Base's path to mainnet, Connext Chain Abstraction - The Daily Gwei Refuel #591 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of daily gray refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host here and this is honor and test the 25th of May 2023 alright everyone let's get into it so bass has published their path to base mainnet blog post and Twitter thread here now this is obviously a pretty big update uh in the world of Base here for those of you who don't know bass is coinbase's layer 2 roll-up on ethereum built using optimism's op stack here now they've outlined exactly what their path to mainnet is going to look like so here they say as we approach mainnet we've defined a set of criteria that will unlock our launch so they've already completed a successful test net uh hard fork and a successful infrastructure review with oplabs now uh they're

waiting for the op mainnet to upgrade to bedrock they're waiting for completion of audits with no critical issues and test net stability and then after the mainnet launch they will enter something called a Genesis window which is a time for developers to deploy at adapts on the base mainnet which is similar to what arbitrim did and optimism had something similar as well and I think like even the other l2s like ZK sync and stuff like that have had similar things uh during this window the base core team core team will provide Hands-On support to developers deploying their dapps and will recognize early dapps launching on base so an exciting update here you can read the blog post for full details on this uh paulinear did bring up an interesting point here in reply where

they said I see fraud proofs and such are missing from the mainnet criteria I understand the time to Market needs but might I suggest an aggressive tvl cup coinbase is a public us company is potentially more likely to be scrutinized or sanctioned as a centralized chain now I've talked about these risks in the past obviously um given that coin that base is going to be pretty centralized from the start what happens if someone deploys Toyota cache on there is uh the I guess like coinbase going to censor that because they are a us-based company right they're going to be the only ones running the sequencer on the base roll up are they going to be engaging in censorship there I don't know um it kind of feels like it's it's kind

of like a coin toss because coinbase has led uh one of the lawsuits against the treasury Department around the sanctions on tornado cash but at the same time they still have to abide by them right so it's going to be interesting to see what happens there I really do think that someone is going to deploy tornado cash to base relatively quickly just to test the waters and as I said I wouldn't be surprised to see them censor it because they're the only ones right going to be running a sequencer now obviously when they decentralize that out uh hopefully sooner rather than later that won't be really be an issue but while it's centralized that obviously is a concern and something that people I think should be prepared for and I can see I can already see the fun right I can see the base launching

someone launching Toyota cash on there and then potentially they're getting censored on bass and then straight away all the floods just come out and say oh look bases is centralized so much for decentralized finance or so much for crypto values blah blah right when in reality bass is not going to be decentralized from day one they're not making any kind of claims to that uh but they have said they want to decentralize it over time now obviously we don't know how long that time's going to be but hey you know there there are other uh Roll-Ups out there that are more mature but that still aren't fully decentralized or or anywhere close to that right and they've been around for quite a while so I think we can cut bass some slack here but yeah be prepared for fun if that was to happen that's for

sure and also around fraud proofs yeah uh bass isn't even going to have I guess like permission fraud proofs or anything like that and I think that's because optimism doesn't really have the fraud proofs um uh uh kind of live yet on the op stack so they're probably waiting for that but at the same time because it's like totally centralized you probably don't need fraud proofs or at least maybe you'll have permission fraud proofs but we'll have to see I think it's a great point that Paul and you are bringing up here but I think that I I want to set the expectation now that as bullish as I am on base and as excited as I am for it it's going to be a very neutered version of what like an l2l roll up can be at least from the start right it's gonna it's gonna have cheaper

fees it's going to have faster transactions and it's going to be obviously supported by coinbase so you'll be able to bridge in and out of it uh through the coinbase exchange but it is not going to be decentralized from day one it is not going to have uh decentralized sequencing and validating it is not going to be something that you can get uh that you can expect to get like some uh some full censorship resistance from so I just want to set that Baseline now so that people aren't surprised by that and I'm sure all the refuel Watchers and listeners out there you guys know that that this will be the case but be prepared for fun around that that's for sure uh now there was a one other thing they mentioned at the start here in their thread where they said reminder bass has no plans to issue a

network token and I've talked about this before and about the implications around this it wouldn't really make sense for them to issue a token for base I mean one because you wear coinbase is U.S traded public company so there's already a coin stock that's tied to coinbase two it really does open them up to regulatory scrutiny three they don't need it even to decentralize the sequencer I don't think they need to do it I think what they could do is they could just have ether's the staking token and then pay out the fees to to the um the sequences right and and to people stacking their ease to become a sequencer but you know what's funny they could even get away with just altruism on the sequencer side of things at least for a little while where I reckon people would be happy to run validators or run

sequences on base uh for free basically I mean I know I'd probably be interested in that because I already have the infrastructure up up and running for running this sorts of stuff so I and and it's obviously not going to be a huge cost because there is it's um it's just the sequencer right it's just the uh it's not proof of work or anything like that but we'll have to see how that plays out there uh and then Benji here who it works in the optimism ecosystem said to everyone asking for a token instead instead asks what will happen when you have a chance to bring daps to 110 million people for the first time ever build products instead and I think this is a an important Point as well where people always ask for tokens because they want to hopefully get an airdrop right and get free money but hey

if you're holding uh eighth right if you're holding some other tokens out there and you're holding like a Dap token that Launches on base and suddenly has like a massive new pool of users to tap into well isn't that better than coinbase doing a token which inevitably will probably just bleed right because a lot of these tokens that get typed up they obviously have a a high value when they launch and then bleed against USD and eat over the longer term but would you rather that your current bags or the bags you purchase in the future for whether they be apps or eth or L2 tokens for example like op because this is built on the op stack maybe this uh maybe base makes value flow to op I think I'd personally rather that than base doing a token and then uh and that

becoming a thing that everyone kind of speculates on whereas you bring in all these new people you bring in potentially 110 million registered coinbase users obviously it's not going to be that much but it's going to be more than what we have today and that will lead to more liquidity more money into the ecosystem which should I'm not going to say it's going to happen but it should and I believe that it should drive value to the most successful apps on the base Network as well as things like Ethan potentially even the op token now none of that is investment advice I'm not telling you to go out there and buy anything right or buy op buy it I'm not telling you that I actually as bullish as I am on on eth I don't think I've ever actually directly said to on the refuel to go on buy e because I give

you the bull case I give you my reasoning behind it and then it's your choice whether you want to buy buy it or not how long you want to hold it for whether you want to be a Trader or an investor but I think overall uh we really shouldn't care if bass does a token or not honestly we shouldn't even ask for it we should really care about onboarding as many people as possible and then if you you're in it for monetary reasons or speculative reasons there are plenty of ways to speculate late on and play the bass kind of ecosystem in my mind anyway I'll link this thread in the YouTube description below for you to go check out all right speaking of optimism op labs's Twitter account here has put together a thread about uh catching up on the improvements coming with bedrock so

Bedrock is less than two weeks away as they say here so very close now and if you're interested in what Bedrock is actually bringing to the optimism Network well this is the tldr recap thread for you and I'll mention a few of these things just to just to quickly recap it for you so bedrock's optimize data compression started strategy will majorly reduce gas fees so similar to what a nitroated for arbitrum so that's obviously something that end users are going to feel immediately uh Bedrock also transforms the op stack into a more moduline flexible system which is obviously something that optimism is really focused on now getting that op stack built out so that other teams can build their own op chains and then become part of the super chain sort of like exactly like what bass is doing

um and then they continue on in in this thread here which I'll link in the YouTube description below but I just thought this was a great recap thread that you should definitely go check out because I'm super excited to see bedrock finally go live and I'm super excited to see the fact that the l2s are just finding their own place in the L2 landscape and I've talked about this before of course but I really like that optimism is targeting this kind of op stack thing that they're doing and this super chain thing that they're doing and I'm really happy that arbitrim is targeting uh is building things like arbitrim Nova but also targeting different um programming languages and non-evm uh kind of things like like ewasm it used to be known as ewasm they used to be part of the core ethereum road map but

wasm which is webassembly uh and other such things like that and other l2s targeting different things so just super excited about that I'm actually going to talk about the arbitrim thing in a sec uh but you can go read this Twitter thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so as I said arbitrim or off-chan Labs the Builders of arbitrim today uh announced that they've been working towards building stylus which is an upgrade to the arbitrum tech stack and I've covered stylus before it's basically the way uh developers are going to be able to build on arbitrim networks without having to build in just solidity they'll be able to build in basically any language that they want and then off chain Labs today announce that they've written a complete working fraud-prover for stylus so this is very cool so essentially um as I said stylus allows users to

deploy contracts uh written in their favorite programming languages such as rust C C plus plus and more you can check out stylus here and currently the arbitrim Nitro stack is the only evm equivalent roll up with working fraud proofs this is achieved by enforcing safety directly at the wasm level of webassembly level now with stylus we're they're um of chain Labs has leveraged Nitro to also enforce safety in the webassembly uh in wasm for style contracts broadening evm plus support and yeah that's what they're calling it basically they're calling it evm plus so basically sticking with the evm but making it better right building on top of it and this is something that I actually discussed quite a while ago about l2s and I'm glad that that arbitrim is targeting this where

essentially you don't have to be limited to what the evm is on layer 1 ethereum the evm on layer one ethereum is always going to be much more simple and much less expressive and and I guess like experimental than it will be on the l2s and the l2s can go ahead and just basically do whatever they want this is why I spoke yesterday about intra enshrined Roll-Ups versus not in Shrine Roll-Ups you wouldn't be able to do this on an enshrined roll-up like none of what you've seen from op Labs with the Bedrock upgrade or from uh off chain Labs with stylus or anything like that that would not be able to be done on the enshrined roll-up without changes without going through the ethereum governance process the ethereum L1 governance process like it can be done

it's probably more complex and more risky um but it can't be done in the same way that it can be done at L2 because as I said you have to to go through the ethereum L1 governance process which is not something that I think a lot of people want to have to go through in order to build their stuff because it's at minimum six months between Network upgrades sometimes longer I mean most of ethereum's life has actually been longer than that um very few eips actually make it into the network there is a lot of governance discussions around it before it gets into the network there's a lot of potential drama that can arise from it there are things that if it's considered overly complex and not worth the effort that's just not going to go into the network whereas with l2s and the different l2s out there they can

actually just build in their own little I guess silos and have their own Community but still obviously settle to ethereum but have a lot more flexibility around what they do when it comes to how they build out their tax Tech stack which is why as I mentioned yesterday one of the biggest reasons I'm most bullish on non-enshined Roll-Ups over in Shrine Roll-Ups now that's not to saying Shrine Roll-Ups don't have their I don't have their place and what's really cool from my understand standing and I was actually just reading about this recently is that with an enshrined roll-up at layer one you could potentially have the L2 Roll-Ups tapping into that one and then the Australian Roll-Ups would give the l2s even cheaper fees now I don't know if that is 100 correct or if it works like that but

from my understanding it should work like that so I mean ethereum will probably have both of them eventually but I do think that in terms of ethereum's roll-up Centric roadmap it's much better for us to focus on having an expressive ecosystem of different teams building different l2s and roll ups and l3s and whatever else rather than just limiting ourselves to something like an enshrined roll-up on L1 that's not to say that that we shouldn't have an enshrined roll-up so that l2s and and other end users on L1 can take advantage of that but I don't think it should be the bo end-all or kind of like end game for ethereum I think the end game for ethereum is a large network of extremely expressive uh designs for different kind of like a walks of life different

developers different people and all that kind of settles down to ethereum and we have this harmonious ecosystem rather than something that is fragmented or something that is I guess like monopolized I should say not fragmented but speaking of I guess fragmentation this is a perfect segue into the other thing that I wanted to talk about which I'll talk about in a sec I'll just say that I will link This Thread from off-chain labs in the YouTube description below for you to check out more details about what I'm talking about but uh connects which is a bridging protocol or I guess like interoperability protocol that that is building on on ethereum and obviously other chains announced today that uh well I mean they started off this tweet though by saying that currently interacting with an app across chains is difficult and time consuming you have to

select the right network bridge assets get gas tokens et cetera et cetera and they say here web3 users deserve a better experience so today they've introduced something called chain abstraction which allows for onboarding users from anywhere regardless of the chain they are on so this is basically what I've been advocating for for quite a while now when it comes to interoperability between different chains especially different uh l2s you basically want to extract away abstract the way I should say every complexity for the user so bridging assets choosing the right Network getting gas tokens that shouldn't be something that is presented to the end user what they should see is basically a one to two click thing that they can play around

sorry they can use in order to get to where they want to go now you can read this blog post for full details about how this is going to work but analogy I like to use is something like if you're using these things to travel between different points think about a robust public transportation system and a really shitty public transportation system so I'm going to use two examples here I think that Japan I've been I've used Japan's public transportation system especially their their Metro system and it is the best I've ever used by far and that's not just me saying it obviously it is praised all around the world for how good it is and then you have the public transportation system in the US which all I hear about from

everyone is that it's incredibly bad so if you're using this analogy we need to make the experience between bridging uh between different l2s and chains like Japan's Metro system and not like the US Metro system which it currently is like the U.S Metro system and I'm not trying to fight any at the US here or anything like that but you want to hear praise for bridging between different things and you want to hear people not even really having to worry about it I mean I'm sure people that live in Japan don't even worry about if that train is going to be on time or if their train connects them to where they want to go or whatever else or if they're kind of um uh that their card's going to work or if there's going to be violence on the on the train or anything like that I don't

think they worry about that at all when I was traveling in Japan for three weeks I didn't worry about the tram being on time and if I missed the train uh another one was coming like two minutes later whereas um I mean Australia is not not got the best public transport either mind you if I'm comparing it to where I live in Melbourne I mean I don't catch it much anymore but I have friends that do it when I used to it's not great right it is basically built as an afterthought after the developers have gone and built all the properties in a new estate what ends up happening is that I mean the same is true I think in the US they just build a train station out there but I mean it's not great right whereas in Japan uh I don't I don't know exactly how they built it in

Japan but essentially they're very high density so they obviously needed a good public transportation system and it's so good that it really just is something that is expected to work all the time and expected to be on time expected to offer a great user experience basically so I think that's where we need to go with uh with this kind of bridging protocols and these interoperability protocols uh especially on top of ethereum with the l2s and the Roll-Ups because if we don't do that the I mean the SW liquidity fragmentation but I think that what's worse than liquidity fragmentation is just user fragmentation because and and basically confuse using users because let's say for example if someone goes to arbitrary and they're like okay I'm on arbitrim now I'm going to play around here I'm going to do this

stuff here and then they're like oh damn like this thing that I want to do is actually on optimism and then like okay well I have to bridge over there and I have to get my funds over there somehow and I have to go through all this complex bridging that's not how we're going to get Mass adoption and I even think that people kind of bridging to arbitrim or bridging to optimism bridging to anything it's not how they're going to get Mass adoption we're going to get Mass adoption by people building stuff on top of protocols like connects that allow them to easily tap into all of these different Roll-Ups and l2s and look and basically places where liquidity exists and then off offering that product to their users in a simple way like one two clicks to do whatever you want you know maybe you want to get

some yields right um and maybe that the product doesn't even tell you where the yield is coming from they just say to you hey you know where such and such you earn a five percent yield with us or whatever it is you know five ten percent yield with us on your dollars and then in the background they put that those funds into some app on some chain somewhere and they're using connects to do that so that's what I think the end game is for for these interoperability protocols uh and if you want to learn more about connect solution you can check it out I'll link the thread in the YouTube description below all right so speaking of Roll-Ups this has been an L2 slash roll-up heavy episode today but it was a lot of interesting things so I figured I'd talk about them but figment Capital here has

put together a blog post proposing a new mechanism to decentralize sequences called distributed sequencer technology now if this rings a bell it's because there is something called distributed validated technology or DVT uh like opal and SSV Network that I've talked about a bunch of times on the refill before well this is a similar concept here of having distributed sequences and instead of distributed validators so they would be kind of like a similar thing where essentially you have uh you can see here distributed sequence in the image here you have ethereum L1 then you have sequence cell one but it's split up into different kind of parts or sequencing the one roll up just like you would have when you have a DVT cluster for ethereum validators uh but yeah this blog post is

actually quite long I think it's about a 12 minute read so you can go check this out for yourself but great to see more designs coming to the sequence of space I think the next Frontier for l2s and roll ups is basically creating the best sequences that we can in a decentralized way because there is going to be a lot of fear of a new that is captured and there already is that is captured by these l2s and obviously people are going to want to run sequences to capture some of that value so we want ways to for people to do that in a decentralized and sensitive resistant way without a Reliance on some kind of like centralized Mega sequencer or anything like that so you can go give filament capitals uh blog post to read I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right something I missed the other

day so this is actually quite a while ago now so two weeks ago but it came across my feed today uh Liam Liam ciao who is building a Dap net that I've covered on the refill before basically dapnet is a way for uh people to install I mean basically a client that people can install that allows them to use decentralized front ends to access their favorite apps um they have launched their Alpha Edition here and they've made a really cool actual little trailer here which you should watch I'll link in the YouTube description below basically parroting that you wouldn't download a car you would instill a movie uh piracy um uh kind of I guess or anti-piracy spot that was very popular I think in the early mid 2000s I don't know I don't know when it was created but I'm sure

you guys know what I'm talking about um but with the dapnet alpha um it on Mac OS you can access curve ANS one inch and other websites deployed to East domains and they can never be censored captured or shut down now this is another thing that I think is extremely like needed but something that is both underfunded under appreciated people aren't paying enough attention to because people always complain when a decentralized oh sorry a centralized D5 front end does some kind of censorship or block something or does like an an OPAC censorship but then they won't understand that it's done at the front end level not at the contract level so all you need to do is go use a different front end now of course if you want to

be able to do this in a fully decentralized censorship resistant way where you're not relying on on third-party Finance at all you can do it with net now uh dapnet as I said is in in Alpha right now so it's obviously a not uh not production software just yet but it's something that you can use on on Mac OS um and it use it basically allows you to access all of these uh websites that are deployed to dot ease domains via things like ipfs now they say here that it can never be censored captured or shut down but from my understanding there is still a risk here when hosting it on using centralized uh I guess like domain resolvers uh like like um like uh Dot eath and things like that but uh in saying that it is a lot better than

those centralized front ends and those third-party front ends that we're all used to so you should definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but this is something that I think that more people should pay attention to it should get funding it should be a public good I don't think it should be this VC back thing that issues a token and that you know it's governance whatever blah blah I think it should just be built as a public good like what I mentioned yesterday with uh the heath wizard tool because these things are what's needed to actually really keep the full decentralized sensitive resistance dream alive not just at the chain level but also at the user facing level the the front end level so kudos to Liam's for building this and for updating and for entering Alpha here sorry about I missed

it two weeks ago Liam but you can go check it out I'll link it I'll link this thread in the YouTube description below all right owaki from gitcoin has announced that green pill V2 is now here so you get you can check this out at greenpill.network uh there's a new Direction green pill V1 was a book and so V2 is a network they've got 24 chapters located across the globe and are growing there's also a new branding here you can see on the image there's a new focus on uh V1 was about theories theories and mental models V2 is about local action and they'll be authoring a local regen guides now regen stands for regenerative or regenerative Finance instead of degenerative finance that of

being a d-gen and a lot of you will know that uh that because if you hold the deadly gray one-year anniversary nft you're able to access the regen's channel in the Discord channel uh but yeah I mean there's a bunch of things that oluki talks about in this thread with in relation to the green pill Network which you can go check out but I thought the website was really cool looks really cool I think the fact that they're taking this next step in order to bring all this Theory and mental mod all of this Theory these mental models to the real world and actually put it in action and put it in practice is the next logical step because it's all well and good to have all these amazing theories and all these amazing mental models that you think can work yeah okay you think it can work you think it can

work but you what you need to do is you need to test it you need to test it in the real world and that's actually something that vitalik recently did I'm sure you've seen some people talking about this on Twitter there was uh zuzarlu pop-up Network state in Montenegro that vitalik put together himself and he invited a bunch of crypto people AI people uh I think longevity people basically to work and live together in this pop-up Network State now I think he plans to do this each year in a different city but that's basically taking the concept of the network state which is something that Balaji has talked a lot about and um you bring it to the real world not just looking at the theory but also looking at it in practice so if you were at zuzalu I'm sure you you had a great time

there I was actually invited but couldn't make it work unfortunately um but yeah that's what I mean by putting these things into practice rather than keeping them in theory land because because I think in crypto we love to keep things in theory land when it comes to stuff that is not necessarily speculative because it's when it's speculative you don't want to keep it in theory land because there's potentially massive amounts of money to be made but when it comes to things like social coordination human coordination um you know public goods finding stuff like that uh traditionally we have put it into practice via things like Bitcoin but it is a lot I think more more muted than the degenerative stuff or the danger and stuff because obviously that speculative Mania doesn't exist in the same fashion there but anyway you can go check out greenpill.network I'll link a

wikis thread in the YouTube description below uh for you to read all about it as well as check out the website now got a few minutes here wanted to uh talk about something that I thought was was kind of important today that I actually spoke about in The Daily grade Discord channel so someone asked me about this recent move on nvidia's stock overnight apparently it went up like 35 and that was like more than Eight's market cap and I and I replied to this person and I said basically what you need to understand is that nvidia's market cap is already really large so a 35 move uh if for uh nvidia's market cap obviously uh NV are having I think it's 800 or 900 billion dollar market cap is is going to be larger than ethereum's market cap but

then if you look at ethereum look at sorry eights market cap which is around 210 billion if eth was just to move just 10 it would add 21 billion dollars to its market cap which would be bigger than every single L1 out there except Bitcoin uh and xrp I think as well but all the other ones would just be dwarfed by by them their entire market cap so when comparing market caps you have to do it uh you have to do it with context and then the second part of the question here that other person asked in the Discord channel was around where I kind of see ethereum going and how long I see it taking ethereum to basically be integrated in the entire world's I guess Financial system so if ethereum does succeed it was trying to do it's going to take a while guys like I said 20 plus

years as my answer here for it to basically saturate and become part of the everyday I guess global economy I think it can potentially take longer than that it just it depends on how fast a lot of the world wants to move on this stuff obviously technology makes things move faster than than usual but I think we're still in the very very early days in terms of how many on-chain users there are and I'm not talking about people holding crypto on a centralized exchange I'm talking about people who have actually used on-chain products and services and maybe not just use them once I'm talking like use them uh quite actively maybe maybe at least like once a month right or potentially once a week it has to be a few million at most out of the what eight plus billion people on the planet yeah we've got a lot of long

ways to go we've got a lot of growth to go obviously there's a lot of money in crypto right now but there's still a lot of money left to come in a lot of value to be generated so this is a multi-decade game and I hope you guys are in it for the long term like I am uh especially and maybe I'll still be doing a refuel doing the refuel in 20 years uh that'll be funny when I'm 50 51 I'll be doing doing the refuel still hopefully but anyway I I digress there I'm going to leave it at that for today's episode so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone