AllCoreDevs updates, Taiko raise $22mil and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #601 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where you cap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is Sonic the 9th of June 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so I guess happy Friday and would you look at that I didn't miss a daily gray refuel episode this week I think it's the first week in maybe over a month that I haven't missed an episode and I did an episode with Eric Connor on this Saturday last week and I was just filling in for Ryan Sean Adams on the weekly roll-up with David Hoffman which you should definitely go check out after you finish up with today's refuel so I'm feeling pretty good about the content that's been put out recently and of course as was announced on Twitter yesterday or the day before Eric and I

are going to continue doing those podcast episodes together uh there's going to be a Cadence of every two weeks but that will start I I believe in the next couple months because I hope you have some stuff going on so we're just going to do once a month for a couple months and then go into a bi-weekly Cadence there so yeah lots of content coming your way uh and speaking of content let's get into today's episode so there was another ethereum all core dev's call that happened yesterday or today I think depending where you are in the world and Tim biker has his usual thread out about this one now they discussed things uh like 4844 the engine API and validator spec changes now the biggest thing I think uh well it wasn't supposed to do with 4844 was actually got to do with EIP 4788 which I've

talked about before on the refill this is the EIP that basically allows for better designs for things like staking pools restaking and bridges as you can see Alex Stokes has uh has said here so this will and the reason why this Erp has come up again is because it was just a greenlit for the Cancun dencoon upgrade so this will be going in alongside 4844 it seems like the dencoon upgrade is going to be quite packed which is awesome to see as I have been saying over the past few months the core devs are really I guess like at their best they're at their Peak right now and they really just kind of hammering out a lot of these research and development things that are on the ethereum roadmap so it's great to see say that 487 4788 has been accepted now I believe if I

just Google it quickly here I can bring up the actual spec oh the sorry the actual EIP draft as you can see here and I'll link this in the YouTube description below but this basically explains exactly what what this is doing on a technical level and I guess like the highest level is that uh the abstract is that 4788 allows for the commitment uh of the hash tree root of each Beacon chain block in the corresponding execution payload header store enters to store each of these routes in a stateful pre-compile what that means in normal turns is basically from my understanding the execution layer and consensus layer will be able to communicate uh uh uh communicate a certain technical thing that allows for better designs of things like staking pools as I said I think what it allows

for is like force exiting from from staking pools which is pretty cool but um the actual eips is quite technical so I I wouldn't recommend that if you aren't someone who's technical uh if I just Google again maybe there's something less technical here uh there is an ethereum magician's post as well uh that I'll bring up here with uh with Alex Stokes discussing this too this is actually quite old now this is over a year old uh This Thread but I guess like this will give you more context as well so yeah exciting stuff happening in the all core Dev World in terms of 4844 there was some discussion around the size of of blobs because uh the blobs have a certain size and to change that size it will actually require a hard Fork each time and obviously the bigger they are the more Australians put on the

network so they were discussing whether they were going to have the blob Target uh be changed from two slash four to three slash six it was decided that uh we will keep the three slash six Target uh limit combo for the next devnet and continue discussions around whether this is the right value for mainnet and there's also a 4844 devnet 6 tracker that you can check out as well that Tim LinkedIn is thread which has a bunch of technical stuff going on here A bunch of the uh the pull requests as well linked here and then you can check out the rest of Tim by code Rose thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below and he also has a really good tldr here for uh Cancun which basically lists the IPS that are included so Erp 1153 Erp 4788 the ip48 44 5656 and 6780 so far this is

quite a chunky upgrade which is just great to see as I said like it's just amazing to see these things going forward and and happening so quickly I haven't seen any indication that we shouldn't expect this upgrade by the end of the year uh we're already in June obviously but the devnets are going well then there'll be the test Nets and and and mainnet I would expect that probably by ah look October November maybe uh probably pushing into November definitely not December I don't think uh they want to do any upgrades in December for the same reasons I've always outlined in the past that during the holiday periods probably not the best time to attempt a a mainnet upgrade right so yeah I would still expect this around the October November timeline but I'll keep you guys updated on timelines there this is just my own speculation by

the way there is no timelines being given yet it's just estimates uh based on what I'm seeing all right so we all know that the Bedrock upgrade went live on optimism uh yesterday or the day before I think it was yesterday and there's a thread here from optimism that basically uh details the things that they are most proud of uh that came with bedrock so you can check this one out uh there's also a new dashboard that Hill Dobby highlighted uh new Dune analytics dashboard that shows the impact of Bedrock on gas costs on the optimism Network so it actually led to an impressive 56 transaction cost reduction so over half what a transaction cost reduction on the optimism Network just from this one

upgrade now obviously uh the transaction costs will keep coming down but this is awesome because this is us a a reduction in in gas costs without 4844 and obviously with 4844 it's going to reduce them even more so those numbers that I was quoting from the l2fees.info website uh were definitely accurate and there's actually a um a summary here you can see here gas fee savings projections by transaction type at current L1 gas prices if you click through to this you can actually see a list of each of the transaction Types on the optimism Network and what they cost with bedrock and what they cost in the Legacy system so pre-bedrock you can see here a DEX trade currently costs eight cents uh on the Bedrock upgraded Network and it

would have cost you 19 cents just a couple of days ago so a 50 55 reduction there and if T mints got a 62 reduction uh erc20 token transfer 62 as well and and an nft sorry an eth transfer got a 66 reduction and it only costs four cents on the optimism network uh currently and and I should note that the current mainnet way price is 20 so it is relatively low and I guess it doesn't scale exactly like this but if the gray price was 40 you would expect that each transfer price to double as well now the beautiful thing about 4844 that I need to bring up again is that once it goes live no longer will most of these transaction costs be affected by the normal gas mask Chrono theorem because

4844 introduces a new transaction type that layer 2's take advantage of or that Roll-Ups take advantage of that basically it creates a separate fee market for them so these costs are going to absolutely collapse uh that I I I wouldn't be surprised to see a uh a DEX trade here being subset uh fees even when gray is like a hundred uh for the normal fee Market because as I said it doesn't affect the uh the roll-up uh transactions once 4844 is in place and I don't think people are ready for just how to even upgrade 48 44 is it's going to make these L2 fees competitive with uh these are I guess kind of um other l1s that have cheaper fees without having to sacrifice in I guess like the the end state of optimism without having

to sacrifice that decentralization and security there which is obviously awesome to see but you can check out this dashboard that Hill W linked I'll I'll link it in the YouTube description below but the the dashboard itself was built by I believe uh who was it built by uh let me go back here um I I think it was built by maybe optimism Labs themself uh up the top here yeah so it was built by op Labs uh themself I believe it is maintained Yeah by Michael uh silberling here who I've actually talked about on the refill before so he maintains this dashboard um from what I can see and it doesn't just show that that table that I showed you but there's a lot of information here uh this basically shows all the information around the Bedrock migration upgrade what's changed it's very cool honestly

it's very cool to see this because this is exactly what I wanted to see I wanted to see comparisons I wanted to see what kind of gas reduction saving would happen here and an over 50 reduction across the board is incredible honest that's half right just from this one upgrade that obviously was it was in the works for a while but you can imagine them doing another upgrade later on the line that does this again and then with 4844 in place I mean Roll-Ups in their end State I should definitely have a subset transaction fees pretty much all the time unless they get really really really really popular but I think at that point when you have potentially millions of um I guess like I hate using this term like daily active users but let's just say you have millions of of daily active users then uh the fee

should still be subset and I think we're going to get to to that world and you know when talking about things like daily active users it's quite funny because I think that when an app is going to have daily uh sorry millions of daily active users I think what's what that's going to be is it's going to be a game or it's going to be something got to do with like nfts or some social media thing um I the only thing in finance that I can think of that will have like millions of daily active users really I mean it'll be like um I guess like an exchange maybe but even then like when you're talking about like actual active people doing active things on the Chain not just Bots and things like that it becomes hard to kind of estimate here payments yes but I think that that we

might see an actual kind of dedicated payments layer that won't be a layer two it'll be like a layer three or something like that where these things essentially can live Higher and Higher and they just recursively post their data improves to down the stack so to speak so it's kind of hard to map this all out because we don't know exactly what shape it's going to take but reducing costs regardless of the expected demand uh on the l2s on L1 on L3 stuff like that I think is incredibly important and also tracking the impact is incredibly important so that's why I I just wanted to hire this dashboard for you guys I will link it in the YouTube description below for you to go check out all right so our last thing actually here on optimism uh the ethereum on arm Twitter account shared that they're

running an optimism Bedrock node on a rock 5B board uh which is coming very soon so just great to see that optimism uh that with bedrock is able to run on low power and not doing some note I should say is able to run on a low powered device yeah I wonder if I could run this alongside my staking setup on my rock 5B uh I might try it out but even if I can't I've got another rock 5B I can use or I can potentially run it on on one of the 20 Raspberry Pi's I have I have so many Raspberry Pi's for some reason I don't even know why I I have that many I've used them for various different things over the years I'm actually running a Bitcoin full node on one of them um with an external external hard drive but yeah I like to Tinker with those

things but yeah it'll be cool to see uh to run these things and then compare them against like an arbitrim node and then like a polygon dkvm node or when skull goes live they're they're node right so yeah it's going to be interesting to see uh how that all kind of plays out there but again it's not critical for these things to run on the slow powered Hardware I think running on just consumer Hardware will be fine but even then there's different parts of the stack right if you're running a approver you're definitely going to need more powerful Hardware at least for the foreseeable future uh I I kind of like um a zero knowledge proverb for example um and if it depends on what part of the the software that you're writing will dictate the hardware but obviously bringing down those Hardware costs is

critical no matter what uh piece of the the software that you're running here all right so usdc uh I announced that I announced that I spoke about the other day that Circle announced that they were bringing native usdc to the arbitrum one network while this is now available so basically uh Native usdc was issued by Circle directly on the arbitrom1 network uh so there are now I guess like usdc uh natively um issued on ethereum L1 and now it's natively issued on ethereum L2 and now the any bridged usdc that comes across from L1 uh ethereum to arbitrine one will be named usdc dot e um and then it will be Abridged to

Native usdc over time on the network so it seems like they want to essentially so the the discussion around like native assets is quite fun but it seems like they want to have obviously ethereum L1 have native usdc on there but also make sure that they can have native usdc issued on each of the l2s starting with arbitrim1 here and make sure there's enough liquidity and there's not fragmentation of liquidity and things like that as well so very very cool to see this you can read the full details about it uh in this blog post in this Twitter thread which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh I I 100 think they're going to do the same thing for bass mainnet like launch native usdc on there obviously because Circle works very closely with coinbase and coinbase is launching base and I still think that

they're going to enable free usdc transfers on base which is I I actually can't underestimate uh sorry I can't overstate how big of a deal that's going to be I think it really is going to change the game I think that the Base main net uh especially because it's probably going to go live after 48.44 you're going to have cheap fees generally on these on base and then you're going to have like free usdc trans suppose that's going to be a really big deal and I think what what might be an even bigger deal is if Circle decides to do free USD C transfers on every L2 because it'll just be that cheap to do it after 4844 because right now they're doing it on the polygon POS chain which is still quite expensive it's not that it's not as cheap as it it can be um and the

polygon POS chain isn't actually a roll-up as we all know it's it's effectively its own uh kind of like layer one or a side chain whatever else you want to call it there but with Roll-Ups obviously the transaction costs are going to drop dramatically after 48.44 and sending a token transfer uh sorry doing a token transfer uh would be very cheap probably subset uh fees so I would assume that Circle would probably want to subsidize that on every uh popular L2 at least uh but definitely on base so I'm very much looking forward uh to to seeing how that all shakes out there but as I said the details about the arbitrim are one native usdc launch will be linked in the YouTube description below all right lens protocol the

decentralized social uh I guess like media app that uh doesn't live on ethereum mainnet but he's spawned out of the other um ecosystem and I believe lives on the polygon POS chain announced a 15 million dollar funding round today uh with a bunch of people actually participating so uh there's a bunch of angels there in the in the bottom left that you can probably see on on my cameras covering it but a bunch of angels such as Hayden Adams from uni swap Sandeep from polygon Kevin owicky from git coin and then you have a bunch of uh different VCS and funds on the right hand side here as you can see I'm not going to name them all uh they're all all there um and uh it was it was actually led by a bunch I I think they had like a lead investor I think they basically had just

all these investors uh invest whatever uh whatever amount that was agreed upon and then they raised this 15 million dollar seed round which is a pretty big seed round to be honest I mean I don't know exactly what the valuation would be here but at a 15 million dollar seed around the valuation probably is 150 million which is a pretty big evaluation but at the same time lens protocol has actually got a lot of usage and a lot of people really love using the the project and they did announce the other day that they're going to be launching as their own L2 I think they did fumble the announcement this was a few weeks ago actually they did fumble the announcement a bit but that seems to be their plan launching as an L2 now maybe not launching as a full roll-up but like something like a validium where the data

restored off chain and um they knew they just put the proofs on chain that'll be pretty cool and what'll be even cooler is if they use something like uh eigenlayer restaking for data availability because that'll make it even more secure um or potentially more secure obviously we need to see when eigen layer goes I goes live here so I guess yeah congrats to the lens protocol ecosystem and team for for this race yeah it's really great to see that they're having a really good um uh I guess like play at building a property decentralized social media website and I remember I discussed a few days ago around the fact that I think there's a lot of power in decentralized uh social media because essentially you can make it so that no one controls the state or No One controls like the network effect and database so anyone

who wants to build an interface on top of it can do so and they won't just be rugged by some centralized company like what happened with Twitter like what happened with Facebook and like what seems to be happening with Reddit right now where they're trying to kill third-party apps uh which as I mentioned the other day is actually going to affect me and it's probably going to make me not use Reddit on my phone because I absolutely hate the Reddit uh the official Reddit app it sucks it sucks so bad not just because of the ads it's just engineered in such a way that isn't user friendly at all at least it isn't to me and Facebook's the same Twitter's remained the same but unfortunately uh I guess like there were better Twitter apps and they kind of killed them and I'm surprised Elon Musk

hasn't re-enabled this functionality but maybe it would probably be too expensive to do that because API calls are not cheap um and and they did try to charge more for the API usage as well so whatever anyway that's that's going up a little bit off topic here um but yeah I think out of the the all the social media apps that I've seen over the years the two that still get me most excited are lens protocol and firecast star and speaking of fastcast I actually have more forecaster invites so you should DM me if you want a fire Caster invite um preferably on Discord uh or if you can't DM me just tag me and I'll I'll get to you I don't know how many invites I have actually let me let me check before you all uh kind of DM me yeah oh man I'm gonna have to log in

again uh won't I here because I I restarted my computer yeah okay I can't check right now but I think it was like 30 maybe 30 invites something like that so so yeah I've got more forecaster invites but as I was saying the two that I'm most excited about are lens protocol on firecaster and they seem to be taking different approaches to things lens protocol seems to be more focused on I guess like the web 3 side of things and integrating with nfts and and I guess like social fire and stuff like that whereas firecast is really just trying to make a better uh Twitter that is uh it is decentralized but is also able to have apps built on top of that because there's there's fire caster and then there is like other apps like well there's no official forecaster up there are third-party apps building on top of

it like warpcast and a few others out there and uh that enables what I was talking about before that basic ability for people to use whatever front-end they want and use whatever interface they want to interact with the same database the same state which I think is is really important that's exactly what lens protocol is doing as well mind you there are multiple interfaces to interact with it there but anyway once again congrats to lens protocol on the Rays excited to see them continue to build out the project all right speaking of fundraisers Tycho has announced their 22 million dollar funding around so this was spread across two different rounds they have a seed and a pre-series a uh so yeah 23 million dollars was raised across both of those I do have to disclose that I was an

investor in this round but you know me I love being invested in all the l2s I mean I am an L2 guy so it's a no-brainer for me to invest here and uh one of the uh the founders of of Tycho Matt finestone who I've talked about before used to be at Loop ring he's one of my good friends as well so very happy to support him so the rounds were led by Sequoia China and generative um Adventures here with participation from a bunch of other funds and VCS as well as Angels such as myself uh Patricia walthalta from pull-up and Tim baiko from the ethereum core devs obviously you all know Tim baiko here all right you can read I guess like the full post here and the full tweet thread which I'll link in the YouTube description below about this but I'm really excited about Tycho because

they're as far as I know the only one building a type 1 ZK M right now and the cool thing about a type 1 ZK VM from my understanding at least is that it is the the one that can actually be enshrined at layer one so what could end up happening here is Tiger obviously launches their ZK VM as a layer two um they you know they have lots of usage on there they they they build all the technology around it they build up the ecosystem around it and then potentially when the ethereum main net ethereum L1 wants to integrate uh a ZK VM at L1 they could take tycho's technology and integrate it there now this isn't to say that that would replace Taiko at L2 I I don't think that at all I think it would complement all the l2s and it would be a

huge boost for for Tycho because it means that what they made the technology that they made ended up turning into a public good for the ethereum ecosystem uh which which I think is very cool but that's from my understanding of a type 1 ZK VM because after reading vitalik's blog post on the different types of ZK EVMS type 1 is supposed to be basically basically equivalent to ethereum so not not equivalent like 99.9 equivalent but like 100 equivalent so it functions the same as the evm does on L1 just on a roll up uh instead so yeah as far as I know they're the only ones building this are they being the Taiko of course whereas the other ZK VMS uh Kakarot uh from Stockwell I mean they spun out of stock where now uh uh uh building a ZK

evm type 2.5 scroll and polygon I don't know exactly what types they're building but it's not a type one I'm pretty sure um and then there's a bunch of others out there as well I can't label them all off top of my head but they're all building different things and again this goes back to what I've been saying about l2s for quite a while now is that with these l2s all experimenting with different things we basically get like a huge r d arm that's separate to ethereum L1 Force just scalability but not just for scalability for evm right for evm research uh for research around things like using different programming languages to to write smart contracts uh different technology types all this sorts of stuff so and that is all funded by obviously VCS but I don't think

that's a bad thing because think of it like this the VCS and the funds and whoever else they're not going to invest in eth right unless they buy it on public markets because there is no ethereum seed or pre-seed or there was just the ethereum Ico and that's done now so the VCS obviously want to fund things where they can get a return on their investment from and a big return on their Investments so in a roundabout way what they're doing is they're funding ethereum core development because a lot of the ideas that are being done at L2 a lot of the stuff that's being done in L2 does have implications for L1 and there are teams for example uh helping to build 48 44 out for layer one but they are able to do that because they got funding from

VCS because they're working for optimism they're they're working for off-chain lives because uh prilabs got acquired by off-chan labs are the developers of the prism client so really um it's kind of funny how I've turned that on its head instead of being like oh here we go instead of the ethereum foundation being like oh we'll sell a bunch of our Easter VCS at a discount so we can get more money in no they just holding they want to their eight they're selling it to the public market when they need cash and then they're basically and then all these other l2s have raised uh billions of dollars at this point to build out L2 infrastructure but also a lot of that infrastructure and a lot of that um that uh r d that they're doing can be applied to L1 as well so that's why I think that

non-enshrined Roll-Ups are are very important and and very cool and actually have more Pros than in shine Roll-Ups do and why I continue to believe uh in a I guess like multi L2 multi-roll-up future with an enshrined ZK VM eventually being implemented to complement all of those different l2s anyway uh congrats again to Tycho on the fundraise very proud to be an investor here and you can check out the full details when uh in the YouTube description and below all right finally here we have an announcement from Xerox splits which I should disclose I'm an investor in these guys as well uh they announced a new product called swappa now what swapper is is a contract that allows you to get paid in the currency of your choice no matter what you're sent so if you are

sent a token such as uni or eth or ldo or ens or die it goes through the swapper contract and then and gets uh spat out as usdc as you can see from this illustration here now why this is really cool is because essentially I've been talking about the I guess abstraction of things a lot on the refuel particularly when it comes to things like fees so on on out on the L2 l2s they uh most of them uh use eth or pretty much all of them use eighth for fees but the thing is is that they can actually use uh any token that they want if they had something like a swap a contract for example where essentially what you would do is you would allow the user to pay using usdc then in the

background that usdc would get all automatically traded for eighth and then that would be uh used to pay the transaction fees in ethereum L1 in order to post data and proofs and then ultimately that still gets burned so the user gets to pay in you know usdc or whatever other token that you would like to support but then uh It ultimately gets paid in eighth so where something like swapper comes in is it's obviously not going to do with gas fees but it's got to do with payments where if a user in their ethereum wall obviously they're going to to have ether a lot of the time but say they have like uni and they don't want to uh they don't want to swap that for usdc to incur a taxable event just to send usdc to someone well they can actually just send usdc and then it

will automatically get swapped in this contract for uh sorry send the uni it automatically gets swapped in this contract for usdc now this is not investment advice I don't know how the tax office would actually approach this if you dispose of this and you pay someone with it different countries around the world have their own rules on this but it could be a tax advantage here but it is also just like an advantage of gas so you don't have to spend gas to trade the asset you can just uh send it and it automatically gets swapped in this in this contract um and then uh you know it goes to the user as as usdc here or is really I think any asset that's that's supported so very cool to see this new product from Xerox uh splits and as I said there's a blog post here which you can

check out it'll be linked in the YouTube description below uh that details all this and explains it in in in further detail than I can as well as a Twitter thread and there's also a a new and an interface for this at swappa dot new and you can go there and it will link you to this URL here so you select you can actually deploy a contract through this you can select the output token so let's select usdc beneficiary so the swap tokens will be sent to this address you can put in your address here who's the owner obviously you want to set yourself as the owner and what Oracle are you using as well and there's a bunch of advanced settings too and then you can connect your wallet and and deploy this contract so very cool this is open uh and for everyone to use right now as I

said I'll link this in the YouTube description for you to check out but I think on that note that's going to be it for today's episode 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 the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone