Canto to become an L2, OP Airdrop and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #659 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the early gray refuel where it kept the latest news in your theorem ecosystem I'm your host and this is Sonic's 19th of September 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so first off today we have an update on how the vdf or verifiable delay function uh research is going in the ethereum research land now this has been researched a bit that's been ongoing for quite a while now since I think 2019 so it's been pretty much four years since this research began and it was basically um a research that began because there is a source of Randomness in the beacon chain that we call Randal and Randall isn't perfect it is not perfect Randomness there is a way to buy a set in a to a small degree as as is kind of

said here um but from my knowledge it's actually really difficult to buy a set but there is still a way to buy a set in in some way but uh it you know it's difficult to do now to replace Randall the idea of vdfs or verifiable delay functions uh came to be and I remember Justin Drake who's the talk about this a lot more than he does recently but yeah so there's an update here that was published or that was shared on Twitter by asanzo and it was published by a bunch of different people here basically saying I mean it's not a too long one up there but the tldr is that uh I guess like right now vdf doesn't seem like the solution they say here the cryptography research team agrees that a better understanding of vdfs is essential if we are to continue down this design Avenue

at present we do not recommend using vdfs within ethereum ongoing research and substantial improvements are important factors in potentially revising our perspective on this topic in the future so yeah it's just not up to scratch yet it's not really purpose uh built on or fit for purpose for what ethereum needs so more research will be done on that as well as more research just generally and generating Randomness you know generating true Randomness is is quite hard especially in a distributed fashion uh definitely beyond my kind of pay grade so to speak in terms of understanding the technicals of it uh but yeah Randall's been with us in the beacon chain since it went live on December 1st 2020 and it looks like it will be with us into the future so you can read the I guess entire report here it's linked in this E3 search post uh

it's pretty lengthy with the report and I'm sure it is extremely Technical and mathematical as you can see by all these equations that I have absolutely no idea how to read of course um but you can go check that out or you can just read this the um the small little uh tldr here I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so as you guys know there was a bug that I mentioned yesterday in Geth version uh 1.13 that was causing uh block proposals to be missed and rated.network put out a good little tweet thread today showing that the network Effectiveness went down overall because of this bug so it went down to about 93.5 from its usual I think 98 uh and I saw some people comment on this saying uh this doesn't really make sense because their own validators didn't go

down that much and it shouldn't and the Mr Block proposal shouldn't have uh had that much of a hit that much of a hit to network Effectiveness but I think what people need to understand is that Network Effectiveness as measured by raider.network is based on their own uh their own methodology here and I'm bringing this up here for you to see so this is how uh the raider.network website measures effectiveness of the overall Network so they measure it as proposal Effectiveness attestation Effectiveness and slashing uh Records so these three things basically come together to make what they call the rated validate Effectiveness rating AKA raver and that's what they're kind of referencing here so it is different to things that you might see on the beacon chain website for example that has its

own Effectiveness rating there um so yeah just wanted to clarify that for people that were may have been confused by that and raider.networks uh Effectiveness rating is it's based on its own uh methodology here but you know as as I said yesterday uh if people upgrade to the hotfix version of Geth or basically downgrade back to version 1.12. whatever uh the that issue will go away the network will heal itself but again this is the uh I guess importance of client diversity as rated uh kind of highlights here in that you know the F isn't 100 of the network right so uh it is still most of the network but it's not 100 of the network uh and obviously uh Mev boost as well is running so it wasn't that big of a deal because block proposals were going through Mev boost but still the overall effectiveness came

down but it should Trend back up over time there and you can go give this little thread a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right moving on to probably the biggest news of the last 24 hours is that Kanto the layer 1 blockchain is transitioning to being a layer 2 on ethereum now they're going to be using polygon polygons ZK technology and their chain development kit in order to do this and they say here they say here this is the key chain will be dedicated to real world Assets in support of the next wave of application layer adoption via Neo Finance now I don't know if that's a term that Kanto has has come up with or if that's a term that's been around for a while I've seen it referenced as um as as something

different not Neo Finance before but I guess that's what that's what they're calling it here but yeah guys I mean I I think I said this a while ago that Kanto was one of my top candidates for things that would become a layer two uh for layer ones that would become a layer two so this was not surprising or shocking to me at all I you know I work up to this today and I hope people tagging me in the daily wear Discord Channel I was like yep okay that that tracks you know that that is not a surprise to me um and I think you know there's a few others out there that I've mentioned before as my top 10 candidates number one I think now at the top of my list is gnosis chain I I feel like nurses chain is going to become a layer too I I it

doesn't really make much sense for me much sense for it to continue being a uh a layer one and they're already building a layer two on top of gnosis chain um using polygons technology which I remember I covered and thought it was weird at the time but they're my top candidate for next for for the next L1 to become an L2 and then of course binance chain and Tron in my eye should become l2s but yeah I'm on defense about whether they'll actually become l2s especially Tron it doesn't seem like something that would happen there but hey I'm willing to be uh kind of proven wrong there but yeah so essentially what uh as I mentioned what Cantor wants to do with this ZK uh powered L2 uh conversion that they're doing here as I said they want to dedicate this to real world assets something they're calling

Neo Finance in order to push real world assets not just on layer one but push them up to to kind of Layer Two here and I think this is this is a good little niche to fall into because as I've said before just because a layer 1 becomes a layer 2 doesn't mean that it's automatically going to be successful doesn't mean that it's automatically going to find product Market fit and the layer 2 space is getting real crowded I mean it is super crowded now it doesn't matter if it's an app chain or a generalized chain it is quite crowded right now which I think is fine to be honest like I'd rather see that than than uh you know a million different l1s get spun up but generally uh you know changing your product to an L2 is or changing your chain to an L2 is not

going to give your product Market fit in saying that I do think real world assets are definitely one of the next big waves to come to crypto it's being enabled by a bunch of different products and services out there obviously there are middleware protocols as well such as chain link that are playing a big big role there and there's also make up bringing a lot of real world assets on chain but if Kanto can carve out anishia and become like the real world asset layer 2 where people issue these uh real world assets on on kantos L2 and then you can bridge and you can share liquidity and be intoppable with the rest of the polygon uh kind of ecosystem as well and Beyond on that I think that's that's really positive there but it remains to be seen right I think that you know I'm not trying to on Kanto

here but I think that up until this point as a layer one came to have failed to kind of take off really um I did I I think I got an initial kind of burst of hype around the initial burst of activity but then after that it kind of like died off basically so it remains to be seen if converting to a layer 2 and focusing on this this uh this real world assets thing is going to basically bring more activity back to the chain but as I said before I think that chains have a much better chance of gaining uh activity as a layer two than they do as a layer one but fundamentally if the chain or what's being built on there doesn't have product Market fit it's not going to change anything right and I think I've been pretty consistent with that view over over the um the past

few months at least and especially over the past few years here so anyway you can go check out kanto's announcement for yourself there's a blog post of course and there's a thread I'll link that in the YouTube description for you to do so all right so optimism announced op airdrop number three today so 19 million op has been allocated to over 31 000 unique addresses to reward positive sum governance participation in the collective so you can check out the eligibility criteria in this thread and the documents that they've linked here but the eligibility criteria was actually given as a tldi on The Daily Discord Channel by temperatechi here who says uh the requirement was to have your op tokens delegated to someone so delegated to one of the governance

participants if you had them delegated to an active delegate you got two times the the rewards and the more op tokens you already had the more you got in this airdrop now I ended up receiving a pretty sizable airdrop from this um just to use me as an example of of I don't know what the maximum was but I ended up getting uh 20 000 op tokens so obviously not a small sum of of op tokens there but I want to explain like why that was the case I didn't Farm the airdrop I actually did really nothing for that right I didn't I didn't try to farm it I didn't try the game or anything like that but the reason I got it was because is my original airdrop that I got as part of when op when optimism first issued their token I think I got 32 000

op which was the maximum at the time I didn't sell them I immediately uh after I claimed them delegated them to uh polinia right you guys know Pauline I've talked about them a bunch of times on the refuel and they've been very active in optimism governance so that's why I think that I got so much op tokens is because I didn't sell the first drop that I got I delegated all of it to Paulino who was very active in in governance and it was a sizable uh kind of Delegation there so so yeah and that's why I was able to to get that but in saying that uh you know you should go check if you're eligible of course and also this is not an airdrop to claim that was the only thing that I kind of got annoyed about because for me I like

the way it works where I am in Australia uh if if when you get taxed on these things it happens when you kind of like claim them right when you claim the eardrum usually you claim an airdrop but with this airdrop it was deposited directly into your account so I went for me so I went there and I'm like okay the tokens are already in my uh in my account here that means I owe tax on them at that value that is today so I owe tax on that Opa drop as it was valued today which is annoying because I would rather have claimed it later or something like that just to optimize for tax but you know unfortunately it it was just airdropped and there was no claims process here so just keep that in mind as well there are and and for scams too

if like if you see any scams out there uh claiming that you have to claim this op airdrop you don't if you got it if you've got an allocation it has been allocated to your address it has been airdropped to you already directly in your address and you can see that by searching your address on an optim optimism mainnet block Explorer not on etherscan it has to be on an optimism uh mainnet Explorer because obviously it was airdropped on the op mainnet chain and not um not the ethereum main chain just in case you get confused about that you can go check out that there but yeah it'll be waiting for you and also as I said like because I think the way it works in Australia is the way it works in a lot of places where as soon as the I guess funds are in your control it's

taxed as and and for for me in Australia it's income tax so uh basically you should check that as well because you may owe taxes on that too depending on obviously your jurisdiction and things like that so anyway I'll link optimism's tweet thread in the YouTube description below and you can check it out for yourself in order to see if you are eligible for this airdrop all right so Mark boyeron here the Chief Executive Officer of polygon CEO of polygon here put together a a big tweet today or not not too big of a tweet but a tweet today basically running through what polygon 2.0 is and there has been a bit of confusion around this I actually think that um the the confusion stems from the fact that it is quite a substantial change to to polygon and

I've explained bits and pieces of it before on on the refuel and of course I think I said the other day that I highly recommend going and giving the podcast that Mahalo and Sandeep tour the co-founders of polygon uh on on Bank list they did a podcast all about polygon 2.0 and it gives a really great overview of what they hope to achieve here but really the tldr is that there are there are kind of three spokes to the polygon um 2.0 upgrade yeah there's the governance spoke there's changing Matic to pole so upgrading the Matic token to the poll token and also upgrading the polygon POS chain to uh uh to a ZK VM basically into uh to a billion like construction and that's exactly to what Mark has outlined here so you can go give this tweet a read for full details on that I'll link it in the YouTube

description below but as I said it is a substantial change to the way polygon is today and what it wants to be in the future but it really is the polygon Vision I mean this was the original Vision that I remember um Halo running me through in 2019 and you guys know if I I've talked about this on the refill before but you uh and this is why I became an advisor to polygon was because Mahalo was a was a good friend of mine and still is a good friend of mine um but I I was talking to him in 2019 about this and I remember him saying at the time um you know this polygon thing what his vision for it was why he thinks that it's necessary and this was all the way back in 2019 and finally we're at the point where polygon

2.0 is is living up to to his vision there and he's really the end game for the polygon ecosystem just like how in ethereum you know vitalik spoke about what ethereum looks like today a very long time ago obviously sharding has changed uh a bit and pivoted a bit here and there but so has polygon over time right originally they were going to do all sorts of change they were going to do plasma chains and optimistic roll ups and ZK chains but now they're really doing just the ZK stuff they're all in on that and they're making the super chain thing that that connects them all which they're calling supernets right Super Chinese is optimism's name for their thing which is just a very similar thing to what polygon wants to do with the the super Nets thing and and connecting all the chains together and

making them all in tropical so so yeah that's that's kind of like the end game kind of vision that has been there for the last I think four years I mean I remember when Mahalo was telling me about it it was uh it was around this time actually I think it was maybe October 2019 when I was at dapcon in in Berlin so that's it that's how long this has been coming here so that's why it's such an exciting upright and it really does reflect the uh the I guess like eighth two upgrade as well it's kind of a mirror of that because the eighth 2.0 upgrade was also very um confusing to people because it changed a bunch of times right it originally we had uh sharding and proof of stake and all that stuff in between coming as like one big upgrade then we

split it up into different phases uh and if for those of you out there have been around for a while you remember that the phases were phase zero which was going to be um proof of stake and then you have phase one which is going to be the first Shard chains and then phase 1.5 which was gonna be like uh if I'm remembering correctly uh uh uh more Shard chains being added I can't remember exactly what it was and then phase two which I believe was going to be like wasm and things like that so it was it was an amalgamation of stuff and then after that we just basically um pivoted again and said okay well eth2 is is really just going to be the merge and that's what it was we merged the two chains together and then we we pivoted sharding to just do data shotting things

like dank shotting is pure data shining and then we pushed everything else to the layer twos and I think in a similar kind of vein here what polygon became eventually with this polygon 2.0 upgrade is that they just stopped focusing on all the stuff and they just hyper focused on the ZK stuff and Hyper focused on making sure that everything was interoperable and making sure that anyone could build a chain using polygons technology and and settle all that down to ethereum so that's why I'm personally most excited about the polygon 2.0 vision is because I feel like it's the vision that makes the most sense I am also definitely excited about the other ecosystems like obviously optimism and arbitrary and the other L2 ecosystems out there ZK sync because they're all doing different things and

really we're just going to get the best outcome at the end of the day uh and I think I've said this for a while now is that the reason I'm most bullish on the layer 2 ecosystem is because we get a camber an explosion of innovation that is funded like that's the most important thing here this is innovation that is funded and funded in a really really big way uh by Venture capitalists and Angel Investors and and obviously people buying the token and stuff like that but that to me is better than everything just being reliant on the people building ethereum layer one splitting up those concerns that bizarre versus Cathedral model I've spoken about that has always been the best path forward for me and I think we're seeing the results of that we're seeing the fruits of that labor over the last few years

come to bear with all the layer two kind of activity that we're seeing lately not just from a fundamental activity point of view but also from a social thing where the entire ethereum ecosystem is aligned on making uh layer twos the best that they can be and layer one is being upgraded uh for that which which is just a lot of positive personalities that that fall off that there but yeah anyway you can go check out Mark's tweet I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right staying on the topic of l2's role who works at uh optimism here optimism works at arbitrim here uh or off-chan Labs I put out a tweet today talking about uh their bold proving ecos proving system here so as you guys know arbitrim is an optimistic roll-up so

they use fraud proofs and Raul just gave a short tweet thread here about what happens when a fraud proof is submitted and how that game is actually played and what the end state is so I highly recommend going and giving this tweet thread a read uh for you to check it out but I do find it interesting that I was thinking about this while reading this with this tweet thread which as I said I'll link in the YouTube description below um that when you look at the ecosystem today in terms of optimistic Roll-Ups versus ZK Roll-Ups there really is only two optimistic Roll-Ups that are relevant right and that is uh optimism and arbitrine one now you have to split that out though because optimism uh isn't just the op mainnet anymore right it is the op stack it is base it is uh Zora it is Avo right there's a bunch of

these chains that are building on there same is true for uptrim where they have arbitrum one and then they have uh um uh other arbitrim chains that can fall off of that arbitrim Nova is a validium so it's from my understanding not going to be using um fraud proofs but the thing is is that yes there may only be two core teams working on optimistic Roll-Ups right now but those two teams are building uh software for people to build their own optimistic Wilds on top of that and then obviously uh arbitrimp already has fraud proofs in place it's permissioned right now but they're obvious they're decentralizing that out and making it permissionless with this bold thing and then optimism is working on fraud proofs I gave an update the other day on on their fraud proofs which is the Canon thing that they're building

which will be available to the whole op stack once it's built out and then really it remains to be seen I do still think that these ecosystems are just going to change to validity proofs or ZK proofs eventually and upgrade to that once there is something that is secure and reliable for them to upgrade to and then we'll really just be in a ZK world at that point which I think was always going to be the end game it just came a lot faster than people thought it would um and I think it's taken everyone uh I guess like by surprise and also the funding for it has been just astronomical I think that because the ZK ZK stuff started being talked about in the bear Market the last speaker Market not this bear Market it started being talked about and like you know I guess

2019 2020 and uh there wasn't that much funding going around at the time but then we had the bull market happen in 2021 and a lot of funding came in I think that's pushed it Forward obviously um you know teams like polygon uh acquired a lot of ZK teams and basically gave them unlimited funding to just go work on CK stuff which is why we've come so far now so I think that's the that's still the end game but in the meantime there is a lot of work still being done on the optimistic roll up specific things like fraud proofs which as I said you can check out rules tweets right here about their bold proving system here which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so all right so again sticking on the L2 theme Aztec has announced today that

they will have a decentralized sequences so they say here today we're excited to announce that after significant debate we have selected a final design from Aztec sequencer selection request for proposals uh which is called fernet and this is going to be a fully permissionless random leader election protocol so they say here at Aztec we are fully committed to permissionless listless at launch this means that unlike most earlier 2 networks today Aztecs Aztec will allow anyone to run infrastructure just like Bitcoin and ethereum and you can read the full announcement in this blog post here now I think this is really cool because if Aztec can launch their fully encrypted fully private Layer Two as a stage two layer two like as you guys know L2 beat list out the stages

but if they can launch it as a stage two from the get-go that is a huge unlock for the ethereum ecosystem because you guys know that most Roll-Ups are currently at stage zero or stage one there's very few I mean layer twos generally that are at um that are at stage two like if I bring up the L2 beats site here you can actually see which ones are at stage two it's really only D gate here uh which you know doesn't really have much activity happening at all and fuel V1 which has basically no activity on it on it at all here the rest falling to the stage zero slash stage one uh kind of bucket here and most of them I think are stage zero so if if Aztec can launch as a stage two uh a layer 2 because they have fully permissionless uh uh approving uh and

fully permissionless decentralized uh sequences and validators and all that stuff that falls into it that would be incredibly bullish I think and I mean I'm generally very bullish on what Aztec's building because it's building around privacy here are but very cool to see them announce that they've chosen something today which you can read about as I said I'll link in the YouTube description below but it is called fernet so if you see anyone talking about phonet they're talking about this and they tell you know why they chose it deep dive into it acknowledging the teams that have helped with this sort of stuff espresso systems is actually list here listed here this is is definitely um one that I've talked about a bunch on the refill before uh but yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I'm hoping that

over the next couple years pretty much all of these projects can move to at least stage one I I want to stop seeing stage zero especially on on ecosystems that are big like for example op Mainland and bass which are built on both built on the op stack are still stage zero because there's no fraud proving system right if they had fraud proofs in place they'd I think go to stage one um or at least be very close to stage one I would very much love to see no stage zeros on this list or at least none of the the the relevant ones none of the ones that have a lot of activity being a stage zero at least over the next maybe 12 to 18 24 months and then obviously sleep we want everything to be at stage two eventually and we especially want the biggest Roll-Ups to

be at stage door the biggest layer twos to be at stage two because that is that it is definitely the most important um stage to be out there but we'll get there I think um some of them will launch from the get-go's as a stage two like Aztec for example they probably will launch like that some of them will launch as a stage one a lot of them will launch as stage zero but I think the end game is what matters as long as they can get to stage two eventually uh and eventually not being you know five ten years out I'm talking over the next couple years I think that that is is definitely good enough and that's something that I uh that I'm looking forward to seeing play out but anyway as I said you can go check out Aztec's announcement for yourself we'll link it in the YouTube

description below for you to do so all right so just a tweet here from Austin Griffith who is a legendary builder in ethereum so he said here speedrun ethereum.com is a curriculum for learning how to build on ethereum uh he said we just upgraded all the challenges to the latest Tool Set uh with all of the different kind of tool sets you can see here such as rainbow kit VM typescript and with your choice of hard hat or Foundry so if you're interested in learning ethereum development this is basically a One-Stop shop so you go to speedrun ethereum.com and it has guides on how to basically interact and and learn to uh to program on ethereum to build smart contracts on ethereum learn how ethereum Works under the hood this is one obviously for the developers out there but you can go

check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but yeah as I said Austin Griffith is legendary in the ethereum built Builder space he's been doing uh this sort of stuff for many many years now and he's all about just building right he's I think that he's a very high signal low noise person I don't really I've never really seen any noise from him he just wants to build it just wants to provide tools for people to build uh with as well and provide guides like speedrun ethereum.com for people to interact with and to make building on ethereum and learning how to build on ethereum a gamified experience which is which is exactly what is happening here so you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right I think I'm going to cut it there

for today it's a bit of a shorter episode that's because I'm doing the episode earlier in the day uh today but yeah just a friendly reminder that there will be no refuels for the next three days so no refuel for Wednesday Thursday or Friday and I will be back Monday with probably an extra long episode to cover everything that's happened there is a big announcement being teased on Twitter right now that I wish I could have covered tomorrow because it's happening tomorrow but I think I know what it is so there's a there's a team called Eclipse that is building a Solana uh virtual machine roll-up that is going to be built on ethereum of course so I think that's going to be a big announcement tomorrow that's going to get the um the Twitter sphere riled up but I'll cover that on Monday once it's

announced but yeah they've been teasing it on Twitter the last few days so I think it's pretty obvious that it's going to be uh announced tomorrow but yeah I'm looking forward to seeing what that looks like actually because as I said in the past I think Salinas technology is is very cool but I feel like it would be very cool as a roll-up so we're gonna see how that shakes out there but I'm not I'm sure that's not going to be the only major announcement that happens over the next few days but as I said I will cover it all when I'm back on Monday so that'll be it for today 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 two on the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all

on Monday thanks everyone