zkSync zkEVM testnet, DAO Chess and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #321 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel where we cap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host stan this is the 23rd of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i just got back from a uh nft melbourne event called nft male uh obviously in melbourne city here and it was uh interesting to say the least uh it was actually hosted at a uh i guess like a nightclub um and it was i guess very different vibe to what i'm used to definitely was not a crypto conference it was like an nft kind of like party with some talks uh you know in between kind of like the music playing and stuff like that definitely thought it was gonna be something different and probably just not my scene at this stage in my life that it wasn't

like as i said it wasn't like a traditional kind of crypto ethereum conference that i'm used to going to but that doesn't necessarily mean it was like a bad thing but it kind of like opened my eyes to just how different the nft and kind of like crypto communities are and how like they're i mean there's overlap there but as i've been saying on the refuel for i guess a while now they are becoming or have become very distinct communities where they're doing their own thing and there's overlap with kind of something some things like dows and obviously some some nft stuff within d5 but for the most part people getting involved with nfts are a different breed like they're not really interested in d5 they're not interested in layer 2 stuff they're not interested in core protocol stuff and that's totally fine obviously you know

we can't expect everyone to be interested in everything that ethereum has to offer uh but yeah it was just kind of like an interesting event uh to attend that was for sure i maybe it's just because i'm old i mean i'm not old but like because i'm i'm turning into kind of like a boomer at 29 already yeah but the the you know the event that i went to tonight they were playing like really really loud music i don't know how silly that sounds but like i thought it was just going to be a place where you can go like chat some people about nfts and you know watch some talks and things like that but it was mostly kind of like them playing music you had to yell to talk to people you might hear that in my voice like my voice is kind

of like hurting a little bit tonight um and i am very tired that's for sure but uh uh yeah and it kind of like was very hard to to talk to anyone but still like good to meet a few people there as well a few kind of like daily way listeners uh and watchers really really awesome to me someone made a comment that they thought i was uh taller in in real life than what i am guys i'm like five foot nine i'm not a tall person unfortunately and my entire family on my on the male side even i mean obviously the female side as well is is is relatively uh kind of like average height so definitely not some of those six foot four monsters you see in diner um larry cermak from the block is extremely tall i don't know how tall exactly but he's he's a giant

basically i would look like a next to him that's for sure but uh other than that yeah as i said like just a different vibe um definitely was more of a kind of like club setting than a conference and that's totally fine but i am more about the ethereum conferences and the crypto conferences and just going you know watching talks being able to talk to people uh without like music blaring there i know there's after parties at conferences and things like that but it's not part of the the kind of like main event um but uh but yeah just uh something to keep in mind i think in that like just how different kind of like the nft and general crypto ethereum communities are at this point in time and how that's not necessarily a bad thing because of the fact that this is what mainstream

adoption looks like mainstream adoption is not going to look like everyone being interested in what's happening with ethereum core protocol development there you know there are probably only like a few hundred people not even that that understand what dank sharding is at the moment and you know you know there's only probably uh kind of like a bit more than that that actually care to understand what it is and at the end of the day like do any of us care to understand about the latest standards coming out for like the internet protocols no not really i mean i don't read them i don't read the rfcs or anything like that um rfc stands for request for comment it's kind of like it's i mean i wouldn't say it's like an eip but it's kind of like the same vein where you kind of propose a change and

then people kind of like your feedback on it and they kind of look at it and see what's going on with it uh but yeah i mean i don't do that because i'm just not interested in it right so i i think the beauty of ethereum is always going to be the fact that there's just so much going on in the ecosystem there's so much to do and that there are going to be very very distinct communities and they're going to be communities that just use ethereum as a tool they don't even give a about ethereum they're just using it because that's the best tool to use for them to do what they want to do right now for nfts it's all happening on ethereum so you're going to use ethereum to do that you don't have to even care about it you don't have to

even care about eth but you know you still if you're doing transactions on ethereum you're burning eighth so it doesn't matter if you don't care about it or not right uh but yeah anyway i'm gonna leave it at that moving on to a bunch of the updates from the last 24 hours so we have a really awesome thread from the coinbase cloud account here which is the i guess like twitter account and also the team at coinbase that handles uh the staking uh kind of like services that they provide obviously including eth2 staking but also including you know a lot of other kind of um protocols out there that have staking now uh coinbase cloud uh was basically formed after coinbase acquired bison trails and bison trash has been around for quite a while so this is not a new team by any means they've been the

expertise is there they understand the importance of client diversity on on ethereum and they kind of put together this thread uh showing that so you can read this thread for yourself but i guess like the main nugget is in this first tweet where they said 24 and growing of to validators on coinbase retail do not use prism making coinbase one of the most diversified staking pools in the market additionally coinbase uses multiple eth2 staking providers to maximize security and client distribution so i mean it's a good effort don't get me wrong it's still obviously too high um and it is obviously growing the number here but if you flip that around it's 76 percent use prism so that's still too hot it's still way higher than the 66 percent which is the super majority and then obviously we want to get that below 50 ideally so

it's progress it's okay um and they say it's growing which is fine but again it's nothing to kind of like write home about just yet uh but we're going to see how that kind of like evolves and changes and then in the rest of the thread they go through their rationale of why they used prism throughout the start and it basically was because prism offered kind of like the best experience for them to uh to kind of like um to go with and specifically around the fact that apparently prism at the time was the only viable client supporting remote signers now i saw a comment from i think benjamin uh ben edgington uh that writes the what's unique newsletter saying that um i believe that teku also supported this on day one not just prism but i think you know taking all the kind of like other things into account it's

kind of like uh makes sense why coinbase went with prism instead of teku prison was much more well-known it was more trusted not to say that teku is a bad client it certainly isn't it's it's an amazing client but they just were way less known at the time than prism and even today they're probably less known than prism is today uh but uh yeah and then they go on to say that they're kind of like working on um you know adding lighthouse support from sigma prime and things like that so yeah i mean they're listening right i mean we we have been talking about the client diversity stuff pretty hard over the last few months i know that i've mentioned that a lot i know that i've mentioned one person in the community superfiz he's been doing amazing work on this and i actually going to credit him

with a lot of this he's gotten us to the point where we're actually getting responses from these places now before he was starting to kind of like talk about this and bring it up in a big way really no one was kind of like looking at it talking about it and i think it actually embodies one of the the best things about the ethereum community is that no matter who you are you can have a voice you can get something done you can push things to happen superfiz i mean he's not just no one right he's obviously a big part of the ethereum community he spends a lot of time with the rockapool community and the eight staker community and he runs a lot of stuff out of there a lot of initiatives but it's not like he has like all this all you know all-knowing power it's not

like he's uh he's someone who can kind of like essentially control anything and go in and say you need to do this you need to do that he's just one guy that's been yelling about client diversity for a while now um but he's uh he's managed to move mountains and it's it's actually awesome what he's done so i'm giving you know a lot of credit to him obviously there's been other people kind of like pushing pushing this as well not just him but uh but yeah he's been one of the loudest proponents out there and speaking of super fizz he posted something on i read it today about a brief history of client diversity on the beacon chain that i highly recommend you go and read uh and kind of like check out it's not too long of a read here you can kind of

like just read through and then read through the comments and everything like that but as i said super fizz has been the champion here he really is the hero that uh we do not deserve but we definitely need right uh to get to get these to get this ball rolling here but it seems to be rolling that's for sure and it seems like coinbase actually cares to diversify their clients then you know it's going to take time for coinbase to do it because they're a big organization same with the other centralized kind of like exchanges and staking service providers but as i mentioned yesterday as well i think the day before rocker pool is out there now guys they're doing amazingly on the client diversity front so stake with them if you have less than 32 8 i'm sorry but at this point in time

you know if you're comfortable with the uh with the extra smart contract risk which to be honest i would argue isn't that much extra but if you're comfortable with the extra smart contract risk you should be staking with rocker pool and not staking with a centralized service provider because i mean really at the end of the day if you're sticking with coinbase you're taking the centralization risk if you're sticking with rockapool you're sticking you know taking a bit of um in custody risk with coinbase two and you'll take you're taking a bit of kind of like smart contract risk you've got to weigh up those risks for yourself but me personally if i was seeking less than 32 i would never go with a centralized provider i would go with rocketpool hands down every single time even if there's a bit of extra smart contract

risk there i mean i i i think that's an acceptable risk at this point in time um not just because they respect client diversity uh but because you're helping to do decentralized um staking instead of just adding to the centralized stake which as i pointed out the other day coinbase and kraken already have a pretty big share of the beacon chain we don't need to be increasing that at this point guys we need to be spreading the love we need to be spreading the steak out obviously we don't want to centralize around rockapool either which is which is which is totally fine but i mean they're only one percent of validators right now let's jack them up let's get them to five percent let's get them to ten percent um and and kind of like let's spread the love you know the funny thing is is that if they've got

like two or three decentralized staking pools out there i mean we only have one today but maybe in the future we have two or three i know lido plans to kind of decentralize over time but we'll see what happens there and then maybe another one enters the market but you know say we have two or three then we have like a bunch of centralized staking providers along with centralized exchanges maybe we have like five or so dominant ones there then we have all the solo stakers then we have the big enterprises taking on on you know a a a in a solo way but also kind of like doing it as like a hybrid approach we can get to a very very healthy ecosystem both on the client diversity front but also on the decentralization of the stake front so i'm super pumped to see how that plays out especially

once withdrawals are enabled then it makes it easier people to kind of like chop and change and get in and out whenever they want um but yeah great to see this thread from coinbase cloud and definitely go give this post from superfiz a read i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so i was right about zk syncs news yesterday how i said that it wasn't a token it was going to be something like the zk evm test net going live and that's what went live yesterday this is an absolutely massive achievement guys like i mean the fact that we have a zk avm on test net already like already is huge and obviously zk sync has been working on this for quite a while they're not the only one working on it but they seem to be first to market in terms of on a test

net now i'm sure polygons solutions aren't far behind they've been teasing them coming in q1 q2 as well um and but yeah just great to see that zk sync has launched the first evm compatible zk roll up on a public test net now there is a lot of information in their blog post about exactly what they've launched you know what they haven't launched uh they've also got a new kind of like portal where you can see or a new ecosystem hub where you can see the projects that are live on the network right now and the projects that are coming soon so there obviously isn't too much that's live right now to play around with you guys know about zig zag exchange that i've spoken about plenty of times before orbit of finance i talked about them yesterday as a bridge uh you know the

graphs live i mean really for end users there's not too much live just yet but i mean this is a test net guys like relax we're not at mainnet yet uh and then you can kind of sort you can go click define you can see what's live as i said zigzag is but there's a bunch of others that seem to be um you know moving to to zk6 avm but they're not live yet but still it's great to see this portal very similar to the other portals that we've seen in the layer 2 space before uh but great to see this and then you know in the rest of the blog post they talk about kind of like you know the fact that they wanted to get infrastructure in place before they spun this up infrastructure such as fiat on and off ramps and bridges and oracles and all

that good stuff there um the state of the rollups are what they've actually delivered as part of this test net so with this release they're supporting a bunch of really cool features uh native support for e-s-d-s-a signatures so unlike the first version of zk sync and most of the zk roll ups no spo special operation is required to register the user's private key any account can be managed in l2 with the same private key that is used for l1 seamless onboarding uh solidity support of course uh web3 api support for ethereum cryptographic cryptographic primitives which you know all the popular ones uh hard hat plugin and l1 to l2 smart contract messaging which allows developers to pass data from ethereum l1 to smart contracts on zk sync providing providing required information to run various smart

contracts so we have l1 to l2 composability and then there are a bunch of features coming down the pipeline that aren't live yet such as l2 to l1 smart contract messaging which will allow developers to paste pass data from zk sync to l1 once again allowing developers to build more robust applications so imagine being able to tap into l1 liquidity from l2 very very cool support for the viper programming language account abstraction support for older versions of solidity and of course zk porter which is their premier uh kind of like solution which has off chain data availability sort of like a validium and allows for greater scalability so if you're a developer get started with everything there's a portal for developers and all that sort of stuff there a lot of a lot of different links in this post you can go check out as well just around everything i yeah

i'm super excited by this this this came out like shortly after the refuel went live yesterday of course and i actually stayed up for this and this is part of the zk sync 2.0 effort uh but yeah i mean the test net mainnet i'm assuming is going to go live sometime this year now the test net is live i'm just so excited i mean look look at all the stuff that we have right now guys in the l2 space just like take a like breather here and just look at all the stuff that's like go to l2b check it out and it's not just live in a fashion where no one's using it people are using people getting a ton of value out of it people are super excited about all of it people are building on it that's the main thing i've highlighted how many how many

people are actually building on these things and i'm not just talking about porting something over from ethereum layer one to kind of like these layer twos uh which is all well and fine like that's that's totally fine but building new products on these layer two is what gets me most excited i don't want i like i i mean it's it's cool that like unisoft is on arbitrary and optimism and everything like that or units of v3 and on polygon pls chain and all that sort of stuff but i mean i've used uni swap on ethereum l1 we all know and love unisop it's it's there it's been there for a while it does what it does but what can we do with this new technology what can unit soft do maybe unicorn v4 takes advantage of the new l2 capabilities such as basically instant confirmation of transactions

which allows for much faster updating of things um much cheaper fees of course as well being able to optimize in different ways on the l2s than you can that you couldn't do on l1 um so there's so many you know new things that can be played around with and there's just so many apps that are not ever going to be on l1 and are going to be deployed natively to l2 to take advantage of all of this so that's what i'm most excited about and whether that's on an evm compatible l2 or something like starknets or you know whatever else we've got coming down the pipeline that is what gets me most excited in this industry uh at this point in time like i mean i've been around for quite a while now obviously different things are going to excite different people maybe you're still

super excited by a lot of the d5 apps that we're you know that i'm kind of used to that's totally fine guys i mean at this point in time like as a as i you know regularly say i'm a d5 boomer but only because i've been around for for what feels like forever and there's not that much things that i see that actually pique my interest but i'm seeing a lot on l2 that really pick my interest and as i've pointed out before there are directories you can go on there are portals you can go on um you know the stock net roundup from sphagnum as prime is is a really great way to keep up with the stockinette ecosystem uh and yeah i mean i i keep up with it as best as i can and relay it on to you guys on the refuel

but there's just so much happening so much happening so much cool things being built and i guess congrats to zk sync um i guess mata labs on releasing the first zk evm test net very very massive achievement and i can't wait to see them get to mainnet all right and i guess like as a as a two-for-one here there was a new amm uh protocol uh that is launching to zk sync 2.0 is launched in a test net fashion called mute so you can go to testnet.switch.mute.i and you can kind of like test out their amm platform their farming platform and their ideo platform now i haven't tried this out for myself please use at your own risk and everything like that uh do not trust it with like a large amount amount of money at this point or anything like that i know it's only

on test net uh uh but like i mean like you know once it got to main net uh uh sorry once it gets to main net don't trust it with kind of like too much because it is a brand new protocol from what i can see i don't know if it's actually a fork or not it might be a fork of something but uh because i i'm going to assume it's a it's kind of like a brand new thing or a fork and it's been modified you want to play safe there as well but very very cool to see something or an amm already alive there i'm sure other ones like um uni swap and sushi swap and curve and all that sort of stuff are going to come eventually but these native things are definitely as i said something that that is particularly interesting to me

all right so polygon has launched uh something called finity with which is polygons user first system of design elements uh which empowers teams to quickly prototype launch and scale their dabs without compromising on aesthetics and usability this is basically like a design sdk or a design kind of like pack for people to kind of like focus on creating beautiful user experiences and i guess like ui experiences why i'm highlighting this is because this is the kind of stuff that i think polygon just goes above and beyond to do no other ecosystem really focuses on this it's kind of like put on the developers of the apps to focus on this and to do it in their own kind of like way but that's not exactly scalable there are a lot of kind of i guess teams out there

that don't want to have to worry too much about uh you know coming up with the custom design and and kind of like dealing with all the jargon and dealing with all the all the all the stuff that we're that we're kind of used to but like their newer users probably aren't used to and they just want to kind of like build something uh really really nice to use and really intuitive to use well that's what polygons offering with finiti so uh i think this is really cool i think you know if you can go check out this blog post for more information on this you can click through and everything like that and check it out especially if you're a designer um but yeah as i said this is just another way that kind of polygon goes above and beyond compared to other ecosystems in

order to uh on board as many people as possible whether they be you know users developers whoever and this is the stuff that kind of like we need to get to that mass adoption i mean look some of the interfaces out there or maybe most of the interfaces out there of these d5 apps are so confusing that it's never going to get mass adoption so that's well and good for the advanced users they can use that they can do everything with that but we need simple interfaces for people to interact with it doesn't have to be like completely dumb but it needs to be like one to two clicks and they're doing what they're doing the jargon needs to be gone the uh i guess like um the the kind of like things like uh uh like uh what was it kind of signing not signing so approving

a um a token and then having to do another transaction to swap that has to be gone that's got you know that's all coming down the pipeline but we're never gonna achieve mass adoption in the current state of d5 that's for sure and i think that honestly most people will interact with d5 via third parties and centralized intermediaries which is totally fine i believe for reasons i've outlined before about how d5 improves on the existing system in in so many ways it doesn't even matter that that kind of like ends up that way um because look if you go to uh i guess like i don't know ave right now as a money market obvious interface isn't bad but like imagine going to that interface as a completely new user you'd have absolutely no idea what to do no idea what's a health factor i mean i know

they have tool tips and things like that but like it's scary for new users guys the most simple default interface we have right now is uniswap i would say where it's a simple kind of thing where you swap i say simple but no that's not new users look at that and it's like okay what's what's this what's the swap what's slippage what's blah blah oh i have to have to um i have to sign a transaction or i have to approve a token then i have to swap and you know what's this we'd met a must pop up guys like honestly that's just not the way we're gonna get to mass adoption so yeah as i said really cool to see this from polygon and focusing on the ui ux element which i believe more ecosys more of the ecosystem needs to focus on because if we don't we're never going to

get to mass adoption as i said all right so immutable has announced today that starting today marketplaces powered by immutable x will be able to set their own custom fees on immutable x trades this is a critical step forward in incentivizing the best nft marketplaces in the world to build on ethereum's leading l2 for nft so the tldi is that once live you can anticipate the following any marketplace will be able to set their own fees on orders market.immutable.com and other nft marketplaces like tokentrope have begun the implementation process already already so obviously this applies to developers mainly to get these kind of like things live but this is good i mean you want custom fees on these marketplaces you just don't just want a flight fee you want competition on fees you want fees to get you know as close to zero as

possible while still being able to provide profitable profitability for the marketplaces because obviously no one's gonna run a marketplace if the fees are zero right like especially if they have to pay for our one fees as well like as i've talked about before the l1 fees that that these l2s have to pay can come from anywhere but usually it would come from uh either charging the user the fee directly as a gas fee quite unquote or uh basically taking fees on a marketplace of sorts or like a trading platform of sorts and using that to cover the cost like dytx does that when they kind of like um take trading fees and then use a portion of that trading fees in order to pay for their l1 gas fees and the same is going to be true

for nft market places on immutable so very very cool to see this from the immutable x team here all right so uh lyra has announced that they've partnered up with hot protocol to provide seamless bridging from ethereum and mainnet to optimism the integration provides a significant improvement in the onboarding experience 2l2 so this has been designed for a quote unquote multi-chain future so in just a few minutes traders can move ether from ethereum mainnet to optimism without leaving lyra so this is a direct integration in the lyra app which is an options protocol that i've spoken about before um and you won't need to leave at all so what's next well they'll be adding the capability to bridge from other l2s like arbitrary polygon that's awesome like right on the app you'll be able to be like oh you know what i want

to use lara but lara's only on optimism right now and i've got some funds on arbitram all right i'm going to bridge over from arbitrary to liar without having too optimism to use it in lyra without having to actually leave the the lyra app that again what i was talking about before about ease of usability this is one of those things guys like ui ux is such an absolutely massive field and there are so many things that can be done that you wouldn't even think about to improve the user experience and this is one of them i mean just having a simple kind of like button to bridge in right in the app without having to go somewhere else vastly improves the user experience and reduces the amount of clicks they have to make and reduces the amount of things that and decisions they have to kind of like think about which

is what we want to get to we want to make it so that we don't you know we don't want to dumb it down too much but we want to make it so easy and so seamless that people don't even think twice about it it's just like oh yeah i'll do this do that blah blah and get their kind of like a job done there without having to complicate things so very very cool to see this from hop and lyra and looking forward to further integrations here so the zika rollups account on twitter have another thread about all the latest i guess uh projects that they have listed that are building on stock net so as i mentioned before there are resources out there to see what projects are building on what when it comes to l2s well zkrollups.xyz is one of the best resources out there like they i mean you

can see here they have a directory of all the projects building on zk tech they've got uh kind of like you can see what roll-ups are being built what wallets are being built you can kind of like sort here infrared daps nfts this is kind of like your one-stop shop right now guys in order to see what's being built on zkryl specifically this does not include optimism and arbitrary any other optimistic wall-ups of course only zk roll-ups but still you can see everything that's being built here now this thread which i'll link in the youtube description gives you a full breakdown of all the projects or the latest projects building on stock net there are quite a few guys i mean as i mentioned before stock net this like an ecosystem is one of the fastest growing ones out there very very cool to see

them growing not only on kind of like people migrating their apps from i guess ethereum l1 to stock net but also new apps being deployed there that we haven't seen on l1 before as i said before that's what i'm most excited about very very cool to see this so definitely go check out this thread and check out zkrollups.xyz for a full breakdown of all the apps building on zk roll ups right finally here we have a tweet from tim connors who said uh our eighth denver hack project dow versus dao on chain chess each member can vote on what move to make next next the game state is saved to the blockchain we call it dual dow this is really cool obviously this is not going to work on ethereum layer 1 because it's going to be super expensive that's going to be one expensive chess

match but this is going to work on layer 2 like in a really really awesome way and this reminds me of something like twitch plays pokemon which was this phenomenon a few years ago actually it was quite a while ago now where a developer put together a kind of like a system where the i guess twitch chat would put would input kind of like what direction to move and what buttons to press on uh pokemon and then the bot would do that and everyone had to work together to actually advance in the game you can imagine the chaos that happened and ensued from that um so this is i guess similar but it's kind of like a voting mechanism where each member can vote on what move to make next it's kind of like the wisdom of the crowds here and then the game state is saved to the

blockchain as i said really really cool not going to work on l1 just because of the gas phase but will definitely work on l2 and work a lot smoother on l2 as well not just because of the cheaper fees but i mean honestly this is the kind of thing that can be done on an l2 um as a volidium where the the data can actually be stored off chain it doesn't need to be stored on chain because you don't need super high security for um dow versus dow on on chain chess unless the stakes are really high maybe you have like a million dollar pot that people want to kind of like um play with uh and kind of like are gonna win well then maybe you bring that on chain but in most cases you can do it as part of like a validium construction

where you have off-chain data and then the fees can basically be zero like or near zero and you could have as many moves as you want going on you can have as many games as you want going on that's really really cool so again this is the sort of stuff as i said to you guys before that is just not possible to build on layer one because of one i mean it's too slow uh even at like 15 second blocks or 13 second blocks way too slow and the gas fees are just stupidly high it just wouldn't work the and and this going on to layer two is uh is definitely what um what i want what i want to see and what i love to see so very very cool little project here uh i'm sure i don't know if i've seen kind of like the eighth denver hackathon

projects like a list of them just yet but i'm sure that's coming soon or somewhere out there if you have a link to it be sure to share it with me in the discord channel um but i think on that note that is gonna be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone