Arbitrum One's new validators, zkSync raises $200m - The Daily Gwei Refuel #489 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily gray review where he kept the latest news in ethereum maker system I'm your host and is asano in today's the 17th of November 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so the contagion continues from the FTX Fallout today with uh The Lending arm of Genesis trading uh halting customer withdrawals and also Gemini's earned program that was run through Genesis was uh was paused and withdrawals were paused there which caused a bit of a Ruckus over the last 24 hours you know I've been thinking about this kind of I guess topic of contagion and where it all started and it seems to have all pretty much started with the terror collapse right that wiped out three hours Capital which was doing all their funky borrowing which then later on uh you know which then had its own

contagion wiped out a bunch of people there and then a few months later we have the FTX Fallout and then from there there's even more contagion so I mean it's always going to happen like this especially in the C5 context because a lot of the time uh pretty much everything's opaque so we don't actually know the extent of the contagion and can take weeks or even months to play out and we're seeing the result of that right with Genesis trading here doing this now for those of you who don't know who Genesis trading is they are one of the biggest if not the biggest lending desks in the ecosystem uh here and they are backed by a digital currency Group which also owns um coindesk and has invested in a bunch of different things they're a very big company within crypto so this is not a a small kind of

announcement here and there was also concerns around Gemini themselves being insolvent and not be able to meet customer deposits or anything like that I I haven't seen anything about that I don't think that's true at all uh but I did put a tweet out saying you know Gemini probably picked the single worst time in crypto history to have an outage because they actually did have an AWS related outage over uh overnight or overnight my time um after this news came out so as I said it's like the worst time ever to have an outage but from what I can tell there are no issues with with Gemini in terms of solvency uh but we'll see like I mean I don't even think Genesis is insolvent either I think they just have like this whole uh from the contagion from FTX that they that they're going to need to

plug somehow I reckon that they could raise money to plug that hole because uh Genesis as a business is quite profitable and it's quite big and it's quite legitimate as a business but uh I I don't like honestly I don't know for sure what's going to happen here I don't know if they if there are if the hole will be too big to plug if they will be insolvent I I'm not sure like I don't as I said like C5 is very opaque there's really no way for us to know until things come out later you can connect the dots as much as you want right but at the end of the day we don't know for sure until we actually have something uh I guess like announced by these companies themselves right and even then they can lie uh that's what I mean that's another thing what I love about

D5 is I don't have to trust anyone I can just go check the chain and then obviously I can see where the assets are and where they've been and everyone can do analysis on it uh that's I guess Like A major benefit I think is still undersold within crypto but yeah this is the latest contagion that I just thought was worth mentioning uh other than that I think I haven't talked about the FTX drama in a couple of days but other than that it seems SPF continues to tweet there was some photo of him in the Bahamas in a shopping center or in a grocery store or something like that uh wearing an FTX shirt of the irony right there was a few articles uh that came out with uh with with interviews that were done with him one of them actually showed a bunch of DMS where he basically

admits that the whole his whole image was a fast which I think if you were paying attention you would have known that from basically day one like I don't think that you know obviously the effective altruism thing was a complete fast and he never believed in that it was always just a way to cover up his profit maximalism and then he was he even admitted in those DMS that he thought regulations were so even the regulatory stuff that he was doing was a some kind of front right or some something uh which is which is just funny there but FTX also came out or the new CEO of FTX also came out and said the SPF has nothing to do with FTX anymore he's not part of it at all he's been completely kind of gotten rid of so doesn't matter what he's tweeting about

it make it means nothing they're in bankruptcy proceedings it's going to take a while to play out and even SPF apparently said that he regrets filing for bankruptcy because he thinks he could have repaired it on his own I don't think that he could have done that that's just his ego talking uh but yeah that's the latest on that and there's a bunch of other things around that there's obviously the conspiracies flying around too I did put out a tweet I think a couple days ago where I basically said that I don't think it's a conspiracy to uh to say that um that SBF had like deep political connections right especially to the Democrats who he donated to and that could spare him jail time because he still hasn't been arrested and he's flaunting it by going into grocery stores so honestly like I there's longer

this this goes on the the less and less faith I have that he's going to be arrested and going to actually suffer consequences here but I really hope he does obviously but we'll have to see how that uh plays out but yeah I don't want to spend too much time on that because I think it's getting stale at this point going to move on to the next update which is a tweet from superfizz who said as of today rocket all accounts for 2.01 of the validators on the network while providing fifteen point seven percent of the nodes on the network 1718 people and entities recognize the value in a trustless and decentralized stacking platform it's great and we can still do much better I actually really like this uh this comparison that superfuse has done here because I did mention I think yesterday or the day before that rocket

pool is still around two percent of validators and I'd love to see that grow more um and uh you know grow more because it's it's obviously the centralized staking pool and not one of those centralized services but the fact that the rocker pool uh I guess ecosystem is providing 15.7 of the full nodes on the network is very cool it means they're batting above their average in terms of validators on the network and full nodes running it um basically because to spin up rocket pool node you need that I guess rocketpool um validators uh and and mini pools you actually need to run a a node right a full node which is very very cool so you can see that the charts here in the pool distribution uh where basically it's got like a nice little pie chart of the same stuff that showed

on rate are shown on raider.network of validators uh part of rocketpool here and then also the uh the share of the nodes on the network now the the colors are kind of mixed up here the rock the blue should be red and the red should be blue but still it's a good way to illustrate it here and you know I I think when looking at these sorts of things and looking at networks that are batting above their average I really do think we should talk about it more and talk about platforms like like rocketpool more because I mean I've spoken about it a lot in the past but I mean is there really any other uh I guess um staking service provider that has put in as much effort as rockable has uh over the years I don't think so as I've said before rocketball's been

around for a very long time they've put in so much effort and they've stuck true to their mission of making a truly decentralized staking pool whereas other ones while they serve a purpose they've taken shortcuts especially the centralized exchanges they don't give a right they just basically say well speak with us we'll take our cut and you don't have to worry about anything we're as rockapool obviously took the hard path and and I think that you know there's good and bad aspects to that the good aspect is that rocketpool is actually decentralized taking pool right that's the obviously the best thing about it um but some of the bad things are well not bad but like I guess trade-offs uh is probably the better term for it is that rocketpool will naturally grow slower than the centralized entities just by nature of how uh how the network

works and also by nature of the fact that uh the centralized exchangers especially have much more reach because they already have the network effect they already have the user base but still in the face of all of that rocket pool is at two percent it is it is growing they are you know they're not slowing down on the building front from what I've seen and they keep adding more and more uh features to The Rocker pool ecosystem as well which is which is very cool um now obviously you know to address the elephant in the room of ones that have taken shortcuts you can look at look at Lido right as something that has taken a shortcut not as bad as centralized exchanges but has taken a shortcut and basically said oh we'll decentralize later look I I just the way Lido's set up I think they're going to have a very

hard time decentralizing and I don't think they're ever going to be anywhere near as decentralized as something like rockapool because of the matter of the fact is they used centralized stake providers um and they're just the way the whole thing is set up it doesn't lend itself to being truly decentralized but the trade-off for them is that they got really quick growth and they are obviously the largest share of of network stake on the beacon chain so there's that aspect to it as well but then it's not just rocker pool there are other uh uh services like stakewise and things like that out there that basically uh trying to be your stakewise V3 I should say that are trying to be decentralized and not not just just be another centralized taking provider which I think is obviously very positive and I think that competition in that

arena is very welcome but yeah just a cool little comparison here that superfuse put together that I hadn't considered it before all right so ASN here I put out a new research each research post today where he said horn is a new bell signature aggregation system for ethereum the beacon chain can use it to enable up to a million validators to vote on the same slot find new research with Francesco here and this is posted to the E3 search Forum ah this post yeah that's actually just an image of a of a horn um but you can see here that basically this it's a long technical post that you can give a read I don't think there's been any replies yet but you can go check this out I'll link in the YouTube description but why this is cool from like a Layman's point of view is that BLS

signature aggregation is what enables the beacon chain to have so many validators on it but there are limits to it and those limits Express themselves as the as kind of uh limiting the minimum stake required so the minimum stake required right now is 32 eighth that could actually be brought down uh the better uh the you know the technology powering the signature aggregation gets and Horn is one solution there so right now we have what I think like half a million or something validators on the network uh or almost half a million 400 something thousand right so there are limitations already with the BLS signature aggregation that's being used it's like we can have unlimited validators on the network or anything like that but this is a solution to basically enable the beacon

chain to have up to a million validators to vote on the same slot so slot being a block so basically vote on the same thing every 12 seconds now I don't think the current implementation can do anything near that and why this is really important is that it could enable single slot finality right and could enable single slot finality uh much quicker than we otherwise would have had it and I've described single slot finality before it's basically the the concept of taking the existing finality Gadget that we're using to finalize the beacon chain which happens every you know 13 or so minutes right to epochs and doing it per slot so instead of having to wait those 12 13 minutes you basically only need to wait 12 seconds to have finality on the beacon chain which is massive which is a

massive upgrade and it's also got a lot of positive externalities such as dealing with things like Mev and that's exactly what ASN uh kind of alludes to here he says you know getting a million validators to vote in one slot effectively moves us closer to single to a single slock finality future which improves and simplifies the ethereum consensus layer any basically uh takes a snapshot of the merge part of the um ethereum road map that vitalik has shared before and you can see all the pieces there but yeah I just figure this was worth highlighting as I said the post is quite technical but you can definitely go check it out give it a read for yourself if you want to learn more about this I'll link it in the YouTube description below alright so a big announcement out of the arbitrim ecosystem today where they said

hey I'll be naughts arbitrim Autumn has been going strong and as we Crest into November we wanted to share some progress we've made towards decentralization the tldr is that they have expanded the validator set on the arbitrim1 network so they've brought in the group of organizations securing the arbitrine one chain which now includes consensus the ethereum foundation l2beat mycelium off chain Labs obviously uh P2P validator quick nodes um I I don't recognize this logo here Institute for the future um and unit four one zero so the evaluator set is still permissioned here it's obviously still centralized but they've they've expanded it out and this has been enabled by arbitrim Nitro which

made it 90 uh uh less resource incentive to run a validator on the arbitrine one and network so this is very cool it seems like arbitrary money is beginning their Progressive decentralization uh Road or get beaten path I guess I should say and and it seems like they're going to be making more moves like this as time goes on but I think this is great it means that isn't just kind of I guess like a one validator or just a small handful of validators on the Arbitron one network we now have uh a bunch of them and they're also part of a very legit uh companies or fandate foundations or non-profits within the ecosystem which is obviously very cool and arbitrim notes Here decentralization is a long process and while we're super excited about today's update we're even

more excited to keep making progress towards further decentralization stay tuned across our channel so you can be informed on our upcoming developments you know someone replied straight away saying guess I'll read the next post and they basically did a search for the term token but we all know what decentralization means right it means that a token will come at some point and as I've mentioned in the past I think all the layer twos are going to have tokens you know pretty much everything's going to have a token um here so as they move closer towards decentralization I would assume that the token fits in some part of that a Dao fits in some part of that and then opening up the validator set to be a permissionless validator set and also permissionless sequencer set would play into that as well so we're going to keep

an eye on that but if you want to learn more about this announcement you can I'll link this uh blog post in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of tokens a stockware has announced that uh the Stark Nets erc20 token contract is deployed on ethereum until further notice by the starknet foundation stackness tokens are not offered for sale and I don't think there's been an airdrop done or anything just yet but basically the token is now live on on mainnet so they've got the token address in this blog post here I believe I saw it earlier or maybe I just a link to it um and it's called Uh Stark strk is the um token ticker uh and oh yeah that's right they're linked it here on

etherscan so you can go to the etherscan link it'll be in the blog post that I link uh but yeah we already knew starkware was coming out with the token I've talked about it on the refill before but I guess like they've done this to help with scams and their first kind of warning here is you know beware of scan scams Stark net tokens are not offered for sale it will take time for the foundation to determine the mechanism for Distributing its tokens uh tokens held by stockware shareholders employees and by independent partner software developments are locked at developers are locked for a four year period with a graduate release starting after one year so it seems like vesting has started for the I guess shareholders employees and and partners of of stockway here and I have been quite critical of stockwest token distribution before I didn't think it was very fair

uh for I guess like the community I thought it was quite centralized so I'm curious to see how their Foundation decides to distribute those tokens and how fastly they decide to distribute them to the community because I do think that during a bear Market especially the the community is more I guess sensitive to these things and they would be in a bull market we've already seen some of the newer layer ones something like Aptos get absolutely slaughtered for their really poor token distribution but also because Aptos is another pointless layer one so maybe the comparison isn't fair but I'm in no way saying that uh Stark net isn't a really cool ecosystem and that I don't respect all the work stockware has done I think that you know sometimes people will conflate the things but I think that you can be critical of a token distribution while

also being very supportive of the technology of the of the project which I definitely am but yeah it's just still not very impressed with this token distribution and I think that uh you know the layer twos maybe not even just the layer twos but like the projects in general are now going towards the I guess Dow model where they're basically saying well we're going to distribute you know such and such percent to our investors and our team which is fair enough and then they're going to distribute the vast majority of the tokens or at least 50 of them to the uh treasury as part of the Dow and then we're going to do a small initial airdrop and then the rest of the future airdrops or future token distribution is up to the Dow I don't necessarily like that model to be honest I think it is I

so I've talked I've talked about token distributions a lot on the refill so I don't I don't I don't want to rehash everything that I've said before but the reason why I don't like that model is because basically it doesn't lend itself to building a really good Dow I feel like the dowel would get filled with people who are just interested in extracting as much value from the treasury as possible and instead of getting good community members you you get mercenaries oh sorry I should should say instead of getting missionaries you get mercenaries uh and then it doesn't lead to a very good uh distribution and and a very good kind of I guess credible neutrality incredible decentralization of your network in saying that I I think that can be overcome if you have good enough technology and a good enough social layer backing up your thing but

it's a tough slog right and I don't know what the solution is to token distributions in general I feel like it's an impossible problem to solve so I think teams have basically just thrown up their their hands a lot and basically said well we'll just distribute it to the Dow so that we don't have to think about it and then they can worry about it which honestly I don't blame them for doing just because it's so hard for to do proper token distributions but at the end of the day I think that as time goes on it's probably going to be a while before we get to the point where we basically are able to get something that resembles a fair token distribution with what we've been trying for years now we're still not there I don't think but maybe we do get there one day but anyway

just wanted to uh give a little bit of thoughts there but you can check out the blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so ZK Sync has a massive announcement out today where they said they have raised 200 million dollars and have a total of 158 million dollars in Mission driven funding uh they have decided to go full open source at their next Milestone reserved two-thirds of the potential future token for the ecosystem aka the community and formed a partnership with open Zeppelin so a bunch of massive announcements here but I think the headline is obviously that massive 200 million dollar raise which was co-led by a blockchain capital and dragonfly uh and and and which I think invested in their previous and early

announced ecosystem fund uh and uh the other rounds that they've had so this is a series C round where they've raised 200 million dollars and as I said they have all I mean DK Sync has always been committed to giving away two-thirds of their tokens to the ecosystem to the community and I've always been a fan of them for that uh and they've also announced that they're going full MIT license open source for all code at their Fair onboarding Alpha Milestone which is the next milestone time and they've also uh partnered with several security uh uh companies including open Zeppelin who is conducting a full security audit of ZK sync as they prepare for their Fair onboarding Alpha and fair launch Alpha and also uh Stephen Newcombe here who is the CPO at matalabs joined bankless for an episode

titled why we're bullish ZK sync so you can go check out that one uh and then yeah a couple more uh tweets in the thread here but yeah huge announcements out of the ZK sync ecosystem today I mean if there's one ecosystem I'm really looking forward to seeing launch at CK sync because they have a lot of hype around them right now uh they've they've talked up themselves a lot they've made a lot of promises so I want to see them deliver on those promises that's for sure and I guess disclosure here you guys probably already know this I am an investor in ZK sync not this round but the the previous rounds I embed or maybe the round before that they've done a fair few rounds now on and I think it was the previous round uh no it was I believe it was the series B here then

the the Nico system around then they've done this round as well they've raised a lot money that's for sure um but yeah I'm an investor in in zkc and I should have said I'm an investor in arbitrim before as well but I think you guys know that by now uh but yeah just just I think this is huge I mean what this really says to me is that VCS and funds and people with money that doing investing are willing to invest in these layer twos uh with as much money as they've put towards layer ones historically and I think that obviously it's a much better use of capital to to give Capital to layer twos than these pointless layer ones which as time goes on the more and more of them we have the more important pointless they become as I've said before I can't believe that

people are still launching layer ones in 2022 but here we are and there's still another two to launch that I know of sui and say I think there's some others out there floating around as well but it seems that there's less and less layer ones launching and more and more layer twos launching which I think is a very big positive here and not just with them launching but also them being able to raise a ton of money I mean I reckon any layer 2 team right now even in this deep bear Market can go out and raise the same amount of money ZK Sync has raised at this point so a raise isn't everything but still I think it's a pretty big boost and a pretty big vote of confidence that uh you know big funds and big VCS are willing to put a lot of

capital behind layer twos just as they would layer ones in the past so I think that's a pretty good vote of confidence there all right so an update out of Aztec today they've deployed a new sign up flow for ZK money that vastly improves on the user experience aliases have been demoted uh Long Live aliases so you can go to the zk.money website to check all of this out but basically the sign up flow now demotes aliases making them option making them optional ensures you don't have to go through recovery if you don't do lose your Alias and exposes as Tech connects architecture to the user I did discuss Aztec yesterday because of their other integration and I did say that we need to make the onboarding process easier from a UI ux perspective obviously just generally I mean that

applies to everything in crypto but these layer twos taking it upon themselves and the infrastructure taking upon themselves to make the onboarding process more more smooth for their users especially around privacy is obviously a very welcome uh welcome kind of feature set here so I guess if you want to check out ZK money's new signup flow you can go choose uh sorry Aztecs you sign up flow here you can go to zk.money we which I can probably load up here for you guys right now on uh on the stream but I probably won't go through the on onboarding process uh basically they've got a shield now button so if you click shield now uh let's see what happens here as we go through uh yeah you can go basically sign a message from your ethereum wallet to retrieve your Aztec address let me see if I'm on sasol.eath

right now I think I am so yeah maybe I can do this just quickly uh connect wallet uh here yep connect metamask you probably you guys won't see the metamask prompt on my screen but I'm just going through the the classic metamor stuff here and then signing the message sign um yeah this should give me access once that's done uh please sign okay I gotta say another message here ah there we go retrieve spending here okay this is taking longer than I thought it would let's go through the received spending key uh copy to click uh to clipboard okay um your account this data is not privacy revealing but please store it somewhere safe but accessible Next Step okay well this is basically going through the whole sign up process yes I'm not going to go through the whole thing on on

video but you can see how it looks very nice it's pretty simple just signing a few minimized transactions but you can go check this out for yourself I'm not gonna not gonna spend too much time on that I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right a big announcement out of spruce uh today say and they've they've said now commencing phase one of the bring your own data Revolution they've introduced something called SSX which is self-sovereign anything now the easiest way to install sign in with ethereum enable Dao login and more so what is SSX well SSX well basically it is the easiest way to install sign in with ethereum reducing the lines of code required by up to 60 but it's also a critical building block into the future we're building here at Spruce where users own their identity and data Beyond

streamline signing with ethereum installation SSX offers seamless login for dials to web3 dapps Via collaboration with Nosa safe the SSX dashboard for web3 devs to measure the success of their dap and more to come they were only getting started right now the only complaint I have here is that SSX is really hard to say constantly so that kind of abbreviation there is is maybe not the best one ever but very cool to see that they've made it easier for developers to integrate sign in with ethereum you guys know I'm a big fan of signing with ethereum and everything that it can offer and any way that we can make it easier for developers to integrate it is um is is the goal basically I mean the reason why signing with Facebook became so ubiquitous across the web is that it was basically very easy integrate it was only a few

lines of code from what I from what I know now if we can do that for signing with ethereum well then we should see signing with ethereum begin to I guess uh get integrated with a bunch of websites across the web especially web 2 websites oh it's all well and good for web 3 websites to integrate it which they have they pretty much do by default right um a lot of the time but web2 websites doing it is where where I think the biggest impact is going to be had because imagine going to one of the big two web two websites and seeing sign in with ethereum I think that would get a lot of free marketing a lot of good I guess I shouldn't say free but a lot of good brand awareness and marketing for ethereum uh just generally so very cool to see this update from Spruce I'll link

this in the YouTube description for you to check out alright so we have a fresh update from fire today they've announced polygon POS simulation Integrations are now live in the fire extension so you can simply interact with any dap on the polygon POS chain to see the fire simulation in action so if you've been using the fire extension lately you can basically now use it with the polygon POS chain not just ethereum mainnet so if you don't have the extension they they kind of link it in the thread here but very very cool to see to see this Live on another chain I feel like they're going to do this for every chain right all the layer twos probably all the evm compatible networks out there and I've been using fire lately through my on-chain transactions and it's just

really cool to be able to see exactly what's going on exactly what I am signing when I'm you know confirming transactions and things like that and exactly what's going to happen in the interactions there so yeah you can go check out fire uh and check out their extension I'll link in the YouTube description below but just know that you can now use it on polygon POS as well as the ethereum mainnet all right last up here we have a git pull-up announcement where they've said custom get custom get pop-ups are now live uh get powers platform can now be used as a general service for issuing pop-ups for professional achievements Beyond just software contributions on GitHub so this is a big announcement for git pop-up I believe because obviously it's all well and good for get pop-up themselves to issue these pops for these professional achievements for people but

that means it's centralized that means it's very slow because you have to go through a um a a a a a kind of like a permissioned way of issuing these things or now with custom git pops you don't need to do that you can go there permissionlessly and issue your own pull-ups for professional achievements uh and going Beyond just software contributions on GitHub as well so if that sounds like something you are interested in you can go check out the blog post on how to do this and how to get it all set up with designs and and and and and text and and basically all the other requirements that are required for these sorts of things uh but yeah very very cool announcement out of gitpal which you can check out which I'll link Link in the YouTube description uh below there now just to

round out today's episode with something I wanted to end on basically that I talked a little bit about about this at the start of the episode but you know this contagion thing that everyone keeps talking about when it comes to the Fallout of things I do want to set the the expectation here that this is going to go on for months like I did mention earlier that I said it usually takes months to play out this will definitely take months to play out like it may feel like we're at the tail end of it where okay well FTX was the last Domino to fall in the terror collapse and yeah okay Genesis was caught in there and maybe some other players were caught in it but we won't know the full extent of it for quite a while now does that mean that prices are going to go down from

where they are today does that mean that eighth is going to go down 50 or whatever it is I don't know I mean I personally don't think so but uh I don't know for sure obviously anything can happen I think the fact that prices haven't gone down more in the wake of the FTX collapse as a positive sign but who knows I mean I I think that we're probably in for a pretty a pretty long winter I don't know how long that's going to be is it going to be six months is it going to be 12 months is it going to be two years I don't know specifically but what I do know is that it doesn't feel like winter in the ethereum ecosystem I'm still able to do a refuel every single day and I could go for longer than 30 minutes I just

stopped myself because I like to keep it consistent but I could easily go for longer than 30 minutes because there's so much happening so much to talk about so if you are focusing on the ethereum ecosystem if you are in it for the technology then this crypto winter shouldn't really be bothering you at all and you should look at it as an opportunity as well to grow personally to possibly grow your stash of eth or other assets that you're interested in but as I said the contagion stuff will take months to play out potentially years to fully play out for us to fully assess the damage and on top of that we don't know obviously what the prices are going to do but don't be surprised if they stagnate for quite a while just because obviously people have lost interest yeah the normal people have

lost interest in the crypto markets maybe they're still around using using some of the apps especially in nfts but definitely when it comes to prices the reason we're stagnant is because the demand is basically zero right it has been for a little while now but I don't know what's going maybe in the New Year people feel a sense of new new sense of bullishness and we get bullish again and the price goes up I don't know obviously I personally am just continuing to stack eth like I always do but I just thought it was worth talking about that a little bit because I've seen a bunch of people talking about it in the Discord channel so many discussions everywhere that I've had privately with friends and and and in group chats that I'm in and I really do think that it's worth just taking a

step back and realizing if the ethereum ecosystem is not in a winter it's just you know plowing ahead full steam ahead but the prices obviously are and there is always a Detachment between fundamentals and the market as we all know but on that note I'm going to end up there so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a bit a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone