Client diversity website, Connext reduces fees - The Daily Gwei Refuel #302 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel worry capped the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony and today's the 27th of january 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so first on the agenda for today is this brand new website from the ether alpha team called clientdiversity.org which is a resource website geared towards ethereum client diversity as the name implies here this website is really awesome i mean you can see here i've been talking about client diversity a lot on the beacon train lately but you can see here basically a real-time dashboard or maybe not real time but like a i guess like an updated dashboard on what the client diversity landscape looks like right now now as i mentioned to you guys last time prism has uh you know pretty big share of the network

right now at about 66.17 lighthouse following in at second place 18.7 percent takeo at 9.04 percent nimbus at 5.21 and then uh the other three minority clients under one percent there so i guess i mean i've talked about client diversity a lot recently on the refuel and about why it's important for the beacon chain to not just be dominated by one client there's been a lot of work being done especially from the east sega community there's been a lot of outreach happening behind the scenes i'm aware of uh especially to major exchanges and staking service providers and things like that we definitely want to get the ball rolling here because at the end of the day like i can encourage you guys as solo stakers to change if you're running prism through something else uh and we can get like a lot of individuals to do

this but the thing is is that it it won't move the needle as much as getting one of the bigger providers to do this because if we can get an exchange or a staking service provider to essentially not you know stop using prism altogether but change to a setup where they can use you know all four of the major clients in kind of like equal parts or if they want to they can have like 50 prism and 25 uh lighthouse and uh or 25 another client and then 12 and a half percent for the other two but uh a lot of them are running like 100 prism now and that's why prism is so dominant so we definitely want to get that down uh to below 60 at least uh ideally below 50 but as i said to you guys i think that's going to be a little bit difficult to

get there especially before the withdrawals are enabled on the beacon chain which actually comes about six months after the merge so i think we're going to be having this kind of issue probably for the remainder of this year but it's still good that there's a lot of initiatives happening happening around this and you can see on this website you know why is client diversity not optional and there's a description here basically and you know as i've said to you guys um if two thirds of validators uh are kind of like um you know reaching finality and those two thirds make up one client and that client has a bug then uh the validators basically go on to that chain that the bug chain that becomes the canonical one and it can't be kind of like return to the real chain without being slashed unless it was done as part of like a

hard fork or a social layer thing and that's obviously very very messy there's further reading here there's a bunch of resources you can read about client diversity if you want to get more involved there and there's a bunch of um uh links to the clients here as well too to kind of like change there and there's also guides this is the one thing that i actually requested from people i'm like you know guys would make a lot of sense and it's really actually simple here you can click from whichever client you're coming from say you're coming from prison you want to go to lighthouse click two and then search guides and it'll bring up some guides for you to to play around with and i'm sure there'll be more guides added here over time so if you're a solo staker and you're on prism right now there's pretty much no

excuse not to change to one of these other clients and it's you know those other clients aren't bad clients they're pretty much on par with prism from what i know i think prism just had the brand awareness at the start much more than the other kind of like clients did but from what i know from what i've seen the clients are pretty much all uh all the same essentially right in terms of kind of functionality in terms of performance um some of them you know probably inch out some better performance than others but they're mostly the same and i think the reward difference you would get is is probably you know i think actually i think one of the minority clients has a better um better a better reward sorry will give you more rewards than the majority clients and they will kind of like based

on the protocol rules as well so yeah definitely go check out this website it's got all the resources you need here i'm very glad to see this but as i said i i don't mean to discourage people from changing over by saying that i don't think it's going to move the needle enough if if if the solo stake is changed over because most solo stakes won't change like that's just the way it is especially not before withdrawals are enabled because what people are worried about is screwing something up and if you screw something up you won't be able to restake until withdrawals are enabled because your funds will be stuck if you get kicked out of the validator set so it's kind of like potentially a year where you wouldn't be staking um and you could get slashed and i totally understand people's hesitation to to

change but i mean um if you're not worried about that then definitely change in your running prism definitely consider changing to one of the other clients out there so ethereum.org has a brand new page uh uh that kind of like runs you through how to run an ethereum full node and why you would want to do this and all that good stuff there so i have obviously talked about this a lot on the refuel over the the months and why you should do it uh but this is like a very very simple guide of how to get started a bunch of different ways to get started and and to kind of like run your own node kind of like hardware requirements for this as i said to you guys you real i mean the biggest hardware requirement is probably just a ssd and they're pretty

cheap these days so about a two terabyte ssd would um would work here uh and then a bunch of links to other things and also um uh the guides to staking your ether and stuff like that so very very cool to see this page from the ethereum dot org website here if you're not running an ethereum full node yet and you have the capacity to do so i would highly recommend uh doing it because i mean you're helping the health of the network by doing it yes you're not getting any rewards from it but you are definitely helping the the network stay decentralized and this is the main reason why we keep the network you know so limited at layer one we want to make it so that people can run full nodes whenever they want and uh i think you know as ethereans our duty

is to run a full node if we're able to like and if you can afford to i mean it's not a a cheap endeavor if you don't have a pc that you leave on all the time then you you probably need to buy a separate pc that you you that you would kind of like have as your dedicated um dedicated station for running a full node on so i totally get it but at the end of the day it's not super expensive but still if even only if you're able to do it you should do it you shouldn't force yourself to do it or anything like that uh but uh but yeah this guide will help you with that if you're interested so the block is reporting that uh consensus is poised to double its valuation in a pending fundraise now i don't know i remember what their last

valuation was i think it's yeah yeah so uh they've their last valuation was 3.2 billion dollars a little over two months ago that i that i covered back then um so if they double that valuation it'll be 6.4 billion dollars or 6.5 billion dollars um i don't think consensus commented on this report from the block but the block's pretty good so i'm sure this kind of like is very accurate here now the reason why i wanted to talk about this was because it's just crazy to see how far um this stuff has come because like i don't know how many of you were around back in 2018 and 2019 but consensus was really struggling for funding they had to cut stuff uh there was a kind of like um i'm pretty sure consensus was basically being run off joe lupin's eat stash right he was

selling eve to to kind of like keep the company afloat and no one wanted to invest uh any large sums into consensus from from from kind of like um from memory here because no one really wanted to invest large sums into into crypto in general because people either wrote it off or it just wasn't a hot area it wasn't considered a place that you that you could put your money now obviously fast forward a couple years and it's a night and day difference people would are clamoring to invest in everything they're clamoring to invest in consensus because the consensus is is you know for all internal purposes a very successful company they're the company that created metamask and infuria and truffle suite and a bunch of other things out there that a lot of people use they've funded a lot of a lot of different things in

the ecosystem they've been a force for good a very very positive force so no wonder you know people are clamoring to kind of um i guess invest in them especially because they want to get exposure to metamask as well i mean metamask is an absolutely massive tool yes people hate on it all the time it doesn't matter they have tens of millions of active monthly users and that's nothing to scoff at especially crypto users who are using it for financial transactions and all that sort of stuff there so not much more details about this fundraise but i'm sure it's going to be uh have participation from all the names that we all know uh in terms of like vcs i've also it's also got me wondering if consensus is going to do a token themselves or if they're going to go public it would probably make sense for

them to go public not actually do a token so just list on the stock extent stock exchange uh or the you know in new york or something because they're a us-based company i don't think it would make sense for them to do a token uh i don't see why that what benefit that would bring to them i don't see consensus wanting to become like a dow um but maybe they do maybe this was kind of like joe lubin's goal all along maybe he wants consensus to become a true dow and really the only way to do that is to have a token attached to it but i don't know i'm not convinced but we'll have to see you know even investing for equity and for uh for shares um if if consensus was to list on the on the stock market would still offer up a pretty decent return

because i'm sure metamask will eventually tokenize and that kind of like and obviously consensus will own a large chunk of that and that'll be worth you know billions if not tens of billions of dollars i reckon um that you know then you have all the other properties that they kind of um make money off of and then you have like the consulting services and auditing services so it definitely makes sense there but yeah really really cool to see consensus are raising another round just such a night and day difference between what it was like two to three years ago you know struggling for funding massive layoffs hundreds of people getting uh losing their job to what we what we where we are today where consensus seems to uh you know not be struggling for money at all anymore actually probably having too much money thrown at them from what i've seen from

the uh the private markets uh over the last few months so yeah i'll cover this when it's i guess like officially public but just wanted to kind of i guess a signal boost booster there so uh yesterday arc invest which is a very popular in uh kind of like fund in the traditional finance space that's been making moves into crypto recently published i guess one of their investment kind of reports here and they were pretty uh heavy on crypto so they kind of talked about crypto a lot in this report and they also mentioned that they believe each market cap could exceed 20 trillion in the next 10 years now i quote tweeted this and i said i tend to agree now you guys know that i have said you know plenty of times before that i believe over the next five to ten years eth really has a shot of

going to a 10 trillion dollar market cap which would put it you know depending on the eat supply based on the burn things like that would put it anywhere from 80 to 100k per per kind of like token here it really depends on on how much we're burning and and things like that and it really depends if it happens in five years or ten years so but yeah i added to 100k depending on the supply there um now you know arc invest is saying that they think it can go to 20 trillion in 10 years and look i'm not going to disagree with that like you know obviously uh it'd be nice if it went there but i i actually don't think it's too far-fetched to say that because i think what ends up happening in crypto or in just like general with a lot of

things is people just don't i mean humans inherently don't do well with exponential growth they kind of like are very linear based where it's kind of like okay if something's growing you know slowly over time they kind of understand that but it's when you kind of hit exponential growth humans have a really tough job kind of like uh rectifying that or um uh coming to terms with that not rectifying um uh wait what's the word i'm looking for reconciling that in in their head because think about it like uh most of our lives are linear and not exponential what we feel like us aging is a linear process it is not exponential we don't just jump from like age one to twenty right we go one two three you know in a linear kind of fashion whereas a lot of this exponential growth that we see

within tech and particularly when we talk about network effects happens so so quickly that it just blindsides us like uh i you know for example within crypto a protocol can have like 10 million dollars of tvl and then the next day it can literally have a billion dollars of tbr just literally overnight and uh people underestimate how quickly that can happen because it's just it's very foreign to us unless you you know you're in the weeds and you're actually diving deep into this sort of stuff i think the same applies to pricing you know right now its market cap is what 300 and something billion dollars 220 billion or something like that uh billion dollars um i think i think it might be less than depending on the price you know depending what the price is there but essentially to get the 20 trillion obviously it's a it's a you know it's a

slog from here but it could happen relatively quickly if you actually study what the crypto kind of like ecosystem looks like much of the major price moves are done in a relatively short period of time and then a lot of the time is just kind of like trending sideways for a while and kind of like correcting and just like finding a new bottom um so i think that's you know maybe 20 trillion in 10 years maybe a bit optimistic i still think we can see 10 trillion but it's good to see these kind of like signals coming from the more traditional world because i think that you know they're kind of like waking up to the fact that eth is you know the premier collateral within d5 is a story of value uh has like a risk-free kind of like uh internet bond with staking is you being

used as money within nfts is going to become deflationary right has the burn and things like that and has all the demand at the end of the day and will scale so i think or you know when you kind of like put all that together it doesn't surprise me that these firms are kind of putting out reports like this and these investment reports go out to you know the non-crypto people right a lot of non-crypto people and especially people that um that have all the wealth right like the older generations that have a lot of the wealth and i actually do believe over the next few years especially when it comes to staking there's going to be a lot of the a lot of staking products uh repackaged by traditional finance institutions and sold on sold to these people and it's going to bring in a ton of money into

this space so i actually don't think it's far-fetched to say the market cap could exceed 20 trillion in the next 10 years it's not a guarantee of course just just kind of like my belief just arc invest belief and it's not investment advice it's just that it's just kind of like a price target there and obviously arc has as far as i know i think they have a bit of an eighth position obviously i have a neat position but i think um you know if everything goes right for ethereum and 8th as an asset i don't see a reason why this this can't happen uh 10 years is actually quite a long time when you think about it i mean you know relative to a lot of different things you can think back 10 years like what the world looked like 10 years ago was very very

different to what it is today especially the tech world so that comes back to exponential growth and how quickly these things can can go absolutely bananas so very uh very cool to see that arc investors put out this kind of like target here we'll see if they're right maybe you know i'm i want to say i'll still be doing the refill in 10 years uh i hope i hope i am i don't know if i i will or not but uh you know if i am still doing the refuel in 10 years then uh definitely um we'll we'll uh we'll try to remember to come back to this maybe i should do a a reminder underneath my own tweet and say remind me in 10 years right to see if they were right but i'm sure at that point uh we'll we'll know or not

so nifty island is out with another teaser video today uh i think yesterday actually i think i missed this one of my friends pointed out to me but basically this is a very early alpha demo of the nifty island game world here of the metaverse world uh looks like a bunch of buildings around here and and you know their character v buddha and he's jumping around a few different kind like floating little islands i guess um but i mean you guys know i'm really looking forward to this game i've been following it for quite a while i have my you know legendary neon palm i have my my nifty blade and all that sort of stuff but i'm really looking forward to being able to finally play the game because uh for me look i like or love nfts in general but i i'm just so uninspired by all the copy

paste and you know 10 000 profile picture nfts i've said this to you guys before i'm just looking forward to being able to do stuff with my nfts and to bring them into game worlds to show them off to hang out with my friends to do vr stuff like i just want more of that and i want less of i mean buy a profile picture and choose between the 10 other picture pictures that you bought because you can only have one right you only have one profile picture on twitter and if you keep changing it it kind of confuses people as well so um that's another reason why i'm not really a big fan of that and it feels like a lot of them are just people kind of like flipping flipping the uh the profile pictures which is fine i have nothing wrong with

that but it's just it's uninteresting right like i i feel like the more interesting aspect is being able to bring all of our items into these you know open game worlds open meta verses uh hang out with friends do cool stuff with it rather than just staring at it at our open sea kind of like profile right so coolest cities from nifty island i can't wait for their their their alpha to go live soon so bartek is out with another great thread about uh why independent monitoring of rollout parameters is important so in this threat he's taken a look at anti-censorship mechanism of arbitram uh and using their jan 9 sequencer outage which was a nine hour outage as an example here so i highly recommend giving this re giving this

thread a read i've seen a few a fair few people kind of like ask about um this sort of stuff and asked asked about what happened with kind of like arbitrarily asked about like what's what you know what's what's the goal with kind of like censorship and censorship resistance and things like that and what you can do to exit to l1 and all that sort of stuff so i just wanted to kind of like point this out to you guys definitely go check out this thread for a read on that and in a related kind of uh i guess post here one from hexonaut who wrote an article about deploying uh your token or dap to l2 first and the mental model to switch involved with making this choice so you've probably seen some discussions recently about how when you deploy your contract to arbitrary optimism on l2

only you can do that but then if you want to exit to l1 or have it on r1 you have to deploy it to l1 as well which is obviously a larger cost than it is on l2 uh there's a lot of um kind of things coming for developers to make this an easier process and in this kind of blog post hexanote describes a bit of this and and and you know goes through eric wahl's tweet who actually started discussion around this and how we can kind of like uh i guess like um fix this and how we can kind of like make this flow better for developers so if you're a dev definitely go check this out it should be very interesting for you so investor finance today it had announced that they are conducting their treasury bootstrapping event using prime dow's prime liquid launch and interface

for conducting liquidity bootstrapping pool events so if you're interested in getting your hands on this you can definitely check this out i don't usually bring up token sales um but there's two you know two reasons why i'm bringing it up one i'm an investor in investor and i'm actually super excited about this project they're launching natively on layer two and i've told you guys plenty of times that i'm very very excited about layer two native projects and two i've seen a lot of people in the discord channel talking about vesta so i felt that was just very relevant for you guys out there don't wanna show you too much on it please you know don't buy this on my recommendation i'm not even recommending you to buy it i'm just pointing out that they're going to have this treasury bootstrapping event so just think just because i know a lot of

you guys are interested in it i didn't want you to miss out uh or anything like that so you can definitely check out the um thread in the blog post for more details on how this is all going to work here it's a pretty interesting mechanism um so so yeah definitely have a have a have a look at this in the youtube description below so paul miller here uh released an ethereum cryptography 1.0 which was funded by the ethereum foundation so this is a new audited library set behind and and behind it will empower all kinds of projects in the space so you can it's basically a cryptography stack for developers for researchers for all that good stuff there um if you're not a developer or a researcher that handles cryptography stuff then this probably isn't going to be very relevant to you but i figured

i'd point it out for those people out there who were who are kind of like interested in this and you know it's funny because i've seen some discussions around you know why would you want your own l1 over an l2 and one of the one of the answers was that with your own l1 you have control over things like what cryptography it uses obviously if your image is its own set of cryptography um and the avm does as well and that's not likely to change anytime soon whereas if you want to use something custom you can't do i mean you can do it at an l2 to an extent but you're still kind of like a subject of l1 um cryptography uh but like if you wanted to you could have your own l1 and do whatever you want on there i think that's like a very niche thing i don't

think it's actually a selling point i don't think most projects or almost all projects should ever be spitting up their own l1 it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons as i've outlined before but this you know ethereum cryptography stack basically runs through what you can do with ethereum cryptography and how it covers a lot of the the major use cases that you would want here so definitely go check out uh this if you're interested in that sort of stuff so connex tweeted out they've done that they've done some gas cost reductions so they've been analyzing gas consumed on every roll-up chain that they support to optimize their estimates eg you can see optimism below and now because of that fees are now 30 to 40 percent cheaper throughout the entire uh connextor

network yeah this is awesome i mean as i've said to you guys plenty of times before i've talked about this so much lately these networks these bridges these l2s they're so early and they're going to optimize the out of their gas because that's their selling point a lot of the time like the bridges selling point obviously is twofold one is being able to bridge it quickly in and out of l2s and different chains but two is being able to do that cheaply because there's no use being able to bridge between things if it's super expensive to do um and then the same you know goes for optimism where or kind of like these l2s where obviously they want to kind of get their costs down as much as possible and that can all be kind of like taken holistically and users can just enjoy a

very very seamless and cheap experience and obviously as more l1 upgrades come to ethereum that lower kind of cost for roll-ups and things like that uh we're gonna have even better uh optimizations there as well so super excited to see this from connex then yeah all this stuff's just gonna get so much better with time guys like we're so so early i mean if we're if you think we're early to crypto we're like a hundred times earlier to the l2 stuff and to the bridging and to how big this thing is going to get as i was saying before about exponential growth you know where a lot of us just can't fathom that like i i mean to be honest i probably can't even fathom it like how quickly this stuff is going to grow and how how much it's going to grow by because you might

be seeing today on aggregate all across like all the chains and layer twos we might be doing a few thousand transactions per second maybe maybe that right and i'm talking successful transactions not like spam transactions that people count as being successful no i'm talking about successful uh certificate transactions that are executed at an execution layer whether it be at layer one or layer two it's not more than a few thousand it's probably not even near a few thousand now i'm going to tell you within the next 10 years we could hit a point where that becomes millions of transactions per second and aggregate and successful transactions um and that's exponential from here right that's an absolutely massive amount of growth and we need to keep costs down we can't have the cost going up um with the

transaction uh demand at uh the execution layers obviously ethereum l1 is always going to be very limited and the costs are going to go up but the point is is that users at these other execution layers such as roll-ups will be able to get the cheap experience uh of these roll-ups because they scale better with transactional demand and then layer one does while being able to maintain security and decentralization here so yeah i mean honestly i should just set a reminder on my phone ten years from now watch uh the you know the refuel from from 2021 and 2022 and see how much you you know you were able to predict because i actually think that it might even happen faster than 10 years because of as i mentioned before exponential growth and how

quickly that stuff can happen there so yeah anyway very cool to see this uh fear reduction here from connext all right so finally we have another blog post out of polygon uh titled zk verse polygons zero knowledge strategy explained which i'm very very glad they put this out because i've seen a fair few people ask me recently about polygon zk strategy uh you know now that they have these teams under their umbrella polygon hermes midan nightfall and zero what's their strategy you know what are they going to do with this what's in store for the future when are users going to be able to kind of like play around with them and in this uh blog post they basically go through the technology behind each solution the people behind them and the roadmap so if you're interested in any of this you can definitely check out the blog post here

i'm really glad they put this out because as i said people have been asking me about this and it can be confusing because you might be thinking okay well there's a polygon pls chain that's really the only thing that anyone uses today because the other stuff is i mean hermes is live on mainnet but it doesn't really have any kind of like applications right now um but uh you know everyone's wondering okay well you know there's the pos chain we're all using it but i want to use polygon zero zero knowledge kind of like roll up stuff and that's coming right like and this blog post details that but it's gonna take longer than people think it will and as i've explained before this is exactly why i've been such a champion for optimistic roll ups in the face of zk rollups like even if zk roll

ups end up being like you know in a couple years end up being like a million times better than optimistic roll ups on on cost and on speed and all that sort of stuff um you know optimus develops are live and working today they've got adoption they have an ecosystem so let's kind of like use that sort of stuff but at the end of the day um you know i think we're going to be using both for a very long time which is fine i mean you know you use what you want to use you use what you get value out of and i'm really excited to see more people use uh use these kind of like tools no matter what they are and as i explained yesterday the layer two walls they're heating up right there and the layer two wars have so many teams a

part of them now um and you know when i talk about the actual wars between different layer twos i'm talking about the generalized platforms not so much the app specific ones like for example example dydx is roll up he's not competing with arbitrary's roll up it's not competing with optimisms whereas arbitram optimism stark net zk sync and polygon solutions are all competing on the generalized front and you know this i mean and obviously the optimism forks like boba and metis and uh i think nami as well or something like that they're all competing on that kind of generalized front there but i've told you guys before that i don't expect there to be more than a few major winners in terms of kind of like having the most market share because of a variety of different

reasons but it's just how things kind of tend to play out with the pareto principle there or kind of um you could kind of like google that and check out the 80 20 rule um the same goes for l ones obviously i expect ethereum to ma to uh you know uh remain the dominant uh one smart contract platform and eventually replace bitcoin as the dominant uh crypto network in you know uh by market cap but uh you know at the end of the day i think you know everything's competing with everything but all this competition is going to be very very healthy and i'm super excited to see uh you know what polygon does with their solutions and uh in terms of like their zk solutions and i'm really really excited to see how everything else scales alongside it as well but i think on that note i 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