zkSync 2.0 update, Exciting Ethereum things and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #411 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daddy gray refuel where recap the latest news new theorem ecosystem i'm your host dante's assigner and today's the 21st of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so just before i put out a tweet uh kind of like discussing the five things i'm most excited about in ethereum so these shouldn't come as a shock to any of you but i did want to kind of like jump into a little bit of them here and explain i guess like why i'm excited about them but i listed them off here and i basically said you know the merge staking as number one and these are actually ordered to be honest um kind of like the order was was a funny thing to come up with but these are they're in order of what i'm excited about the most

and obviously once the merge happens uh that kind of like falls off the list but staking kind of falls into that like i'm super excited about proof-of-stake just generally and that's not just going to kind of like be a one-event thing with the merge so that's kind of like obviously an ongoing thing and then number two is layer twos i mean again like pretty obvious yeah i'm excited about literally everything got to do with layer twos uh we've had so many exciting announcements lately and and the kind of ecosystem just continue to grow it's just amazing to see uh number three is dank sharding uh like the full dance shouting rollout obviously it's gonna be rolling out in stages but i think that that is going to unlock the next era of scalability for ethereum uh because it will give those layer 2 so much extra space to kind of

put their cool data on and collapse those costs there four is d5 i i have a funny relationship with d5 i think where you know i i was obviously around for defy summer and i think that since then i haven't really seen that much innovation that has gotten me very excited i feel like when it comes to kind of like what d5 is good at it's good at what it's already kind of like created is basically what's going to take over the world like i don't think we need to keep trying to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it with defy and that's why i think these days it's kind of like hard to get excited about new things in d5 because there just isn't that many new things that actually are sustainable and we saw with dfo 2.0 most of it was not

sustainable and we saw with kind of like some of these other schemes that popped up like terror just not sustainable and all the things that are sustainable are boring like let's be honest guys like finance i've always said is not something that is supposed to be exciting for for most people i mean it's exciting when you're making money but all the day-to-day financial activities that you do or that you that you're going to do are just not generally that exciting not compared to something like you know nfts and and and kind of like gaming and things like that like finance is generally something that most people kind of like outsource or most people kind of just don't want to have to think too hard about investing i guess like is a is orthogonal i mean it fits under the finance umbrella but investing can be as

boring or as exciting as you want it to be it can be boring because you can just buy an index and just sit on it and that's it or it can be exciting where you're actively trading and investing looking for new companies and protocols and stuff to invest in and things like that so my yeah as i said my relationship with d5 is quite quite um i guess funny i wouldn't call it a love hate because i absolutely love d5 i think it's going to take over the world but it's more of a fact of the innovation in d5 is just very slow paced because the innovation in finance in general is very slow paced and i think that what we're just continuing to do within d5 is improve the existing primitives and also bring on on chain are kind of like primitives that may not be have been able to be

successful in leon ethereum or the more complex things that required other things to exist before they could exist uh like for example a lot of things tap into money markets and and decentralized exchanges and without those those kind of like things can't exist and they're also expanding on to layer twos and stuff like that so definitely still very excited about defy but it's a different kind of excitement as opposed to those other three things that i've already mentioned and then fifth here is public goods funding obviously you guys know i'm really into public goods funding i think that uh it's it's kind of like an amazing way to uh to kind of like touch on many different things uh of what ethereum enables public goods funding doesn't just touch on kind of like dows uh and human coordination but it touches on different mechanisms and and kind of

falls into the default bucket as well uh nfts like you could kind of like mean to uh sorry issue nfts and donate the funds to public goods exactly what we did with the delivery anniversary nft um falls into d5 because you can do things like what the protocol guild is doing where it's going into these kind of like d5 treasuries and saying hey like you have tokens that are valuable and you should kind of like donate a share of them to public goods and there's other ways as well like you could do something where you could have a protocol that donates a small part of the um of the kind of revenue to public goods and things like that so there is uh like public goods funding is a broad kind of like topic but definitely something that i'm extremely excited about and i continue

the tweet by saying each of these things is a deep rabbit hole that you can spend countless hours engrossing yourself in ethereum truly is the infinite garden and i mean you can like literally guys like i spend like so much time in each of these kind of worlds uh especially because i try to kind of like keep up with everything for the refuel uh but just like wrapping your head around everything got to do with the merge and proof-of-stake ethereum like if you if you wanted to diverse deep into it and to become like an expert on that it would take you a long long time to do that right layer two same thing like layer two is like that term once you unpack that it gets crazy because you have the different kind of like optimistic bullets you have the different zk robs and you have the

different flavors of zk roll ups and optimistic roll ups and you have everything that falls into that then you have everything that kind of like um enables those things you have the history of scaling just so much going on there same is true for dank sharding defy and public goods funny like each of these rabbit holes just it can seem endless and there's always new things coming out for each of them too so those are the things i'm most excited about i think generally if you speak to any og ethereum number one or close to number one on their list would definitely be the merge staking like it's been such a long time coming for so many of us and it's been talked about for so long and it's something that's going to fundamentally change the properties of the ethereum network in a really positive way or at

least we believe in a really positive way that it's hard for us not to be excited about that the same is true for layered twos and and sharding generally these things have been spoken about for such a long time and we're finally at the place where we have the layer two networks live they're not just pipe dreams anymore they're live they have users they have applications and they get better every every single day uh and sharding you know it's not there just yet we don't have shining in any form yet but we have dank sharding which we believe is a really really nice kind of like workable uh not as complex sharding kind of like implementation that we can push into the network hopefully next year and then there's a bunch of other things that kind of obviously fall into into all of that as

well but those kind of like three i i think that pretty much like all the ethereum's all the hardcore ethereums would agree are the most exciting things and then you know some ethereums are more excited about nfts than they are about d5 like i didn't list nftc at all because you guys know i'm not really big into nfts it doesn't just it i mean it doesn't excite me like as simple as that doesn't excite me like other things do um and you know some ethereum's just like into public goods funding like i am for example like maybe they'll they think it's cool but they're not like in like diving deep into it like i do so there's all of that kind of like when you think about it that all comes together uh and you have like this i guess like baseline of what people are excited

about and then they kind of branch off from there which i think is pretty cool so i'm interested to hear what you guys are most excited about you can kind of like uh obviously put a comment in the youtube comments or go into the discord channel and let me know what you're most excited about i'm always curious to to kind of like hear from other people because i might be missing something here you might be excited about something that i haven't even thought of like obviously there's web 3 and dows and maybe social kind of like uh finance and social tokens and and human coordination problems and stuff like that maybe that excites you more than any of this stuff like let me know i'd love to i'd love to know but i'm gonna leave it at that you can kind of leave your comments below or in the

discord channel all right so uh ethereum mainnet shadow fork 10 uh had i got announced i think yesterday today and it will be happening on wednesday the 27th of july at around 2pm utc as i've said before these shadow forks are going to keep happening up until the merge uh abattoir mainnet merge which is still a couple of months away from today uh well hopefully a couple of months away right we have girly to go for uh go through first and there's also an all-call devs call today as well uh at uh i think you know you it's probably already happened or happening as you're watching the refuel i can't remember exactly what time it is um but it's expected on that call we're gonna get like hard confirmation on the girl ttd and and date around that which we had you know

pretty kind of we i mean we had soft confirmation of the ttd it was proposed and everything like that but you know it's pretty safe to say that gurley is going to go run through the merge transition uh between august 9th and august 11th just depending on when ttd gets hit and then i think they'll probably discuss a bit more about mainnet uh kind of like dates as well and of course everything surrounding that like the paris and baltrix hard forks that need to happen uh to get the execution and consensus layers ready for the merge transition so yeah just uh some fresh merch news there for for you guys all right so peter from the geth team put out a tweet today where he's quote tweeting another account uh called space time here and this spacetime account said if ethereum called devs decide to

radically change the ebm interface all the avm compatible projects like filecoin vm will have a lot of work on their hands how are they participating in eth governance and then peter quote tweets this by saying the moment when everyone clones the evm to leach away value from ethereum but then go or pikachu when ethereum's evm uh keeps evolving further i think it means go all pikachu is that like pikachu shocked face um just in case you missed the reference there and then peter continues by saying the evm is made for ethereum anyone using it should be aware of the risks involved in relying on stuff out of their control and then peter continues by saying this is not a debate up for governance the evm is not a public good to be used by everyone and forcing a lowest common denominator at the same time the evm

will always follow ethereum's vision and everyone is free to tag along or get left behind i think this is a pretty strong stance that peter has taken here and one that i wholeheartedly agree with like you're like obviously ethereum is open source you're free to fork geth and you're free to kind of like use the avm but don't expect uh i guess like the evm to adhere to your standards don't expect uh you as i mean i'm i mean i'm saying you as kind of like someone who's like a chain founder for example like a layer one chain founder that has just kind of forked the uh the uh evm or forked geth and expects the uh the evm devs to basically play ball with them no that's not the case at all the evm as peter says he will always follow ethereum's vision it is built for ethereum and

ethereum alone if people want to fork it that's on them it's the ethereum community has no obligation has no duty to make sure that other implementations of um of the forked version uh are kind of like a stable are kept up to date uh kind of um sustainable like we've got not we could to do with that at the end of the day um and the thing is is that that doesn't mean that these other kind of like uh ecosystems can't participate in ethereum governance but at the end of the day they're not going to be able to dictate what upgrades come to ethereum uh especially if those upgrades are things that they want included so they can kind of like fork it off and go leech value off of it somewhere it's just it seems insane to me that people would would think that these forked evm

chains are first-class citizens uh next to ethereum they're not at all ethereum is the first class citizen these forked evm chains are things that ethereum at the ethereum community shouldn't even be considering when when talking about ethereum governance and improvements to the evm and things like that so i thought this was just like a really good stance from peta and as i said one that i wholeheartedly agree with because it just annoys the out of me honestly these days and for a while now where people will just fork geth fork the evm make a lot of money doing it because they attach their own token to it right and then expect the ethereum community to play nice with them expect the ethereum community to fix their issues expect uh the geth devs and the evm devs to kind of like um help them with with

things no that's just not the way it is guys like evm is built for ethereum and ethereum alone and when i say here i mean like the ethereum network the ethereum community ethereum ecosystem it is not built for the avalanche c chain it's not built for phantom it's not even built for the polygon pos chain just because polygon is aligned with ethereum doesn't mean that uh they're kind of like evm pos chain it gets to kind of dictate anything and doesn't mean they get to dictate anything that's not how it works at all um but yeah we're going to leave that one that you can read through some comments here for some further discussion on this um but i thought it was a great little uh i guess like stern kind of like statement from peter here all right so i think the la the biggest

news over the last 24 hours which was something that i talked about yesterday was a zk syncs announcement now their announcement was that their zk sync 2.0 which they're calling the first zkvm roll up will be live on mainnet in 100 days and they also have a public roadmap available in this blog post for the rest of the year so you can see the public roadmap here with 100 days to mainnet now before i get into this i did want to kind of like discuss a bit of the drama around this there's obviously been three zkvm related announcements this week we had polygon announced there's ek vm um kind of like uh road map and and and test net and things like that we had scroll announced their pre-alpha zk vm test net and now we've had zk sync

announce their uh zkvm oh sorry zk sync 2.0 zkvm mainnet or roadmap generally here and they've all claimed to be first at the end of the day guys like this is the most asinine kind of debate and argument like who cares who was first really at the end of the day like it really doesn't matter um what matters is getting this stuff shipped getting it to mainnet getting it ready for developers to build on and users to get value out of because at the end of the day 99.99 of users and developers do not give a who was first they just want something to use and to build on that's it so this debate is pointless it is so stupid i don't even care who's first like i don't care who's last like all that matters is building a good product and that's all that should matter so now

that i've got that on my out of my system i do want to kind of like dive into this hundred days to mainnet roadmap that you can see on my screen here where you can see that you know where i guess like they've got nine steps here and we're currently in between step three and four uh we and basically what we're most interested in is when it goes live on main nets which is a hundred days from now and now being july 21st so we should expect uh full alpha uh mainnet by the end of the year now they're calling this an alpha main net not a beta or anything like that so again guys like i mentioned yesterday how just because these zkvms are being announced uh and kind of like they've got main net dates and they've got test nets and stuff like that doesn't mean

they're anywhere near their final form doesn't mean they're anywhere near a kind of like a good user experience like if it's going to be in an alpha um state then i expect there to be lots of bugs i expect there to be lots of annoyances with the ux and i don't expect them to be anywhere near as scalable as they can be i mean even the optimistic roll-ups that have been around for a while now are still in beta i mean arbitrary hit its limit uh with odyssey right because it has that kind of like hard cap on it and they're bringing nitro out soon optimism i don't think has hit limits yet but they're definitely not in their end state either so when looking at these sorts of stuff i know the marketing can be quite forward and quite kind of like bombastic but it's good to keep kind of like

firmly planted in reality about these things they're cool they're coming much sooner than we thought they were but they're not going to be like a full main net uh kind of like uh releases where everything's going to work smoothly anytime soon that maybe that happens next year sometime but it's definitely not happening this year but in saying that it's cool to see that zk's evm will be live in a mainnet fashion uh kind of by the end of the year uh polygon i think is also aiming from that as i mentioned yesterday and scroll i believe would be too so i think it's just amazing that we've gone from how is ethereum going to scale uh to wow there's so many scaling solutions that we're now debating the most kind of like pointless stuff like who you know which the zkm came first it's an amazing place

to be really compared to where we were just a couple of years ago just even a year ago i guess i mean a couple of years ago right it's 20 it's july 2022 it was july 2020. that was like basically the start of d5 summer and that's when the face started skyrocketing there was no kind of like solution at that point there were obviously um roll-ups being worked on and things like that but no one knew when they were going to come out no one knew how scalable they were going to be um zk stuff seems it seems kind of like pipe pipe dream kind of like pie in the uh the clouds kind of like pie in the sky sorry uh it seemed like a very very distant dream fast forward two years later we have extremely robust optimistic roll-ups live with lots of

applications lots of users we have zeke three zk evms right that are kind of basically heading towards mainnet by the end of this year we have our non-evm networks like starknet right we have private networks like aztec like this sort of stuff if you told me that we would have all this two years ago me being like the biggest eighth ball in the world i wouldn't have believed you because really it's caught me off guard too how fast this stuff has come but i think it goes back to a thesis i had i don't know if i've talked about on the refill but i've definitely written about it in my newsletter where i basically said that keeping ethereum layer one simple and not scaling the base layer uh for kind of like users but instead scaling it for layer twos is really powerful because what this

does is it creates these scaling wars that i was talking about yesterday where instead of ethereum layer one trying to pander to every single person trying to do everything on its own ethereum layer one does what it does best it becomes a super decentralized and secure settlement layer and it continues being that in perpetuity right and then it also upgrades itself to benefit layer two so it basically becomes like a b to b business to business kind of network and then there's layer twos there's like tens of them already there's probably gonna be hundreds of them in the in the near future they're all going to compete with each other for end users for those users that obviously everyone wants for applications for developers for all that sort of stuff that's where the competition lies and that uh and this is kind of my thesis

here that leads to much better outcomes than if ethereum layer 1 tried to do everything because then ethereum layer 1 would only be competing with other layer ones which as we've seen they're not really something to compete with they're actually like most of them are most of them aren't even worth mentioning because they're so bad whereas these layer twos they're not right like there are some that are obviously forks and aren't that great but there are so many of them that are awesome bleeding edge technology that are all hungry to become the premier roll up or layer two platform on ethereum and win that kind of race for developers and users and it's really just getting started like i think the next five years will be will be defined by this there'll be a very kind of like cutthroat um kind of competition for this it's going

to get nasty at times it's going to get tribal especially as these things get tokens i mean we already know pretty much all of them are going like i have tokens uh most of them have confirmed it by now some of them have them out so i guess like i think it's going to be great i it's going it's going to be awesome but i also think there's going to be a bit of nastiness involved too because of the fact that there's going to be so much competition ethereum obviously benefits from all of this because layer 2 is pay ethereum for security they're going to use as that mle and that kind of like money on there and and kind of like fee token on their networks some of them will opt not to do that but i think that those that opt not to do it will not be

as successful at those that do that that do so yeah if you take all that into consideration uh i think that it just leads to a very very vibrant ethereum scaling kind of like ecosystem there but that's a little bit off track uh besides kind of like the roadmap that they have here mata labs or i guess like matlab is the people behind zk sync also put out a bunch of different information in this blog post which you can read i'll link this in the youtube description below what i really liked was that they put kind of like uh their i guess missions and mission and values and principles uh in the blog post so they said at zk sync we embraced the ethos of ethereum the value ethereum's trustless security decentralization the importance of letting our ecosystem partners have choice the power of being

fully open source the commitment to being truly community owned and scaling without degrading security or decentralization that's basically like ethereum in a nutshell right so i'm really glad to see them just recommit to this i think that if as long as the layer twos do this um kind of like they're they're signaling socially that they're very committed to becoming part of the ethereum family or continuing to be part of the ethereum family rather than trying to leech value off of ethereum so i like that but anyway you can read this blog post for yourself i'll link it in the youtube description below just another super exciting announcement about zk ibm this week just funny that we get three in the same week and that's competition right there for you guys like the fact that they all announced in the same week it's cutthroat guys everyone wants to have

the first production ready zk evm to mainnet where developers can start building on to start building that moat and network effect so we're gonna see much more competition as the months go by all right so speaking of scroll they put out another tweet thread slash blog post today uh titled introducing scroll technical principles to scale ethereum with our zke evm based zk roll up we have design scroll with a set of key technical principles in mind which upholds scrolls called values now this is very similar i guess to what um i was saying about zk sync before but the kind of like core values and principles here obviously is uh kind of like taking on board ethereum's core values and principles such as ensuring user security maintaining evm equivalents uh efficiency asks for a great user

experience decentralization across all layers and a bunch of different things here which you can read through in the thread or in the blog post as well now what's funny about this is that i saw polygon and zk sync mentioned a lot but i didn't see scroll mentioned a lot when people talking about zkvm stuff and i think that's because scroll has kind of like been in stealth mode for a while and they're not just now ramping up their marketing that's another thing that i think is going to determine the big winners within the industry and i've talked about this plenty of times before marketing and business development is going to determine the winners it's not about who's got the best tech at the end of the day like it's never been about that when it comes to technology what it's been about or at least consumer-facing technology what

it's been about is marketing and brand awareness i mean objectively you could say the iphone isn't the best technology or isn't the best phone out there in terms of kind of like oh objective uh i guess like hardware specs for example right but then you kind of like get into a debate okay well the software marries really well with the hardware so that makes up for it and there's all these debates here i mean i said objective but it's kind of like hard to be objective about things especially because there is tribal wars in the smartphone market as well but that's just like an example of the fact that the fact of the matter is like the iphone has incredible brand awareness and incredible marketing i mean everyone knows what an iphone is uh and that is definitely a big part of its success doesn't matter if it doesn't have the

latest tech doesn't have the latest gadgets this that and the other there is other things for for people who want that obviously there's the samsung phones and and other phones out there as as well uh so when i think it comes to kind of like roll ups and layer twos in general i think the same principle principles apply here of marketing and brand awareness especially for getting kind of like partnerships and developers on board and things like that and i've mentioned polygon as being like the front runner here by far to be honest but i'm hoping that other ecosystems like scroll zk sync you know uh starkware album optimism all of them i hope they ramp up their marketing and business development efforts as well because that is definitely what's going to determine the big winners in my eyes but you should check out scrolls

technical principles piece here i'll link it in the description and finally here on the zka vm debate there was also a debate around kind of like which zkvm was better now ali atiyah here put together a great thread about kind of like evm equivalency versus compatibility and how it's a red herring the l2 state and rpc course can easily be wrapped around to provide equivalent dev experience on l1 and m2 l2 maintainability is the critical factor now you can read this thread it's not that long for a breakdown here of what ali is talking about but this is what i was kind of saying yesterday about how the fact of another is that evm equivalency versus compatibility i mean there is definitions of what these things are but it doesn't actually kind

of like matter that much as long as you adhere to what kind of i guess um developers and and kind of like users are used to which is basically providing the equivalent dev experience that developers are getting from ethereum layer one or other evm ecosystems like optimism arbitrary and providing users with the same uh kind of like experience that they get on ethereum layer one or other evm chains right like that being able to use metamask with it for example being having the same transaction flow and things like that like that stuff is what matters most it doesn't really matter if it's equivalent or compatible um except for like the education edge cases and except for things that may matter to developers more than users but yeah it's kind of like a red herring as ali says here but you can check out this

thread from them uh to get the breakdown of exactly what this means i'll link it in the description all right so cool to see a new dune analytics dashboard focusing on the protocol guild from data monkey here today so this is a transparent up-to-date uh finances dashboard for the one-year pilot of the protocol guild so there's a lot of useful information here on the protocol guild's finances such as what tokens they have the allocation of those tokens and what addresses they're allocated to how much is vested how much is claimable total funding all that good stuff yeah you can see it on my screen obviously i'll link this in the description for you guys to check out below yours but i just thought this was a really really cool kind of like dashboard um that you should definitely check out and i guess i i

what i liked most about this dashboard was the fact that it kind of tracks the the tokens that the protocol guild has and also kind of like where all this stuff's going or where all the money's going because because the thing with these public goods funding is you want it to be transparent as transparent as possible so that money just doesn't get thrown into i guess like a pit and then whoever gets that money you know you don't know who gets that money so i think that it's really cool that this kind of like dashboard can even exist to begin with right like where there is it's fully on chain we can kind of like track where all the money is going and and make sure it's going to the right people so i really really love that right finally here we had uh this kind

of like a db account on twitter announced today from uh from coinbase's blog that coinbase had no financing exposure to celsius three hours capital and voyager now what i've wanted to kind of like discuss about this is that there's been too many threads on twitter and too much kind of like fight on twitter lately about coinbase and how they're insolvent like i think i've discussed this on the refill before but if you believe any of that guys like like i don't understand why you would like think about it logically for a sec coinbase just because they're kind of like downsizing or cutting stuff doesn't mean they're insolvent right just because they're kind of like cutting costs doesn't mean they're insolvent if you expect a bear market as a crypto company right especially a crypto company that relies

on you know 90 plus percent of its revenue comes from trading fees if you expect the bear market to last like two three years or something like that why why would you keep the excess fat in your company you wouldn't you would cut it like you would cut the kind of parts of the company that you wouldn't need to save money so that you don't kind of like keep bleeding cash over time unnecessarily now who anyone who's ever studied a business or a company would know this and i think a lot of people that fall for this just i think that everything in crypto had exposure to three hours capital and celsius and voyager and things like that i mean to be fair a lot of companies did but not every company did and coinbase of all companies like in my in kind of like my eyes wouldn't and i know

coinbase has copped flack in in the past especially for me around like token listings that they do and how they're listing kind of like you know pure coin scam tokens that's completely orthogonal to them being insolvent or not guys like i i just i don't understand how people kind of like get come to this conclusion really and and maybe just noobs maybe just people kind of like spreading fud because they want the market to crash or something like that but uh yeah i just wanted to kind of reiterate the fact that if coinbase was insolvent guys it like i mean it would mean like most of the space is insolvent to be honest like coinbase is still the gold standard in terms of kind of like uh uh managing their risk and i've said this before it's all about managing a risk and i think coinbase is definitely up

there in terms of that they're the only exchange i think or one of the only centralized exchanges at least the longest running one that hasn't suffered a hack right like that that in of itself is very impressive considering how long coinbase has been around for um and on top of that their finances are completely public because they're a public company so you can even verify this for yourself uh i just i don't i'm so just puzzled by the fact people still think that coinbase is insolvent it must be like the xrp fanboys who are mad at coinbase for the listing xrp uh but yeah i don't know maybe that's just like a a funny little joke there but uh yeah i just wanted to kind of reiterate the fact that coinbase being insolvent is completely false uh them cast cutting is actually good it's actually it

actually kind of like ironically enough lowers their chances of being kind of like insolvent or one day or kind of like becoming insolvent obviously the chance is always greater than zero but you know if you keep kind of like bleeding unnecessary cash and the bear market lasts longer than you thought it did well then you may kind of like put yourself into a dangerous position where you may have to kind of like go raise outside capital again or have to kind of uh i guess kind of do some other kind of like weird things in order to get the capital that you need which is what some of these companies did i mean uh ftx or sbf bailed out a few of these things like gave a loan to blockfi essentially bailed out blockfy so there is things like that going on but yeah no i don't

expect that with coinbase uh that's for sure but anyway i think 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 them a thumbs up subscribe to newsletters join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone