Arbitrum reduces fees, Web2 brain drain and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #301 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel worry capped the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony susana and today's the 26th of january 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so a major announcement actually uh got to do with polygon today so ryan wyatt who uh used to work at youtube actually announced today that he's going to be the new ceo of polygon studios which is polygons kind of nft metaverse focused area of their ecosystem there absolutely massive news right guys i mean this is the web 2 brain drain in full effect right lots of web 2 people coming over to web 3 for the i guess like enhanced opportunity but also for uh to work within a kind of more decentralized space as we all know

youtube is a you know extremely centralized video streaming platform doesn't try to be decentralized has never tried to do that and it provides a lot of value but there are issues with it right we've seen kind of like censorship issues before we've seen a lot of kind of um uh stuff happen around i guess like d platforming uh and also um uh what is it what is it copyright issues as well which are pretty crappy and there is a reason why it is the way it is but there are a lot of kind of things that can be done better in a you know decentralized way if we do eventually get a decentralized youtuber and i get the irony of that considering that you're probably watching this on youtube i use youtube we all do we'll we'll use it we will watch it it's all good but i think

it's really cool that um heavy hitters from youtube making their move into the web3 ecosystem and especially going into uh you know things like nft and metaverse stuff and that's what that's exactly what ryan is doing here by becoming the ceo of polygon studios and you know i quote twitter this today and i said you know once again polygon making all the right moves i feel like what polygons real strength seems to be and i'm saying this as a casual observer not just because i'm an i'm an advisor but you know just observing all the actions that they've taken up until this point they're really really good at landing the right talent and acquiring the right talent in any way that they see fit obviously they did a lot of that with their roll-up teams right so there's ek teams where they acquired

three zk teams and there's not many of them there's there's probably less than i don't even know probably less than 10 zk roll up teams uh probably even less than that right um in terms of like even the good teams as well and polygon has three of them right that they acquired but not only that they do a lot of great business development and marketing um and acquiring the kind of like right uh right people to kind of help lead that and now they have uh i think i believe ryan worked as kind of head of gaming at youtube or in in their kind of like gaming space so now they have him coming on board to be the ceo of polygon studios which is the nft and metaverse focused uh kind of like um uh business area of of polygon and obviously as you

guys know i i consider nfts and the metaverse to be the thing that is going to onboard the most people so this is a very smart play i believe here and a very defensive play for the future and i think ryan's going to do very well on this role i've heard nothing but good things about him so super exciting hire for polygon here i'm very very curious to see uh what ryan does how he kind of makes his mark on the polygon as a whole and how he makes his mark on the nft when a vs web 3 space of crypto so speaking of web 3 and brain drains uh david marcus which is a name that you guys might be familiar with he was the uh guy who led novi which used to be known as dm which was known as libra from from facebook uh he used to kind of

like run that uh for a while i think um he was pretty big on that and then he kind of like left and in his bio he says he's taking a brief hiatus hiatus before starting something new and exciting well today he put a tweet out saying i've never felt this connected to a community of builders like the crypto web 3-1 i'm not talking about folk folks who are in it for a quick speculative win i'm talking about people who want to rebuild the internet's infrastructure to move value and power into the hands of the people so i mean in one tweet he very uh quickly kind of like um i guess what does he do here what's the kind of like term looking for he gives the value prop like very succinctly in just in this one tweet of what we're trying to do with

web3 and it's really funny that he's coming from basically you know i mean he's coming from facebook right the most centralized kind of kind of um company you can think of right an internet company you can think of and he's coming from building a uh well attempting to build a very centralized crypto payment rail in in nove libro dm whatever it's called and there's actually been an announcement today that i believe uh dm or one of the whatever you know one of these things are kind of like split splitting up and selling off their assets which means it's kind of like being shut down apparently due to regulatory pressure which pretty much most people kind of uh predicted they said you know regulations are going to prevent facebook from doing this i i don't i remember if i brought this up but it was something that i kind

of like was thinking about because when you look at at facebook right like and look at all the regulators and how they treat facebook they absolutely hate it so there was no way they were going to let facebook essentially create their own kind of like their own money or their own payments network and and and especially not using crypto so no surprise there but i thought this was really surprising from from from david marcus because as i said he has in his bio that he's going to be starting something new and exciting soon so i'm very curious to see where he lands here does he start a web 3 company i mean it seems pretty obvious to me that that's what he's doing because he he says he's never felt this connected to a computer community of builders like the web 3 um sorry the crypto web 3 one i'm

not sure how old david is or how long he's you know what what other things he's done besides oh my internet's gone off again sorry guys but yeah i'm not sure what other things he's done uh besides kind of like um the facebook dm i mean he's got paypal and he's uh in his kind of bio here and he says he's built startups um but you know i just going off his profile picture he looks to be maybe in his 40s maybe he's younger than that i don't know but i like my internet's office i can't even check but my point is is that if he's saying this after having like potentially like a 20-plus year career already having worked in in tech and having worked startups and things like that that is a huge signal to me like absolutely massive signal to me and i do believe

that whatever he announces that he's doing next is probably going to be uh you know crypto web 3 related so i'm super excited to see how that kind of like plays out there and you may be wondering why i'm talking about kind of like david and why i'm focusing my attention on him but it's not really about him what it's about is people like david people like ryan that i just spoke about moving from web 2 to web 3 these are executives these are high ranking people these are people that are kind of like have have big followings are well known within their respective industries and they're making the leap that is a huge vote of confidence for crypto it is a huge boost to its um its kind of legitimacy and it also sends out an absolutely massive signal to the rest of the web 2 world saying hey we think this

is serious you should actually take a deeper look at this don't read the headlines don't read the don't read the bad takes on nfts just come and look at what's happening in this ecosystem and i think once people do that they finally realize that hey okay well maybe there's something to this crypto web three thing maybe all these headlines are just like really shitty maybe i should dive deeper in here maybe there is actual real value being created and as we all know there is but i think it takes you know people that other people trust to listen to them before they actually kind of like get it or before it clicks for them so super exciting to see more i guess of this talent drain from web 2 into web 3.

so an absolutely massive announcement out of arbitram today so this came out of kind of nowhere uh but but today hunter from uh from the off chain labs team who built arbitram is a community guy there uh basically put out an update saying we just pushed an update that lowers transaction fees on arbitrary this update makes arbitrary one the most consistently cheap generalized l2 now just imagine when nitro is implemented so this isn't even their nitro upgrade guys this is just another optimization that they found to reduce fees and obviously i've been talking about optimism optimizations lately and now arbitrage come back in the game because they probably got a bit jealous right they're probably like hey optimism keeps saying that they're cheaper than us you know you know what screw you guys we're gonna make ourselves cheaper than you i love this i love these kind of like uh

roll-up wars that are going on right now and i wrote about that in the newsletter today if you want to check that out but essentially you can see here that arbitrary one to transfer eighth uh at time of screenshot was a dollar 88 for optimism it was 2.56 for boba it was 2.91 now obviously it's cheaper on the specialized networks like loot brings ak single polygon hermes but they aren't generalized l2 networks so it's kind of like comparing apples to oranges there uh and you know these costs are still going to keep coming down guys remember i said to you that i think we're going to get a swap not just to transfer eight but a swap to under one dollar very soon on these optimistic walls before any of the l1 upgrades go in i think we're trending there like you know if nitro

reduces fees by only fifty percent we've also we've already got sub one dollar eight transfers at i believe 80 to 100 way on optimistic rollers which people said were obsolete and they weren't cheap enough and and zk's going to kill them and as i've said to you guys before i don't believe that's the case i believe optimistic robs are going to have a very very bright future at least for the for the you know for the short to medium term and maybe one day zk stuff gets so mature that that you know it doesn't make sense to do optimistic roll up stuff but i don't think that day is coming for for a long time as i mentioned before um but without getting too off track there i think what i really love about this is that our betroom just kind of like you know i don't know if they had this

in their in their back pocket but they it kind of seems that when you when you really do kind of like look for optimizations you can find them now they've obviously been working really hard on nitro and i know this having talked to some people from from there that they've just been kind of like working super hard on nitro trying to you know get obviously get costs down trying to make the network more stable it's a mat it's a massive upgrade for all intents and purposes but they've had time to go in and basically say okay well you know what how can we get our fees even cheaper before we do nitro let's get a quick win in there and that's what they seem to have done here there isn't uh an explanation about how they did this uh maybe there will be a blog post coming

they're pretty good at putting up blog posts but this is literally just a screenshot of l2 fees dot info one of the websites from david mihaly here um from hunter so really cool to see this you know i'm sure optimism's probably gonna hit back and be like hey we just reduced fees again guys and now we're the cheapest one but i mean we all win if they keep doing this like i want this to keep happening i want them to keep going a wall with each other even if every optimization that they do after a little while only results in like a five cent transaction fee saving i don't care like even if it's only like a five percent fee setting i don't care i want more of that i want every single optimization these guys can squeeze out of these networks and i want them in

place and i think the best way for that to happen is if these kind of like roll-ups go to go to war with each other and not a war where it's kind of like violent and people kind of like lose but a healthy kind of war where they're kind of basically battling it out for the for the number one spot because being the number one layer two network is an absolutely a massive uh uh uh massive deal right because not only from a valuation perspective for the network once they do tokens but also from a kind of like social perspective being the number one is is huge i mean obviously ethereum being the number one smart contract blockchain is is massive everyone knows ethereum uh you know everyone knows vitalik the creative ethereum and people people will know the the um the the top winning l2 teams

they'll know the networks and i think those builders will obviously get a lot of um a lot of satisfaction out of that but uh anyway uh great to see this i'm sure you know any of you kind of uh you guys playing on arbitrary lately have experienced the cheaper fees over the last uh i guess like 24 hours i certainly have playing around on arbitrary so very very uh awesome to see this so synthetics announced today that they're putting incentives on their optimism with snx uh kind of uh a pool as part of this this synthetic kind of ecosystem here so 50 000 snx will be distributed for one month to where to wait with snx lps and you can check out the guide for uh a short tutorial here obviously i can't open it because

maintenance off yeah um but essentially this as i've said to you guys before there's two ways that there's going to be kind of like liquidity incentives on l2 it's going to be the l2 native tokens and the native networks doing this but they're not doing it right now in any big way and then there's going to be the apps and the apps are going to bring more liquidity with them they're going to bring more kind of um you know users with them because people are going to be like oh well he's money-making opportunity because that's what it really is at the end of the day when you look at all these things and and the chains that kind of like get the most adoption whether they be l1 l2s or sidechains it's all about the incentives at the end of the day of course it's

about the apps for like a more sustainable ecosystem but it's really about the incentives uh to kind of like bootstrap that and it can't just be up to these l2 teams to issue their own kind of like native token and then to do all the do all the kind of like um liquidity subsidization or liquidity rewards um and also because it's gonna be hard for them to play favorites between apps and things like that so the apps can obviously do it with their own token and that's exactly what synthetics is doing here this is exactly what a bunch of others are doing i know lyra is doing this on optimism and and there's a bunch like um the magic ecosystem or the treasure ecosystem on arbitrary has been doing a lot of stuff they launched something new today i think so yeah i mean i i'm i'm

very happy to see this i'm curious to see like how many new users and how much more liquidity goes over to optimism because of this i i'm sure there will be a fair bit i mean i think uh 50 000 snx at current prices is 250 000 i think i think snx is about five bucks right now um so that's 250 000 for with snx lps uh and that could you know that could turn into even more than that if people hold on to their snx yeah and restake it and things like that so really really cool to see this from synthetics i'll link the blog post in the youtube description for you to check out so speaking of l2 and gas savings and everything like that there's an awesome new tool here from this l2 savings account which uh you can go to the

website l2savings.org and connect your wallet to see how much in a gas fees you've saved by sending your transactions on layer twos instead of the ethereum main net this is i mean i obviously i can't load this right now but i mean i highly recommend going and checking this out this is a really really cool tool i used the foresaw.east today and i was able to see kind of like the l2 transactions that i've done on cecil.8 which isn't my main l2 wallet uh it's just my public one and i just kind of like linked it to c um but essentially i had saved i think it was like 1500 or something like that which is obviously a crazy amount of uh of money considering the amount of transactions that i did i think i've only done 30 transactions on l2 from my public address so far

so that's a pretty pretty big saving there because uh because of the fact that i've done them on l2 instead of l1 so definitely go check out this website if you want to see how much you've saved i think it's really cool as well because it basically allows people to quantify their their savings without having to basically try and guess because if you were to try and guess it would and manually do this it would take a while whereas this website handles that all all for you in and you just kind of like normally connect your wallet to it like you did to other websites that check these sorts of things like fees.wtf and things like that uh so very very cool to see this uh and i and i you know i hope to see this continue to add more features i think they only

support optimism and arbitrary right now but i'm sure they're going to be supporting more l2s into the future so sam ragsdale here from a16z's engineering group uh basically put out a new release today saying that they built uh they built uh what do they build are they built a zero knowledge proof merkle airdrop contracts that people can use so what are these in plain english well sam basically says in his tweet here people should be able to airdrop tokens to their community without asking them to dox their financial history um and they've built the tool with native ethereum zk proofs um with supporting examples and libraries for developers to check out here so essentially from my understanding what this allows you to do is do an airdrop without having to kind of like identify users

and kind of collect all that personal information of users so you're basically preserving their privacy using zero knowledge proofs which is really cool because as i've said to you guys before zero knowledge tech is not just for scalability but it's also for privacy and there's a lot of latent privacy applications that are going to be coming out and the people are going to be able to to use to to make use of this you know i've mentioned sismo before they're doing a lot of great work there but now we have this kind of like a developer uh example in libraries from from sam here which uh you can check out i'll link in the youtube description of course um but you know i i've said for for a while now that i think you know the two major things that i pay most attention to are

scalability and privacy and they seem to be coming at the same time and hand in hand obviously there's a bit of overlap there with the zero knowledge stuff but generally privacy seems to be at you know more at the forefront of people's minds lately at least in my circles because you really are i mean if you tell your address to someone and that address is one that you've used regularly that someone can just go and eat the scan crawl through your entire address they may not just eat the scan they can put put it into any tool and basically see everything you've ever done and obviously that's not fun and you know what's what's what's not even what's even worse is that if you have like a public address um and then you accidentally link one of your private addresses to it because you you mark up

and send a transaction to it then everything is linked forever and there's nothing you can do to change that so obviously this isn't something that we want uh to kind of like stay into the network i've explained before why i don't think we should have privacy at uh at the at the base protocol layer it's uh you know it kind of like leads to some perverse things like if there is a critical bug it'd be hard to kind of like find where that buggy is and things like that um especially if it's got to do with an inflation bug but all the applications building on top can enable privacy features and we can have privacy stuff at layer 2 which i'm very much looking forward to seeing more of but definitely check this out if you're a dev um a link in the description for you

so felix here from zappa put together a tweet today where he said the devs at zappos just finished indexing all the nft transfers and open c sales since block zero on ethereum mainnet that's 26 000 nft collections 25 million nft transfers and 12 billion in sales on open c so obviously they're doing this as part of their kind of like new feature that i spoke about yesterday they're kind of like newport new um profile feature with nft integration and all that sort of stuff it's very cool to see that but i mean that's crazy 26 000 collections right like i know a lot of these collections are kind of like it's funny because you have like the most well-known ones right like crypto punks and board apes and like um uh cool cats and stuff like that but then you have

like the long tail which may or may not have gotten some attention but then died off but then you have like the even longer tail which just never get any traction but still people are making them that's why there's so many collections here um obviously a lot of transfers and 25 million transfers and 12 billion dollar billion dollars in sales on open c uh i mean openstack just been killing the game right like they've been the biggest winner of the nft mania by far they've enabled us to buy and sell nfts like crazy um so really really cool to see that as well but yeah just some quick kind of like nft related stats that i wanted to highlight here as it is uh as felix says here very very bullish uh and you know i'm personally very much looking forward to their um more of that kind of like nft stuff that

they're doing and kind of like further improving their nft integration because as i said yesterday i want to be able to have my you know d5 staff my nft stuff my whatever stuff on the same dashboard and that's what i think zappa is working towards here so a new tool from etherscan came out yesterday uh basically a chat tool that you can use at chat.blockscan.com uh if you load that up you'll be able to get a chat window and then you'll be able to send a message to any ethereum address using kind of like eat the scans infrastructure and then if someone else goes and uses that infrastructure they can see your message there so it's not like you can just i mean you can you can obviously message any address you want but it's not like you're going to get a reply if you do that right there's no

guarantee there you're basically just using etherscan's built-in um kind of like chat feature here but what i really like about this is it basically gives people a way to easily contact certain addresses for for whatever reason i mean sometimes you want to contact an address to to tell them something and this is a really easy way to do it you used to i mean people used to put this in the comments under the scan because there's a comment section people would comment there and basically say hey you know blah blah but now this is a more direct way to do it uh there are some drawbacks to this though it's uh from what i understand it's not a decentralized service and it is not end-to-end encrypted either so i wouldn't be doing any sensitive stuff on here but it's still really cool and i think there are other projects tackling

this like ethmail and i think i've covered parallels inbox and there's also xmtp which is a a project that i've backed um that's trying to do uh this kind of stuff as well and i believe there's probably others that i'm just forgetting right now but they're trying to do it in a decentralized way like a truly decentralized messenger or their status as well but yeah truly decentralized messenger that uh incorporates all the stuff on ethereum layer one that we know and love like ens names and and uh pull ups and other nfts and stuff like that would be really really cool to to use but i think this is a great kind of little proof of concept here and obviously the i guess like moat for either scan here is that like it's ether scan they have a button right here that you can click and and basically chat with people

and i'm assuming that it yeah it does it tells you gives you like a little bit of a notification window there if you've got messages at your address so whenever you go to eat the scan you'll be able to see that uh on your addresses there so i thought that was really really cool but looking forward to seeing how this evolves you know will they decentralize this will they do um end-to-end encrypted chats i'm not sure or does this kind of like stay as just what it is now as a proof of concept i'll have to see how that plays out but you know there's no reason that ether scan can't just eventually become like a front end for one of these other decentralized solutions and like tap into them especially the ones that are trying to be protocols like xmtp and stuff like that but we'll have to see how that

plays out um but yeah really really cool little feature from etherscan here all right just wanted to give a quick shout out to uh my one of my recent new favorite followers pseudo theos here who's been writing a lot of great blog posts about i guess like ethereum's uh uh um architecture from sharding to uh you know the monolith versus monolithic versus modular architecture uh roll-ups layer twos all that good stuff um i think sudo theos has a potential has the potential to be the next polynomial with the amount of education that they're putting out and obviously that's high praise but i'm really loving this because paulie and i was taking a break recently i think from from doing blog posts from educating and you know well-deserved break after spending the

the better part of a year basically uh changing the narrative around ethereum scaling publicly and just basically telling everyone hey you're wrong this is how everything's going to scale um and now sudo theos is one of the other people kind of like picking up the pieces here and running with them and writing stuff about it so i'm always on the lookout to highlight people doing this how are people kind of like writing really great blog posts about ethereum and definitely go follow them as well uh you can get in cheap uh right now they've only got 4 200 followers so you can get in before they get to 50k imagine if you could buy uh kind of like shares in a person i think you can i think there's um a big cloud that was doing this and but i don't think the implementation is very

good but you can actually buy shares in a twitter persona or someone on twitter and then uh that would be worth more as that person kind of like got more attention got more followers and things like that um but maybe there's another project that i'm not thinking of right now that does it better than that but yeah definitely give them a follow and definitely read their work i think it's all published on mirror you can see it here but you can visit their profile as well i'm sure there'll be links there for you to kind of like visit too there uh but yeah i've got a few more minutes left here so on just staying on the same topic of kind of like education here and writing about uh certain uh certain things i think as i've mentioned before the fastest way to kind of like grow

yourself in this ecosystem and to get noticed by the people that you want to get noticed by the people that you know the actual kind of like um true builders in this industry is to educate and i've mentioned before you could do this through twitter threads or you could do this through blog posts you could do it through videos it doesn't really matter the medium isn't too important but what's important is writing about things that people haven't written about before the reason why point polynomial got so popular very quickly is because they started writing about things that people weren't really writing about such as the modular blockchain architecture such as zk stuff and just layer two rollups in general there were i mean there were people writing about it but not in the way that polynomial was doing and they and they also coined the term

monolithic as well model i i think they coined the term monolithic um chains at least they popularized it which uh you know work to completely change the narrative of monolithic versus modular um certhiest has been doing the same thing just focusing on less talked about topics and that's why i've been really enjoying reading their work and why i'm highlighting them now but you know if you're just going to write about defy and uh nfts and dows that there's already a lot of people writing about that so it might be a struggle for you to kind of like get attention on that work but if you start writing about things that aren't talked about as much but you think it's a big deal and you know it turns out it is actually going to be a big deal obviously like uh like layer two stuff uh uh like

uh things like sharding and stuff like that then you'll get attention and there's always things to to write about and and what i mean by write about as well is doesn't just mean kind of like write anything but also kind of like dumb it down because let me take a recent example there's this new sharding um proposal from uh dan crad called dank sharding you've probably been hearing about it lately i did cover it on the review i believe last week when he first published about it but i i think at this point no one really understands the explainer like on 5 version of it no one really understands what the big deal is about it even though it is an absolutely huge deal so if you were to write about that it would get a lot of eyeballs like instantly because a lot of people have

heard of it already but they just don't know what it is so if you kind of like write a blog post and say hey i've explained dank sharding in a way that people can actually understand you're going to get you know i can almost guarantee you're going to get a lot of a lot of people reading that a lot of people sharing that and that's just one example there are plenty out there of things that i mean you can go on eat research look at the research posts to convert them into easily just digestible information for the everyday person and you'll be able to kind of like get get a lot of attention because of that now in saying that it's for for some things it's not going to be easy because some things are inherently extremely technical and it may not even be worth

your while to kind of like do all the background research to write about it because it might take too long and and it might be a boring endeavor too because there's some stuff that isn't super exciting on the surface uh and then even if you dive deeper it gets like just much more complex but writing about things that people have heard about like you know the the even the merge i think is still pretty misunderstood but uh you know sharding zk but any maybe even if you go to like vitalik's roadmap um in a flowchart that he's put out regularly before you can probably find it by googling it and writing about one of the things on there i think would be really cool as well so yeah just a little bit of a spiel about kind of like how to best position yourself to become an educator in this

space whether that's doing twitter threads blog posts youtube videos it doesn't matter as long as you can explain something succinctly to people and as long as it's exciting when they're reading it too and it kind of like i guess all relates back to how it benefits what you're what you're trying to say it's going to benefit such as ethereum or ether as a token i think that's how to get people kind of like much more interested in it and get them much more excited about it and that's what i try to do with my newsletter i mean i write the newsletter every day so it's it's obviously hard for me to do anything kind of like substantial like the newsletters are short and sweet but um you know if i was to write like a longer form content i would definitely focus on kind of um educating about

things that i think that people should be more excited about and then relating it all back to what they're already familiar with such as kind of like ethereum and things like that but i think on that note i'm gonna end it there for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone