supply chain can be sent in the supply chain of Mev can be censored and other places can be uncensored uh and and the funny thing is is that you could as I mentioned yesterday you could have a block being proposed by an uncensored relay with with the tornado cache transaction in it but then the validator that proposes the blocks could censor that transaction themselves so there is still kind of those those concerns there and being able to decentralize block building as

much as possible um it you know alleviates some of those concerns that's for sure but uh but yeah anyway if you want to learn more about this I'll link it in the YouTube description below but 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 newsletter join disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone