Arbitrum AnyTrust chains, zkLend revealed and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #326 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony asano and today's the second of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i put out a tweet today where i said if you don't want centralized exchanges to freeze your assets there is one simple solution withdraw your assets to your own wallet preferably a hardware wallet the ability to self-custody digital assets is one of the most amazing innovations of crypto take advantage of it now i put out this tweet because of all of the i guess kind of like things we've been seeing with regards to funds being frozen not just in crypto but without of it obviously there was the stuff with the canadian truckers a few weeks ago and lately there's been the stuff with the

the sanctions in in russia and stuff like that so i think that i'm not making any kind of like uh moral case here any judgments or any kind of like foreign against here but if you keep your assets in a centralized place it it opens it up to them being centralized to them being frozen sorry and on top of that if you use centralized assets like a centralized stable coin such as usdc or usdt you are opened up to them being frozen as well so in that kind of like instance it's not well you know i mean if you have usdc on a centralized exchange and you withdraw it to your own wallet it may just be marginally better but it's not really that much better i mean you're still holding an asset that can be frozen by a circle at any time but they

want to freeze it so i guess like there's risk there now the assets that i'm talking about here are the true kind of like self-custody assets such as eth uh on the ethereum network and btc on the bitcoin network and a bunch of assets on ethereum obviously tokens and stuff like that so keeping them on centralized exchanges or any kind of material amount on centralized exchanges especially if you're just holding them in cold storage and not actively training them is definitely not a great thing to do not just because of the risk of them being frozen or the risk of them kind of like being hacked or or i guess kind of like or the exchange kind of losing access to them but also the risk of uh just in in general kind of like not not the exchange itself freezing it but kind

of like you getting caught in the crosshairs of things because there are different reasons the exchange will freeze your assets uh one of them will be in response to law enforcement right if you if they suspect you of doing some something wrong they'll freeze your assets you won't be able to move them they'll basically make your kind of like account worthless until they restore access at some undefined period in the future uh secondly they'll might freeze them as part of their compliance effort so they might might say hey you know we're just doing compliance efforts we need you to provide some additional information until you do this your assets are frozen and there's a you know possibly a bunch of other reasons that they would freeze your assets there but they do have the ability to do that and uh they it's because that's technically their assets

they just give they've just given you an iou they've basically given you a promise that when you go to withdraw those assets to your own address they'll honor that withdrawal but while your assets are in decentralized exchange they own the keys to it you do not own the keys to it so your assets are as good as theirs and and not yours yes there may be some legal protections here and things like that but they are normally not great to rely on and take a lot longer to play out and could take potentially years to play out for you to get your assets back in case of a hack or in case of things being frozen or kind of like you may never get it back and obviously people who have their assets in mt gox are um kind of like very familiar with that

it's going on what seven eight years now where those assets have as far as i know not been returned yet so that's a very very long time obviously it's a good thing for people since back then because it's a majority but it's btc and btc has gone up a lot since then but these people don't know if they're getting all of it back when they're getting it back all that sort of stuff right so that's just one example there and you know as i said in the tweet like take advantage of the fact that we have this amazing thing or this amazing innovation in crypto where we can truly have self-custody over our assets because when you think about the existing financial system what assets do you have true self-custody over right really at the end of the day i guess the only thing you could argue that you have

true self-custody over is cash right but cash is kind of useless in this day and age because you can't use cash in a digitally native way if you want to use cash in the digital world you have to deposit that cash into a bank a centralized intermediary and then the bank will issue you some you know digits in your bank account that represent the cash you have in the bank and they'll be like okay well now you can use the digital payments infrastructure now you can use mastercard visa whatever whatever it is to do your digital payments that's not a digitally native payments infrastructure that is just a kind of like band-aid on an existing system that was never created or existing monetary system that was never created for the digital digital world whereas crypto was created for the digital world because it

is digitally native it does not exist as a physical thing of course you can print out a private key on a piece of paper and argue that that's physical eth but it's not right because the ether only exists in cyberspace it exists on the blockchain it exists on the internet and it is digitally native now because of that you get true custody over your eighth in your own ethereum wallet you don't have to put it in a centralized intermediary in order to turn it digital it is digital which means that everything that you can do um on you know with digital payments in in the traditional system you can now do once the integrations kind of like come online further down the adoption cycle you can now do in a completely self-custodial and decentralized way this is the key innovation of crypto this is the biggest

thing in crypto this is the biggest innovation in money in you know thousands tens of thousands of years this is what we should all be very excited about so given that kind of reality there you should really be securing your own assets i know that some people don't like to do it because they don't trust themselves and that's exactly why banks came around too right because securing a lot of cash is um is both kind of like physically cumbersome but also kind of like mentally draining because you have to worry about security but when it comes to the digital world i mean you have a hardware wallet and you can store as much crypto as you want on that hardware wallet whether it's you know a thousand dollars million dollars a billion dollars it's the same thing it's just digitally native money it's not like uh

cash where you know storing a thousand dollars of cash is easy storing a million dollars of cash is difficult still doable in your own home storing a billion dollars of cash forget about it like it's just so cumbersome to transport it to count it like in every i mean i don't have to go through the reasons right you can imagine a billion dollars worth of cash and a billion dollars worth of eth what's easier to keep track of and count and use i mean you guys know the answer right so from that perspective i think that no matter you know what amount you have in crypto if it's a material amount and by material amount i mean if it's a large percentage of your overall net worth and you're just holding it as a as kind of like a long-term hold there's no point keeping it on a centralized exchange in

my opinion you should keep it in your own hardware wallet self-custody do everything from a hardware wallet whether that be a ledger or a lattice one um and you know even just in your own kind of like wallet is better than a centralized exchange even if it's a hot wallet now i obviously don't recommend putting large tons of money into a hot wallet but it's still marginally better than a centralized exchange but of course you're going to be responsible for your own custody responsible for securing those assets securing your seed phrase securing your hardware devices but um you know in my opinion for most people uh for the majority of people like the you know 99 of people that is much better than keeping it on a centralized exchange i do realize that there are a lot of um kind of i guess like bigger players out

there who legally have to keep it on a centralized exchange and there are bigger players out there who are targeted in in kind of like um attacks to steal their crypto which is you know totally uh reasonable to kind of like secure it i guess like on a centralized service but as an individual as uh kind of like regular individual it doesn't pay to have your assets on centralized exchanges in my opinion and obviously not all centralized exchanges are created equal assets on coinbase are much safer than assets on an offshore exchange for example or assets on one of the smaller kind of like centralized exchanges um but you know we have a long list of incidents on these centralized exchanges over the years that it should kind of like get you to just store your assets yourself and not even just not even just

for security reasons but also for the fact that you can actually do it you can actually do it in a digitally native truly self self-cost custody and decentralized way uh which we've never had the ability to do so before whether whether it be kind of like crypto assets or cash or kind of like monetary assets or whether it be things like collectibles i mean you can do it with nfts uh which is which is obviously very awesome as well so i just wanted to kind of give a bit of a spiel about that for you guys but you guys know that i'm a big proponent of self-custody if you are comfortable doing so if you're not fine keep it on a centralized exchange but just realize that by doing so you open yourself up to additional risk and if that risk is uh kind of like less

risk to you than securing your own assets on your own well that's your prerogative the the beautiful thing is that you have a choice right it's not like the physical cash world where i guess the physical financial system where you can't actually um do anything with your cash in the digital world unless you put it into a centralized intermediary you don't have the choice there so so yeah i think that's one of the coolest innovations of crypto and i hope that more people take advantage of it all right so on to some core developer updates so alex stokes announced erp 4863 which is a new erp for beacon chain withdrawals called beacon chain push withdrawals and as alex describes it here this eip provides an alternative to the pool based flow that offers tight integration with the core protocol so if

you want to read the full eip uh you can do so it'll be in the youtube description uh it's kind of like not not a long read there's a bunch of kind of like discussions going back and forth about it too already between a bunch of the core devs and core researchers which is really cool to see but uh yeah in layman's terms this is potentially the eip that will go into the shanghai update which will enable withdrawals of uh staked eath and of with rewards kind of like in the eighth kind of like uh beacon chain as well so obviously this needs to be done but as i've said before it's probably gonna happen about six months after the merge so we may see it later this year um if not early next year and as i've said before there is not going to be a mass

withdrawal of eth guys there is a validator queue which means there is a limit to how much it can be withdrawn each day uh and as i've said before i believe that limit to be around thirty thousand eighth um roughly each day which is a far cry from the ten million plus eight that is staked it's not like there's going to be eight million eighth withdrawn all at once and just dumped on market that's not how this stuff works guys and the funny thing is there's a kind of like a few million eighth there that exists as our ether and st and a bunch of other liquid staking as well that can be solved at kind of like any time at this point so i think that a lot of people who are staking their eighth plan to do so for a long time and plan

to just sell their rewards so from that perspective you know i just anyone who kind of goes on about these mass unlocks and things like that they just don't know what they're talking about right um but anyway off track there a little bit definitely go check out this eip it link in the youtube description below all right so trent van napps has another uh tweet to add to his thread that i spoke about yesterday to add to his kind of like tweets that he's talking about with regards to the merge so this is number five where he says to any stakers you should start running a local execution layer client ahead of the merge because in the future outsourcing this to third party providers will open up stake is to slashing risk under proof of custody under the proof of custody game and you can read this blog post

from a dan crad about this yard about this what what this means for you so in layman's terms if you are a solo staker and right now you're running an ethereum 2 or a consensus layout client and beacon node whether that be prism lighthouse nimbus tekku whatever it is um and then you're outsourcing the ethereum one node or the execution layer node to a third party such as infuria or alchemy or mycrypto or anything like that um doing this in the future opens you up to this slashing risk so you should be running your own local execution layout eth1 client full node whether that be geth nevermind and a bunch of the other ones out there i i run kind of like uh nevermind and geth i like to run both of them so i'm

running my own client there it does require you to have a bit more extra solid state drive space on your staking box if you're a solo staker but it shouldn't be too much i mean as i said before solid state drives are relatively cheap these days uh especially compared to hard drives and uh you know if you want to future proof yourself you should probably even just get like a couple of solid state drives have one running your beacon node and your validator one being home to your execution layer i guess node or eth1 node and you're all well and good and yeah a couple of two terabyte drives not very expensive these days in the ssd realm uh and then you're kind of like set for i guess i would say many years at that point right i don't imagine you needing much more than that and if you're a solo

staker the rewards that you'd be getting would be more than enough to cover the cost of that too and it's just the cost of doing business at the end of the day it's not like you have an ongoing cost of electricity and and uh and hardware and having to upgrade the hardware all the time this hardware can be future proof for for quite a while so so yeah now i'm just a really great tweet from from trent here and the blog post that he links to will of course be linked in the youtube description all right so a huge announcement out of arbitram over the last 24 hours it seems to have flown under the radar a bit so arbitrary have announced something called any trust change which is a chains which is an arbitrary mode for ultra low cost transactions with strong security guarantees any trust chains

will operate alongside arbitrary one so i guess the uh explain like on five is that any trust chains is arbitrary's answer to volidium zk porter and even things like uh avac subnets and stuff like that so the reason i say this and i think it's actually more secure than the avac subnets but the reason i say this is because what volidium and zk porter do is that they take the data off chain off the ethereum main chain and kind of like put it into a kind of committee and that committee is responsible for securing the data and i've talked about this before right guys where you have off chain data on chain transaction proofs and you have much better security than a traditional side chain or something like an avac subnets um but you don't have

kind of like the full security of a of a roller but you still have um you know really really great security but the trade uh the benefit is that you get much cheaper transactions so um in this blog post arbitrary details that these kind of like things these any trust chains are really good for lower value stuff just like how evolytium is used for immutable x for lower value stuff like nfts and just like how um you know zk port is going to come around from zk sync to do this as well this is albert rims kind of like answer to that and the funny thing is is that any trust chains where albert trims original construction in 2018 so it's kind of like come come full circle here which is which is really really cool to see but yeah this was a huge announcement i mean i'd always wondered

kind of like what uh i guess optimistic rollout teams were going to do to to answer the the things like the lydiums and zk porters and and just off chain data in general uh and it seems that the offshane labs has an answer to this with any trust chains now i wonder if optimism is going to do something similar maybe they will maybe they won't but it's really really great to see that option labs is pushing this kind of like world where they envision you know arbitrary one as their main optimistic roll-up that's fully secured by ethereum that they're kind of like putting all their resources behind as a centralized you know team but also giving the option for people to launch their own arbitram uh chains like arbitrary one but also launch something like an any trust chain which is a cheaper and faster kind of

like l2 chain with minimal trust assumptions but just not as secure as as a roll up so very very cool to see this you can go read this blog post to get a full breakdown of what this kind of like all is and you know i should mention there's also a fallback to to roll up mode as well so this is like um what um i guess uh starkware wants to do with their volitium they want to turn it into ah man i can't remember the name of it right now but i want to turn it into this as well where you can fall back to roll up mode two where you can still post that data to the ethereum l1 chain um and withdrawals will have the the usual delay period just like the standard the standard roll up so very cool to see this you know i think this

is where the tokens start making a lot of sense because you want some way to secure the committee you want to give the community the incentive to keep kind of like processing transactions to keep themselves online to keep the data available and what better way to do that than having a token like you can pay them out token rewards you can have it so that they have to stake the token in order to get those rewards um and you're just kind of like adding crypto economics into the mix here so i think you know as i said before like all these alters are going to have tokens but i was curious how how some of them would actually kind of integrate them with their existing systems or you know integrating with their ecosystem and i can see this happening you know and and and maybe it's a thing where uh these

any trust chains decide to be their own kind of like thing where they're like okay well i don't want to use the arbitrary token i want to use my own token and that's totally possible too but we're gonna have to see how that all plays out uh as well there but very very cool to see this new construction from amber trim just another option for people to play around with just another thing on the ethereum scalability belt right there's so much going on in theory scalability right now guys absolutely insane like i i've lost track of it at this point like as i said the other day like just looking at what's happening on stock net alone um as an ecosystem is is very cool and that's still very early but then looking at arbitrary and optimism polygon and all this other stuff and stuff and um dk sync good luck

keeping up with it anymore guys that's all i can say um you're gonna need maybe like 20 refuels a day just to keep up with it and unfortunately i can't talk for 10 hours a day guys i'm sorry but uh yeah you'll uh i think this is good i think this is just the way things are going to be from now on i think the coolest and the things that come out will be the biggest things and we'll probably hear about it but it's going to be like trying to keep up with the internet you know at this stage trying to keep up with l2 stuff but definitely go check out the blog post i'll link it in the youtube description all right so a new protocol as i was just saying i finding it difficult to keep up with everything but this is one

that came across my radar called zklen which is a money market protocol that is going to be native to stock net combining zk roll up scalability superior transaction p speed and cost savings with ethereum's security so um they're coming out of stealth uh over the last 24 hours and there's a blog post here that you can kind of like uh read all about kind of what that what they're doing uh they also have a tldr where they're saying they're tearing down the old guard uh tearing down the issues of d5 market makers into zk la land sneak peek into artemis and apollo which i'm assuming kind of like their version names for their um their kind of protocol here so what they mean by tearing down the old guard is that they've got a they've got four key things that they're kind kind of trying to target here so privacy so

borrowers no longer need to disclose their identity when borrowing because loans are over collateralized and held in smart contracts custody both sides hold their own assets fairness everyone is entitled to the same pools and rates that they wish to participate in and transparency information around each pool supply demand and interest is clearly stated upfront and enforced on chain i think a few of these things are only possible especially privacy is really only possible because it's being built on uh the layer two stark net instead of layer one ethereum so again guys this is one of those things that i talked about that uh when i said that there are a lot of things that can only be done on layer twos instead of and not on layer one ethereum as well but highly recommend giving this full blog post a read to check out what's kind of like going on

here and what they're kind of like building um but yeah as i said this is going to be on starknet this is really really cool i mean stocknet having a money market coming so early to the ecosystem is obviously very great as i said before there are a few key apps that each ecosystem needs to have obviously one of them or the top one being an amm or just like a decentralized exchange i would argue the second one being a money market because those two things together enable all the other apps to come and kind of like exist on the chain and actually get usage and be able to compose with each other and interoperate with each other um because they're like the core primitives of uh of d5 at the end of the day so very cool to see this very cool to see that it's just not another kind

of like fork of like avail or a fork of compound or frog or anything else it's something new something native to starknet not being deployed on l1 something to get excited about looking forward to learning more about zk lind as time progresses so hayden adams from unisop put out a tweet today saying that you can now convert any token to eth and directly donate to ukraine in a single transaction on donate.unisop.org this is really cool like no matter your views on this whole thing or whether you think it's right to donate to you know the ukraine war effort or not i think what this shows is just how quickly capital can before uh can can uh can can um be formed el capita capital

can be um kind of pulled together in crypto but also how we can do one click things like convert the eighth um sorry convert any of your existing tokens into each and donate it to ukraine in a single transaction to do something like this with the traditional system let me kind of like spell it out to you and how slow it would be if you wanted to sell one of your stocks or shares for example for an asset to donate say say for like a dollars to donate to one of these efforts you would have to liquidate the stock and there may be a kind of like time limit on being able to sell that there's no amms to sell it into right you can sell it into the open market but depending on the liquidity depending on

what stock it is but all that sort of stuff i mean it's similar in crypto but with amms it kind of like levels it up but you have to sell it then you have to get that money right and then there's a risk that you're probably going to get that money put on hold or something because they're going to like depending on who you're with they're not going to credit you the money straight away you're gonna have to withdraw it out of your kind of brokerage account into your normal bank account that might take 24 hours blah blah right so you're already at kind of like all this friction just to do this um and then you want to donate it to ukraine well you're maybe your bank blocks you from doing that maybe your bank blocks these kind of things from going on yeah

obviously ukraine's not the one that's sanctioned russia is but maybe your bank's like well no we don't want you doing this banks can do that right that's what we that's why we hate banks rights they can do that now compare it to what we have here with unispot you have your digitally native uh tokens on ethereum you convert it to eth and you send the money to the ukraine government's ethereum address all in one transaction takes two seconds guys i mean it takes an ethereum at most it's gonna take one ethereum block to do this maybe if you've got multiple tokens you want to do it's going to take a bit obviously the fees are going to be quite a little bit higher because this is being done on on layer one but ignoring the fees for a second here i'm just talking about the speed of of what you

can do within five minutes not even if you've got lots like 10 15 different tokens you want to convert you can convert them all into eighth and each transaction will just kind of like go into the uk government all in kind of like one one thing there done all from the comfort of your your kind of like own home or from the comfort of doing it in a self-custodial way as well not having to rely on centralized institutions zero chance of your assets being uh kind of like frozen or near zero chance of your assets being frozen in your own ethereum wallet obviously there's always the slight chance that the ethereum never becomes a you know under attack but you know that's just kind of like getting too into the weeds there this is what crypto kind of like enables and what's so powerful about it on top

of the self-custody stuff that i was talking about earlier it's so powerful that we can uh kind of like uh do capital formation like this in an incredibly quick way in a global way too this isn't just across state lines or in the same kind of like in in the same country so to speak this is all over the world this is someone in australia for example because australia is kind of far away from everything being able to use a protocol that was developed by a us-based team that exists on ethereum which is a global network and send these assets to ukraine which is not close to to australia right like it's in obviously in in europe um definitely not close to

australia and i can do this all from the comfort of my own study all in 10 minutes or less all without having to worry to kind of like interact with any centralized institutions and i get to make my own decisions with my own money this is absolutely awesome as i said one of the key innovations on top of what i was talking about earlier um but yeah but yeah i just wanted to kind of like highlight that for you guys and and definitely go use it if you want to donate to ukraine maybe make maybe put some of those coins that are burning a hole in your wallet to use because in most countries donations are also a tax write-off so you may be able to kind of like swing something there with a lot of those coins that are just burning a hole in your wallet because they're down so

much maybe you want to write them off as a as a loss and help a good cause while you're doing it you can do that too right uh and another thing got to do with uni swap was a tweet from from bastar today who said the unisop effect unisop launched on polygon on the 21st of december 2021 it only took 21 days to become the first decks by trading volume on polygon this is what i've talked about before about unisop's brand and kind of like trust and just overall awareness being so so much bigger than everything else in crypto in the amm space nothing comes close one inch balancer clipper quick stop sushi swap they're known to an extent i mean one inch is obviously very popular

balancer sushi swap quick stop a bit less popular in terms of like overall crypto and clipper i mean obviously you can see from the volume shake here are not very popular but in terms of like crypto as a whole and the mind share as a whole but what people have heard of before pretty much everyone in crypto that has ever used anything on chain has probably heard of of unisop right all one of its derivatives too like pancake swap a lot of people use that uh i guess like back in the day during the mania uh and that's why i've said before that like you know uni swaps dominance is not going away anytime soon doesn't matter if other protocols are better in some way or offer something better or whatever else their dominance is here to stay for a lot of different reasons but

awareness and trust and security is a big one people you know you should be using aggregators because it's cheaper but they don't because they just trust the you know the units up more they're more aware of unisop they just kind of like uh you know it's better to go through unisop than it is to go through an aggregator for them so yeah i just wanted to kind of like highlight this that unisop really is just still absolutely kicking ass in the in the centralized exchange space all right so i just wanted to quickly highlight a thread from uh stone cold pat here who basically starts this thread off by saying eip1559 is one of the most important upgrades ever it guarantees a security budget for block producers no instability at the tip it makes gas prices predictable for the user and it allows the network to

temporarily handle burst traffic and not always run at max capacity now i've talked about this in the past many many many times before so i'm not going to hop on about this now but uh you know pat goes into a lot more detail in his thread here about each of these points so i definitely highly recommend giving it a read and i like threads like this because there was a large cohort of people for quite a while that were kind of like fighting 1559 after it went live saying that it increased gas cost that it's bad for the network blah blah and in reality what increased gas cost was the nft mania i mean we've seen gas going to the 20s the 20 grays lately and that's because chain activity is down a lot right um as opposed to kind of like what it was previously so

i think reading this thread from pack gives a lot of great insights into that and i mean at this point in time it's it's objective that one five five nine uh kind of like was good for the network and achieved all of its goals and even worked to lower gas fees by about seven or eight percent across the board by making the gas fees more kind of like stable and and making it so people didn't have to overpay as well so very very cool to see that i'll link this in the youtube description for you to give the thread a read all right finally here we have tally cash with an update that you can now swap tokens inside your your tally wallet so all fees go straight to the community multisig and tally swaps are almost half the cost of metamask so this is obviously similar to metamask swaps

that they have uh you know inside the metamask wallet but now if you're using the tally wallet you can just go to the swap interface and do the same thing as metamask i just wanted to hire this for you guys out there that are using tele this is just another alternative to metamask which i'm sure maybe some of you are using maybe you know i'm not it's not very popular compared to metamask yet because it's relatively new but it's cool that there's already a swap feature in there and as it says it's cheaper than menomaskia but uh yeah just wanted to highlight that for you guys any of you guys using it and definitely go give talia a try if you haven't yet uh i've tried it on on on chrome before but i just you know i'm still using metamask obviously because i trust metamask more uh and and kind of

like it kind of like acts weird sometimes with other wallets if you have both both installed and stuff like that so i had to remove tally but uh but yeah definitely cool to see this uh and go check it out if you haven't yet but i think on that note i'm gonna end it there for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone