Dappnet introduced, Aztec reveals Noir and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #463 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony until the 7th of October 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so another Bridge hack today this time it has hit the binance bridge uh and about two million dollars I believe worth of B and B was stolen which was worth 566 million dollars at time of the theft here now this is one of the largest bridge hacks that we've seen in the ecosystem obviously not the first won't be the last I mean it's kind of funny at this point because we've seen so many of these uh kind of like Bridge hacks before right that's it's not even surprising anymore like I work up to this and I'm just like okay well just another Bridge hack right uh and Samsung

here as usual has the best thread on the topic so if you want to get the full details of what actually happened in the hack you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I do want to clarify some things here so the first thing I want to kind of clarify is that you can look at this right and you can see okay well this this means the multi-chain thesis is dead blah blah you know this means it's insecure all these sorts of stuff you know l2s are more secure than than these kind of cross-chain bridges blah blah right and I've spoken about this before but essentially there are a lot of similarities but also differences between these the similarities are at the Smart contract level right like every smart contract just like every piece of code or any code that he's

written can have bugs that exist within it the more complex the code the more risk for bugs is the general rule of thumb there but then there are economic concerns so if your bridge is secured by validators there is a concern of uh 51 attack on the bridge and that's usually related to its economics so if it's cheap to attack then there could be an attack uh there's attack on the cryptography itself if that's not implemented correctly that's related to a Smart contract bug but a bit different there so there are multiple kind of ways to attack things here and obviously there are bridges that are just multi-cigs and if that got compromised and the bridge gets compromised so yeah there are multiple different different ways to to compromise a bridge here I think the the main advantage layer twos have are at least Roll-Ups have over the

you know the cross chain Bridges at least from my perspective is that they're easier to reason about which means that the contracts are much simpler uh and much more secure because they're just hosted on ethereum and the l2s through their proving systems uh inherent ethereum security that uh by because of that that's what makes them secure it's not so much that uh they're more secure because I don't know the smart contract itself is written any written better or written in a certain language it's definitely got to do with the fact that they're easier to reason about which means they're simpler like a bridge a roll-up uh Bridge so to speak about a bridge contract uh can definitely be implemented in a much simpler way than a cross-chain bridge and as I said there are many different cross-chain Bridges the one of the most popular ones is actually just the

multi-sig right um but other ones that use some of these other existing Bridge infrastructure they have economic concerns uh they have collusion concerns they have validated concerns all those sorts of stuff right whereas a roll-up Bridge does not have that it's on ethereum layer one it is secured by the ethereum layer 1 validators and then the really the major concern that you have is that there's a a smart contract bug right just like any smart contract essentially which is totally I guess expected at this point in time you know every smart contract that you interact with has a chance of bugs but if the simpler it is you know the less moving parts to the contract the less chance of a bug there so I'm fortunate to see that this has happened to binance bridge yard into their BNB chain but again not surprised they actually ended up pausing

the chain as well which again I'm not surprised about either since it's completely centralized which is just kind of funny when I look at this it's like okay well there's there's this massive well there was this massive alt L1 thesis and there's also uh kind of uh people continuing going on about all this cross-chain stuff that's going to happen a lot of people seem to be getting uh doubling down on the cosmo Seeker system lately which is fine like I don't consider the cosmos ecosystem to your bad ecosystem or anything like that but they've got all these like theories and thesis around certain things and I'm looking at it I'm like guys like cross-chain stuff is really hard to get right and it's really hard to do it securely vitalik has written about this before so instead of doubling down on the thesis of like a cross chain world

how about actually uh you know making sure that you can actually do that you can actually do it securely rather than doubling down on it I think when it comes to something like Roll-Ups we can have relative certainty that they're going to be secure and they are secure because of that linkage to ethereum but when you start doing cross-chain stuff when you start thinking about tokens securing chains so for example the uh the app chain thesis right where it runs like well not everyone but a lot of people are like oh we can have app chains as their own Sovereign l1s I'm like oh okay that's all well and good but that means you're securing yourself you're securing that app chain with its native token and then to I guess um to talk to other chains there has to be Bridges everywhere right so from that

perspective you're adding so much risk in and for what some sovereignty I mean like how much do you do you actually need that sovereignty like there's very few things out there that actually need full sovereignty over the chain and they can just become Roll-Ups and I've talked about this before so there are a lot of considerations here obviously I'm on the side of a roll-up Centric future where it's multi-chain meaning ethereum and Roll-Ups rather than cross chain meaning ethereum and all these other l1s just talking to each other or just l1s in general talking to each other I think it'll happen regardless but I don't think that's the long-term secure solution for for this ecosystem at least that's my view on things I mean some people will call me an eth maxi for that but that's just my honest thoughts on that anyway I'll link Samsung's thread

in the YouTube description below and you can go check this out all right some news today out of the uh I guess like Celsius drama that just keeps getting worse and worse so a Fubar here on Twitter put out a tweet that said Celsius published a 14 000 page document detailing every user's full name linked to timestamp and amount of each deposit withdrawal liquidation this horrific breach of privacy will lead to many robbed and killed anything not provably cryptographically private will become public so essentially what happened was that in this document you can correlate people's balances on Celsius with their addresses on ethereum for example which means that someone can if you you know they know who you are in Celsius they can dox your entire address history basically if it's all connected

right which is a huge breach of of privacy there but this to me is just another nail in the coffin for kyc you guys know my opinion on kyc I really do think that it it does more harm than good I think that if you want to do kyc and it's and and companies are still forced to do it then the best way to do it is to have the user own their own data Maybe through some kind of ZK technology I've talked about this before like a ZK idea or something on their phone and then use that to prove to these services that you are who you say you are and there's cryptographic proof there as as Fubar says here that means that and and by doing that it means that the data doesn't actually need to be stored at all by these centralized

services and they can essentially assign you a unique ID on their back end they don't have to assign you anything else they can just assign you a unique ID that basically says you know this is this account this is who this person is based on your I don't know zkid as I as I was calling it just then I think that's the better long-term solution obviously I'm against kyc generally but I mean if we're being realistic centralized services are probably never going to be able to not have to use kyc and AML and all that sorts of stuff but it doesn't mean they have to use the implementation of collecting all the user data storing it and just having this massive Treasure Trove of data that hackers can steal or insiders can steal and it can be leaked and all these sorts of stuff which obviously leaves a lot of

bad outcomes especially when linking it to ethereum addresses and other blockchain addresses which you know most aren't actually private so that's a that's a huge issue uh definitely a huge issue but I'm optimistic about DK ID technology or zero knowledge technology being uh uh used to I don't know do better implementations of kyc and AML uh for those centralized services but when it comes to D5 we can work around that like truly decentralized products and I'm not talking about the front ends I'm talking about the actual smart contracts on ethereum those things uh you know shouldn't have kyc on them at all and if they do then you could just Fork it or create a competitor and do a non-kyc

competitor now there's been a bit of concern I've been reading lately about people saying well the choke point such as centralized exchanges are just going to keep getting more and more regulated more and more locked down that eventually you're not even going to be able to withdraw to your own ethereum address so it doesn't matter that the ethereum D5 contracts don't have KAC I see on them you can't even access them anyway that is always a risk guys like that has always been a risk anytime you use a centralized service they can at any time freeze your account uh and that there's been many people who've had bad experiences with this where their account just gets frozen for months they go through shitty customer support that just doesn't get back to them it's really really bad and that's why I'm a big proponent of not your keys not your

coins right there was it's been around for a long time but it's very serious I mean I know self-custody comes with its own risks and things like that like you obviously probably don't trust yourself enough to self-custody large amounts and maybe you trust a centralized exchange more it's up to you but at the end of the day it doesn't matter what the amount is for me personally I would never trust it with a centralized exchange I just I've seen too many horror stories over the years too many exchanges go bust too many uh things happening even if you're doing everything right you're not doing anything wrong uh you or it can't your account can get arbitrarily locked and then if the they don't prioritize it if they don't want to help you with it uh you can be locked out for quite a while and that's your money sitting there and

you really don't have much recalls especially for these over seas or foreign exchanges so for example binance I mean you really don't have much recourse there right maybe in the US obviously if you're using coinbase or Kraken you have more recourse but if you're using binance even FTX because they're not I mean there's FTX us but I mean that they're based in like the the Seychelles or I think the the Bahamas are one of those offshore entities there it's it's hard to get recourse on on on that uh part anyway but anyway I've gone off to track a little bit here just sad to see another one of these uh I guess um things happen within the crypto ecosystem for me personally I'll be avoiding the centralized Services as much as possible uh going forward I mean I have been traditionally I've never used Celsius I've never used blockfi I

refuse to use any of them and this is one reason why there's a bunch of other reasons but this is definitely one of the major ones that's for sure all right so Julio from the Aragon team has a nice update here out today about Aragon uh so he posted a screenshot to Twitter saying look at Eragon just syncing without a consensus layer with its own integrated consensus Network layer if you need to use the node for anything that is not super critical and you are too lazy to set up a consensus layer client uh now with dash dash experimental.ly client which is a flag you can use within Aragon you can do that so uh Julia says without with this is without validation for now so do not use it for anything like a bridging or any critical infrastructure use it only for light personal use Channel anal

analysis or testing it is now merged in Aragon uh D level uh so go check it out this is really cool because obviously post merge ethereum uh to become an ethereum full node you need to run a consensus layout client and also an execution layer client which if you're thinking syncing from scratch uh it can take a little while to do that so if you want to just quickly spin up some personal infrastructure well you can just you know use Aragon and just sync Aragon you don't have to worry about syncing a consensus layer client with this new experimental like client flag which is very very cool and this is exactly what we're trying to do with like clients or at least along the same lines of what we're trying to do with like clients here where essentially we're trying to make it so that people

don't have to download and sync all these sorts of stuff uh from the chain uh to use to use it as their own personal RPC or something like that but you can basically get the same guarantees with a light client that what you're talking to or the or what you're seeing is the actual chain is the actual canonical change so very very cool to see this I um I love all the experimentation Aragon is doing I know that Aragon has gotten some Flack here and there from people especially around our pre and post merge how the client was a bit unstable uh with um with uh the merge itself and kind of posting invalid blocks and stuff like that but the thing is the reason why it's like that I think is because they have so many cool features that they're implementing into Aragon it's like they

I think they want it to be I mean they've got like Aragon two and three coming out they want it to be a more stable reliable client like Geth but they also want to push the boundaries here with more experimental stuff and stuff that people end users can actually get usage out of and get value out of which I think there's need to be a delicate balance there at the end of the day I spoke about this last week everyone's going to use Geth if Geth Remains the most stable secure and reliable client um and there are other execution layer clients as well there's not just Aragon obviously there's base to another mind and a cooler as well and I think there's some others out there too but essentially Geth is so popular because of that stability now I think Aragon will probably get to a nice point where

they've got these experimental features but they've also got like a nice stable client that works that syncs that is all well and good and people love using and that will obviously do wonders for client diversity which is still on the execution layer side of things uh in there's much leaves much to be desired there but I think it's just cool that Aragon is is attempting to strike this balance between uh experimental features but also becoming a reliable execution layer client all right some eip4844 news today which is proto-dank sharding so a coinbase actually shared a blog post here saying excited to share coinbase's public support and contributions to eip4844 an upcoming Improvement to the ethereum protocol that will scale layer to Rolex by increasing transaction throughput and

decreasing fees 10 to 100x now I spoke about this the other day when I talked about the latest eip4844 Community call and how there were two I believe two Engineers from coinbase on there and coinbase has been very very involved with erp4844 which has been amazing to see I mean as I've said before this is one of the major eips coming up this will add heaps of scalability for Roll-Ups and it's great to see that a institution like coinbase that has resources is putting those resources behind this up upgrade here and obviously they're not the only ones working on it I discussed the other day there's people from the ethereum foundation and optimism and a few uh I guess people independent people there as well working on this and it's such a major thing that I'm just glad that coinbase is involved then there was also

a comment from Jesse here who works at in the protocols team at coinbase uh kind of saying you know he's excited to share how climax is helping Seattle ethereum and then uh latte Todd I think is how you say the name here uh us you know why doesn't Comet allow deposits and withdrawals from layer 2 Roll-Ups yet and Jesse said we're working on this as well more news soon they've been working on it for quite a while I believe probably a year at this point or probably longer than that and if they added support for the polygon POS chain but I'm super excited for them to add support for things like optimism and arbitrim you know obviously the Roll-Ups on ethereum and other networks uh as as time goes on there but great to see them contributing all as they can to 48 44 here as I said major upgrade for

ethereum something that I'm going to be talking about more and more as the next few months go on and you should definitely learn about it I know it can become a bit technical I mean the merge itself was pretty technical but you could have a kind of like high level narrative for the merge you can have one for 48.44 you can say okay well you know roll-up fees are going to go down by 10 to 100 X or then people will ask well why is that the case well it's because we're introducing these new transaction type called blobs that is cheaper but then storing core data and then you can install these things and they expire after a month and now I've already lost like 99 of people right just just by saying that which is totally fine but if you're really interested in learning

about it I've shouted out this website before you can go to erp4844.com yeah erp4844.com has all the resources you need on there to learn about exactly what this is and why it's going to be so important for ethereum scalability going forward all right so I spoke about Mev boost I believe yesterday or the day before and flashbots and how the delineation exists there how like flashbots is the company Mev business the software well uh flashbot is actually looking to spin out uh Mev booster software as its own self-sustained open source software project with a diverse group of stewards so if you're interested in designing the future of Mev boost you can take a look at this forum Pro Str this is very timely given all the recent I guess like

ofak sanctions another cash stuff the relay censoring all that sorts of stuff and this is really really cool because by making Mev booster software and by disconnecting it from flashbots themselves it becomes more and more of a public good it becomes something that the entire ethereum ecosystem uh I guess support revolves around works on rather than just like one centralized company being flashbots the creators of it uh being the the major contributor here so very very cool to to see that this is being this is being done here it's not just an idea it's actually going forward now some people have asked you that this man is going to be a flashbots token or sorry an MAV boost token I don't think so I mean I don't know for sure obviously and I don't know uh where it

would fit in here obviously when people say we're going to spin it out as its own project and it's going to be self-sustained and and fun and and and become part of the ethereum ecosystem you know nine times out of ten it results in a token but not everything has to have a token there can be things like mov boost that just exist as pure public goods and get funding from various different uh things within the ecosystem and to be honest the goal is that for Mev booster software to actually not be a lot a long term needed with it with PBS we actually just enshrine uh the Mev boost I guess features in the protocol itself so you don't actually need this software anymore but until we get to that until we actually get to in protocol PBS which is a long way away actually it's not

going to come anytime soon we do need Mev boost and it do needs it doesn't need to be worked on and all the learnings that we get from that can actually be implemented in with within protocol PBS as well so the investment is worth it but if there's a token well it doesn't really make much sense because long term logically that token would actually be worthless because the Mev boosts software or ecosystem gets folded into in protocol PBS and then in protocol PBS means that it's actually in the ethereum protocol itself and it's not actually secured or incentivized by a different token it's obviously part of the the ecosystem then but uh but yeah I don't know I don't know if there's going to be a token or not but that's just one thing that I want to talk about I wanted to clarify there but you should

definitely give this foreign post a read I mean vitalik chimes in here and said you know mbv boost is interesting because it doesn't quite fit into any of the buckets that we're used to thinking about within ethereum it's not part of the ethereum protocol so it doesn't fit well under the all-called devsumbrella it is a protocol but not a centralized application right it's not a regular ERC because it's not finished and it's already systematically important and greatly affects people's economic interests obviously it is because mov is a very big thing so and then Pattaya continues by saying another thing to keep in mind is that the me in the medium term realistically two to eight years really wide uh uh timeline here um but he said he's not sure Mev boost will be replaced by in protocol PBS as I was explaining so the structure does not

need to last forever but we can't assume PBS will come quickly what does this all imply at some kind of parallel version of all call devs uh question mark definitely not a simple question and there's some more discussions around here some from people in the ecosystem like Patrick McCory here uh Hudson Jameson uh Yaz as well who's been pretty involved with the ethereum ecosystem and ethereum classic ecosystem as well for a very long time um but uh but yeah essentially yeah I mean I think this is quite important when you when you kind of look at this and and see that removes as a piece of software definitely needs to be a public good it can't just be centralized around one company especially not a company that is us-based and is required to adhere to ofac sanctions and and all that sorts of

stuff so I thought it was interesting but I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out yourself uh this is a perfect segue into something else got to do with the recent ofac sanctions so Liam here has tweeted has ofac violated your rights you may be entitled to decentralization and he's introduced something called dapnet so what is dapnet dapnet is something that is being made to resist capture it is a permissionless application Network built on ipfs and ens so the problem right now is that we can access dapps through DNS and servers so through the normal web but they can be taken down since it captured and seized from us at any time the solution to this so far has been using the ens decentralized name system and hosting the content of dapps on ipfs which is a bit torrent-like P2P Network

ens names can't be seized and ipfs cannot be censored So currently the best way to use daps deployed on here is to use a Gateway like ether limo and gateways make the ux simple for users by simply visiting tornadocash.e.limo and the Gateway will handle resolving resolving the ens domain to its content on ipfs however these gateways always fail because they are all centralized uh go on click it so click tornado cash.e.limo you can't access tornado because eve.memo is us-based and they had to censor it so another big Gateway like eth.link went down because of the Virgil Griffith drama there and this will obviously happen time and time again because these are centralized gateways so the only solution here is true decentralization putting ipfs ins

Tech into the browser and you know the big brain Illuminati is thinking about this too so this is what Liam has worked on basically he was started working on this um figuring out a go to market for his decentralized Database Network Network called Goliath and he got thinking this one be too hard to build I know exactly what it should look like so he's focused on building it um and there's a video here of that happening so in the background everything is downloaded peer-to-peer via the capture resistant ipfs Network the dapnet client runs a local ipfs note in the background the node is pre-configured to be fast it automatically appears with big ipfs providers like cloudflare and flick the client runs a local ens Gateway equivalent to eth.limo or ease.link but Rewritten to run completely locally on the user's machine and there are lots of

other details that make this experience beautiful https everywhere for eighth useful for error Pages etc etc and all this puts together means that for the first time ever we can own a place on the internet that can't be taken away from us and doesn't rely on a single host who dictates what is allowed I think they'll have a profound effect for the web as Liam says here and the thread continues you can give it a read I did kind of read a lot of that thread there but I think it's important context so the tldr is that this is a client that runs locally on your own computer and that does everything nice and easily in the background for you for you to be able to access these apps on ipfs in a censorship resistant way so you run your own local ens resolver you run your own

uh client to talk to ipfs so that you can access this content and in the screenshot here you can see just a very basic example what this looks like it's a client that has the apps here you would double click on this or something and it would load up the app for you and you'd be accessing it on ipfs rather than a centralized server resolving using a decentralized ens resolver as as well they're using your own resolver I should say this is a game changer guys like it's I mean it's mind-boggling that we haven't had this up until now but the fact that this exists now the fact that it's going to keep getting worked on Liam's probably going to be able to raise money for this to be honest because it's so important is awesome and this obviously is in response to the ofax stuff you know the funny thing

about the ofax sanctions is that they've really kicked the ass of the ethereum community to take censorship resistance seriously because before it was an afterthought it was it was more of a okay we know there's a possibility of censorship and we know that it's a you know it's a risk but it hasn't happened yet in any real way so we're gonna just leave it for now and then all of a sudden in August August 8th I believe oh fat came out and said we're going to sanction tornado cash and then oh everything went haywire right like the censorship happened here it happened here the block producers started censoring because uh of um things like MVP boost relays the front ends did it and then everyone was like oh we need to actually get serious about censorship resistance now and not just at the layer one but across the entire

stack the ens resolver the uh the front ends right everything and all needs to be decentralized so this dap net uh the thing here is one step towards that it's obviously not the quote-unquote solution but the thing is is that as long as this is open source which it isn't right now but Liam says it will be open source in the future as long as this is open source and works as advertised then this is all you really need at the end of the day because you're talking to the contracts on ethereum and as long as the contracts themselves aren't censoring you then then uh you're good now obviously this doesn't address block uh I guess like layer 1 block producer censorship concerns right it doesn't produce it doesn't really address that at all but the thing is is that that's also being worked on with other

Solutions but this is at the highest level of layers of the stack which I think is absolutely awesome so go check this thread out give it a read I think as I said this is amazing groundbreaking love it uh I don't know what else I can say about it at this stage I think that you're just gonna have to read the thread form your own opinion on this but I'm definitely going to be using this uh you know as time goes on I I think this is just a demo right now I don't know if there's actually any way to to kind of use it right now um I think uh yeah I'm not I'm not totally sure uh if there's a way to use it right now yeah I guess like uh not not just yet and as I said it's not open source but once it does come out I'll

definitely be a user of this that's for sure all right so we've all heard talk recently about how post merge it may look like that each became a security right which is nonsense we all know it's nonsense but the folks over at Paradigm have put together this blog post uh well at least them and Jake chavinsky's not at Paradigm has put together this blog post uh titled ethereum's new staking model does not make eth a security so this was published by Rodrigo uh Sierra Amy XI Zhang and Jake travinsky I have probably butchered the pronunciation of their names but that's fine um and it's quite lengthy I suggest giving it a read but this is this is great this is what we need we need people who know what they're talking

about writing about these sorts of things and writing about it as part of a publication as part of a reputable firm such as Paradigm if I had to pick one VC in the secret system that has the best reputation it would be Paradigm like at the top of every list you could find about VCS in crypto Paradigm should be at at the top every single time so it just sends a very strong signal here and this blog post I mean I haven't read the whole thing yet I skimmed through it a bit was really good it actually explained things in terms that I could understand and it's got a bunch of references here as well with within the footnote section it's not too long so definitely recommend giving it a read but I think it's a good signal and I think it's good that they've come to the

conclusion that it obviously does not make ether security I mean we all knew it didn't but there's been people pushing that for a little while now which is kind of annoying and disappointing and everything but uh that's that's just what's been happening right so so yeah anyway I'll go give this a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so I spoke about eighth restaking the other day with the in the context of eigenlayer um and Van Spencer put out a tweet yesterday today saying he's excited for E3 staking so for example steak eth get an LSD such as stake Ste to secure a new blockchain such as compute stories that availability and similar it is similar to how D5 yield Farms grew stable coins dramatically during D5 summer restaking is a catalyst for lsds being truly used

expands the total a total adjustable Market of eth which it does it's really cool when you think about it like this and for those of you who are around in DFI summer you'll recognize this interface this was forked endlessly this front end and everyone was using it you would deposit your uh so so in in his Farms you would kind of like deposit a token and then you would earn uh you know another token and then you could get that token and deposit that into another Farm there was just all this restaking going on and it was extremely popular and it's actually what made D5 what it is today really it's what grew defy and stable coins uh so dramatically as Vance says said here so we say a similar thing with restaking eat because if you're already staking your teeth and you have sta if you have R8 you have

some other liquid staking token and you're just sitting in your wallet or you want to do something with that so if someone says to you hey you can restake this with us and we'll pay you some of our token or you can restate this with us and you'll uh you'll secure a new blockchain and you'll get paid in fees or whatever people are going to do that and I think that's a really cool way to do it so I'm going to be paying attention to restaking more and more as time goes on uh but you can definitely check out this tweeze I mean there's a little tweet thread here it's not really that long but I just thought it was a cool thing that advanced tweeted about today all right so as Tech is out with a major announcement today so they've said you've heard of zero knowledge proofs

you've heard of snarks and plonk and ZK Roll-Ups but you haven't gotten started because you don't have a spare brain dedicated to learning cryptography that all changes today with Noir so Noir is a universal language of zero knowledge so basically it is a domain-specific language for creating and verifying zero knowledge proof proofs based on Rust this is obviously for the developers out there but this is cool because I I think one of the main blockers for developers has been the fact that zero knowledge stuff just generally is quite daunting when you look at it and when you start to learn about it especially on the um the uh the development side of things and as as Tech said here the need is that the current ZK stack is cumbersome and hard to understand circuit building languages require knowledge of cryptographic Concepts creating a barrier to widespread developer option

to building ZK right now you basically need two brains and the Simplicity of Noir means that having one brain is Enough by abstracting away all the cryptographic complexity or retaining the power and flexibility of other circuit building languages Noir allow as any developer not just those with cryptography knowledge to build ZK apps I mean anything that simplifies the developer experience here for ZK stuff is welcome in my eyes and I think that Aztec providing this for the community is awesome because it's not just going to apply to the Aztec protocol itself other zks can use this too like obviously Aztec is doing a lot of great stuff on them the Privacy side of things but there's plenty of the ZK uh EVMS coming out there's plenty of these other ZK constructions coming out that could take advantage of something like Noir so

very cool announcement here from Aztec you can read their full announcement thread in the YouTube description below right another big announcement here today came out of makerdale so megadel has initiated a 500 million investment in U.S treasuries and corporate bonds now this is huge 500 million that's half a billion uh dollars guys that's not no small amount here so what this is doing is for this allocation the Dow has partnered with a defy asset advisor called uh monatellis or monetellus I think it's monotelus um so to to buy these bonds and invest to buy the US Treasury bonds and investment grade corporate bonds uh now the there's been a bit of discussion about this especially in the daily wear Discord Channel about how this major centralized die even further but I don't think that's the case like I think

people don't understand that what usdc is backed by so usdc is obviously a large part of the maker protocol it's a large part of the collateral in there but usdc itself is not just backed by US dollars in a bank account it is backed by a US Government short-term bonds I believe uh uh USD like some level of USD and then cash equivalents and then probably some other stuff in small smaller quantities as time goes on so if like and I've always found this bizarre because what do people think or how do people think these uh stable cutting issuers are actually earning money on issuing the stable coin they're not just going to keep it in USD and keep it in the savings account where they earn some some interest on I mean obviously it's higher these days but for the longest time the interest on your on your USD in

a bank account was incredibly low so it wasn't worth them from a business perspective to do that so they buy other things that give them a better yield obviously um if they're trying to buy things that are as low risk as possible because if they don't then obviously it expands the risk all the or to all the usdc holders but don't be under the illusion that usdc's is 100 backed by actual USD in a bank account that's not the case at all it is backed by as I said cash equivalents some USD and and short-term US government bonds which I mean short-term U.S government bonds is probably just as safe as as cash when you really think about it at the end of the day really just as safe as USD I should say uh but yeah I wanted to clarify that for people so does this

purchase centralized diet even further I don't think so I think it actually probably does the other the opposite because you actually so there's two ways you I guess like decentralize the collateral like you just decentralize it by using the centralized collateral such as eth and then you do it also by I guess there's a there's a blurred line here between decentralized and distribute the collateral so that you have not just concentration on one centralized collateral but you have a bunch of different centralized collaterals that are uh all working together to act as obviously the full collateral for the system and through that distribution you get some level of decentralization so I think that's worthwhile doing and I also think that as I've explained before maker Dell's

approach to things is definitely trying to break into Trad Phi uh and I've talked about that on the reefer before and about how some people don't like that other people do I personally oh look I mean I I my opinion on these changes from time to time I'm more neutral on this than than most people are and I've talked about how I don't actually believe that we could get a truly decentralized scalable stable coin I just don't think that's ever going to exist so what's the next best thing well what maker is building with dye is probably the next best thing like as much as their centralization concerns as much as much as it doesn't you know it doesn't look like a diet that we no one loved on the single clutter will die if it die wants to actually scale then I think this is what's needed here so

that's why I'm more neutral on this topic but I'm always happy to hear uh uh kind of um uh rebuttals to that and and different opinions on that but that's my current stance on things but you can read this full announcement I'll put it in the YouTube description below and wow I've gone over time here so last up here is uh announcement from Bitcoin so Bitcoin is evolving Bitcoin grants will continue to be a public good on which the web for ecosystem can rely upon but soon we'll also be launching a concurrent offering the grants protocol so what is the grants protocol well it's a tool currently in closed beta that will allow any community to launch its own grants program that incorporates Community decision making this is really cool it basically means you can create your own Bitcoin grants for your community whatever that is you can

create your own version of Bitcoin grants using grants protocol which I think is amazing for a number of different reasons firstly it means you don't have to rely on bitcoin on bitcoin's ecosystem to do your own grants protocol secondly it means that any community in the world can tap into the awesomeness of Bitcoin grants uh structure generally like the things like um quadratic funding right and thirdly it further decentralizes out the grants program it's not just get coin grants it's now blah blah grants or such and such grants or yada yada grants right it's whatever you want it to be and that can all be extended out globally to any Community around the world to fund public goods for whatever they want to fund right which I think is very very cool but you can read the full announcement of this in the YouTube description below and that's going to be

it for today 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 Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone