ENS token, McDonalds NFT and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #243 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel worry capped the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the second of november 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so ens the ethereum and name service we all know and love it we all hopefully have our dot eth names uh today they announced that they are going to be decentralizing now this means that they're going to be doing a token called the ens governance token they'll be doing an airdrop and and details of this airdrop will be shared in a week from today now there are a lot more stuff a lot more things going on here than just the token as i said they're trying to decentralize their governance process and they currently have a call for governance delegates up up here so you can basically

nominate someone or kind of put yourself up if you want to become one of the dow delegates for ens and now what i wanted to kind of like talk about was some was another topic that related to this um uh and actually i'm going to talk about that in a sec because there were some more details that uh i met 23 here shared in the daily grade discord channel today about um how this token is going to be kind of like given out and kind of like some background about it so essentially the snapshot was taken on october 31st so don't go and buy nest names now uh just for like farming the airdrop you won't be able to do that as the snapshot has already been taken um as i said more details about the token distribution and claim process will be released a week from today

so november 8th or week from yesterday i should say uh those who purchased a dot eth domain from openc prior to the announcement are eligible for the airdrop and what i found really interesting was ens uh did not receive any funding from vcs all of their revenue is from domain sales so ens sales over the years and remaining unused in the uh and remains unused in the treasury since inception of the project now from memory there's a lot of money in there i don't know exactly how much but there's a lot uh and then you know some more details about how the ens that will be governed by the community and the token holders can can delegate and vote and all that good stuff there now what i was saying before is the topic that i wanted to focus on around kind of like ens doing a token is

a topic that always gets brought up when one of these things do a token that people don't expect to do a token where they say you know they want kind of like some projects within the community that they consider to be true public ethereum goods to not have a token now i and like in perpetuity now i get that i get that view i get that some people think that tokens are just like these speculative vehicles that are just there for like moon boys to attach to and to pump and dump and all that sort of stuff i think that there are plenty of things like that for sure i don't think that the legitimate projects in this space do a token for that yes there are there are obviously like investors that want to return on their investment um and yes obviously there's team members who

should really have a stake in their protocol and be able to kind of um kind of have a share in their protocol but the way i view tokenizing is kind of like going public right uh with with ens tokens it's a governance token so it's going to be able to be it to be used in governance of course just like most of the other tokens but that's not the only thing it can do i'm sure it's going to be able to do other things or governance will be able to vote in other value accrual mechanisms um but just generally from the point of you know wanting projects not to do a token i don't know i feel like it goes against the very ethos of this community and of this kind of like of the ethereum ecosystem where we're trying to decentralize everything and you can't

decentralize everything without a kind of like um a carrot essentially like carrot and a stick to get people to want to to participate in decentralized governance and to get them to want to actually come together and coordinate uh to do governance to begin with um so for example like right now ens is just a bunch of multi-sig holders that kind of like hold um like access to that treasury and have a few kind of like other powers whereas uh that could never change unless you did a token because who really i mean how many people are going to get this to get up to step up to the plate to actually uh participate in a decentralized governance process not many and you you know really at the end of the day there's not many that you can trust either so by handing over governance to the community you can work

to essentially you know get have the community have a stake in in the good stewardship and the good governance of the of the ens protocol for example and and that kind of motivates them to stay on top of it and to get more involved this goes this this basically applies to every project it's not just for ens but whenever one of these public good projects does a token it's always kind of like the same uh kind of talking points and i just wanted to add a bit more clarity there uh and you know i've been saying for a long time now you know i repeated it so many times before and i hope you guys are kind of like listening to my alpha here but i've repeated it so many times that everything is pretty much everything crypto related is pretty much gonna have a token and again

there's that asterix except the deadly way i'm not gonna do a token guys but everything else will especially these things that it actually makes sense for them to do a token especially these kind of like big projects and big services that are used by tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people every and things like that i expect them to to to keep doing tokens and those services to do tokens especially when it makes sense as part of a decentralized governance process as well so yeah i'm i'm actually most excited about the fact that they haven't taken any vc funding or anything like that i'm sure obviously there's going to be a team allocation and everything uh and you know knowing the ethereum kind of name service team or the ens team they've been around for a very long time they're not going to give themselves

like uh you know 50 of the of the pie even though i actually wouldn't mind if they did that because uh it's their project but at the same time it doesn't make sense because if they want to decentralize the governance out they need to be a smaller holder but you also want them to kind of have a large stake because they created it and want to reward them for all their past work i'm not sure what the token distribution looks like i'm i'm sure they're going to announce that when they announce how the airdrop is going to be distributed but essentially i just have no issue with this i think it's really cool that they're doing this i think that it's about time to be honest and i i'm really glad that they're getting rewarded but i'm really curious to see how this is being distributed i feel like they

would have gone for an airdrop distribution where they essentially cut out all the domain squatters because there's a lot of people who bought you know uh common words dot eth uh because they were squatting on it hoping to sell it to someone else later on like people's common names and stuff like that i'm sure there's plenty of those but uh there are ways to do it where you can do an airdrop two and s holders and bypass the squatters so essentially you'd probably just want to ans uh drop the ans token to people who are using the ens so that means tying your actual ethereum address to your your ans name and a lot of squatters don't do that because they're not using them they're just squatting on them as you guys know an e s name is an nft so they're trying to sell them on

openc and flip them so i'm sure that they would have kind of like done a snapshot in such a way where uh to weed out those domain squads which is going to be cool to see but i'm very curious to see how much goes to the community how much goes to like a treasury how much is going to the team and you know there's no vcs amazing right like this is going to be one of the only governance tokens out there that doesn't have any vc allocation which is which is pretty awesome i believe but yeah anyway more details on this in about a week and i'll definitely cover that when the details come out so michael sproul here from the sigma prior team has put together a quick summary of staking rewards in post altair so some of you will have noticed that your staking rewards on your e2

validators go up sometimes and this is because of a new uh kind of like feature that went live in altair called sync committees so as uh as michael uh describes here the new sync committees feature has created a new role for validators every 256 epics or 27 hours a new random group of 512 validators is selected to publish sync committee messages which are similar to attestations so if you observe substantially higher rewards for a day or two without any block proposals then your validator is likely a member of async committee rewards for block proposals are four times higher than previously this is to incentivize efficient and timely block production so essentially there's been a bit of a reshuffling of the rewards here a re-weighting of the rewards but also the introduction of sync committees which

gives people that are part of the sync committee more rewards uh for their role there now 512 validator shuffle every 27 hours means that you're not going to be part of a sync committee very often because of the fact that we have a quarter of a million validators i'm not going to do the math in my head but i would say that the current amount of validators it probably wouldn't even get through uh a kind of like whole set during during a year so and as i said it's like kind of randomly shuffled so there's no way to kind of like know uh who's going to come next and stuff like that but uh that's kind of like why you might be observing more rewards if you have been lucky enough to be part of a sync committee this early on because altair has only

been live for for what a car wait not even a week yet i don't think uh so so yeah really cool to see that and you know there's a few other changes in here that michael goes through and he also links to further reading from vitalik on explaining sync committees and how they enable light clients which i went through last week uh pintails modeling of the altair reward changes which i either highlighted on the refuel or i rate i definitely retweeted it on twitter in case you missed this this is also a really good read i'll link it in the youtube description and then also some scripts for scripts for viewing the current sync committees which michael has uh uh built himself and put out there on github to check out so yeah definitely check out i mean this very short blog post but but the the further

reading as well to learn more about this if you're interested i'm sure all the solo stakers among us are definitely interested in that so uh there hasn't been too many updates on the merge lately but uh the ethereum cat herders has put together a couple of videos about the merge so there's this video uh on on the sorry this playlist called the merge which includes two i think it included two videos one uh if i click on it right here i'll actually be able to see it with i don't think it will auto play uh yeah so it includes two kind of like two videos here uh peeping eip emerging ethereum with paul horner who is uh who works at sigma prime on lighthouse and then peeping ip number 41 which is an older video uh on erp3675 which is the eip for the merge

essentially so upgrading the consensus to proof of stake with uh mikhail kellen kellen in uh so yeah if you want to get like more context around the merge definitely give these two videos a watch they're about an hour each here uh but for those of you who don't know the ethereum cat herders youtube channel is kind of pretty much a gold mine for this uh for a lot of these videos if you click here on videos there is a ton here that you can watch um like i've watched all of them and it doesn't show up here because i've actually got like multiple youtube accounts this is the delegate account on my on my sassal account my normal youtube account i i've watched pretty much all of these this is i mean the thing is i don't have many views but they basically describe a lot of the

ethereum core development stuff in i mean not so much plain english but it basically gives you an overview and and allows you to kind of like understand what's going on and these are pretty frequent videos as well there's one or two every week and they cover various things within the ecosystem like you can see one here about vertical tries you can see one here about standard signature validation methods for contracts i guess i said it's not all kind of like high level but it is there it is technical uh one with vitalik about the block gas limit a couple months ago uh i mean there's there's plenty here and it goes back quite a while like stateless ethereum they've been doing this for a while and for those who don't know who the ethereum cad herders are they're essentially a kind of like decentralized project management for ethereum as i

described describe themselves here and they were actually born out of the fact that we needed better ways and more ways to kind of like uh coordinate at the core developer level and we basically needed a link between the core devs and like the wider community in order to keep the wider community apprised appraised with what's happening at the core dev level and keep the core devs kind of like a prize on what's happening at the community level so they kind of act as a link there and i think the name's pretty pretty funny ethereum cat herders like um you know the the ethereum um has kind of like used cats as part of its culture the same as used those as part of its culture so that's why it's called ethereum cathode is there but yeah i mean off topic there but definitely check out the um

the kind of like youtube videos here it'll be linked in the the description uh for you to go check out so one thing that i feel like is has flown under the radar and that i talked about a few months ago on the refill but now it is ready to be onboarded uh is the rv die direct deposit module or the d3m which is better to be onboarded on to make a protocol now what does this module do people asked me today to cover this and i will cover it as best i can hopefully i don't get anything wrong here but essentially what this allows for it allows rv to directly mint die from maker itself so you could imagine rve as like a regular user that wants to take out um you know a die kind of like loan with like a cdp or a vault

and then instead of them having to go through that process uh because they're a protocol of course they can't go through the normal process they've got direct um kind of like integration with maker as a protocol which means that uh maker can feed dye into ave as it's needed and also either can pay back the diet as it's not needed so as the interest rates kind of like vary as the supply and demand varies there's a lot more obviously i'm talking in this uh in this uh twitter thread about it and you can go give this a read um but hopefully that explains to you what it is i mean i like these little images that they've used here um but essentially you know um because dye is in such high demand to borrow uh instead of having to go through kind of like the slower process

of getting dye from the open market and from individual users the rv protocol can source its own diet from from make up which i think is is really really cool it's a it's a really great integration now what i really wanted to focus on um on top of this was the fact that these two protocols are considered quote-unquote boomer d5 but they are doing some of the most innovative stuff right now like this is this is huge innovation here like protocol to protocol kind of like um uh die minting is is the first this hasn't been done before i know there's been protocol protocol lending before with kind of like uh the iron bank but i don't know what the status of that is it seems to have fallen on the wayside but it was a bit different i i think to what maker's doing here with arveir and

obviously maker and arva are much much bigger than then cream and alpha finance were as part of the iron bank so to see such as two juggernauts of the industry of the d5 industry kind of like teaming up on this it's really really great to see it especially you know it's funny because like when i think back to d5 summer um ave was like the darling right even even throughout this year ava was like the darling everyone held the token it was like mooning and then obviously over the last kind of few months it's underperformed the rest of the market and so is mkr but we all know that dejen spartan reminds us all the time on twitter that the mkr 8th pair is at all-time low so i don't think i have to remind you of that but i was actually checking it the other day

on avere and other 8th i think it's down like 70 or 80 percent against 8 since the top something ridiculous and if you had told people that like a year ago they would have laughed at you a bit like no way like obvious you know d5 tokens are so bullish like eighth is not going to capture all the value you know if it wasn't that much i mean a euro great was like was it november i was like 4 500 or something not even 500 it was probably like 400 i mean not even 400. it actually moved up really quickly end of last year so i it might have even been under 400 back then but i mean the point is is that it went from being like one of the most bullish tokens to now being down 80 against eth but uh you know that's not the only one i mean i

saw someone uh yesterday kind of like make fun of the wi-fi token because at one point one wi-fi equaled like 110 eighth or something and now it equals like 8th so if you had bought that you'd be down over 90 against eighth and it's pretty much like all these d5 tokens except some of the some of the newer ones that market themselves as d5 2.0 but the thing is those dfi 2.0 tokens and i'm doing these in like air quotes they are they started at a much smaller base than than than kind of like the rest of these so it's going to be curious to see if these kind of like new crop of d5 tokens end up 80 to 90 down against eighth over the next year which you know i mean i it's probably pretty good bet that they will like not to try

and fight anything here but i just whenever i see people kind of like fighting the and they're calling this boomer defy i kind of think to them guys like you've seen like two three months worth of these new d5 tokens performing well because they started from like a really low market cap as well let's see how they perform over the long term because you know it's all well and good that you have a token that goes up in price but your protocol needs to keep growing it needs to keep on boarding users it needs to keep onboarding liquidity and your token needs to retain value and it's it's very very hard to get a token to retain value as i've gone through on the refill numerous times especially against eth where most of these tokens people just don't want to hold like and especially if it keeps underperforming

it just becomes a thing of like you know that famous quote loses average losers which basically means that losing investors always double down on something that's that's losing they say okay well you know this this kind of thing fell from 30 bucks to 20 bucks i'm going to buy here then it falls from 20 bucks to ten dollars and i'm going to buy again then it falls to five dollars and you buy it like it's you're dca you know on the way down but eventually it just like keeps bleeding and never goes back up obviously there are some that this doesn't apply to like for example eight if you had average down eighth even during 2018 um you know while it was coming down of its all-time high you would be up now but the point is is that you want to go with the momentum right

when it comes to these sorts of things and this is an investment advice but the momentum is is kind of like there for a little while going up and then it just like it can be painful on the way down as well but uh tying it all back to the main point i'm trying to make here is that just because the tokens aren't performing well doesn't mean these protocols aren't growing either is huge make is huge die supplies are all-time high they're still doing these really cool integrations so i think that people need to stop focusing so much on the token performance of these things and focus more on the technology because when you look at what they're actually doing it's really really cool and they and they're you know they're well capitalized to build for a very long time and they're going to bring a lot of

value into the ecosystem you know without protocols like make or rv a lot of the ones the new rd5 protocols couldn't even exist both from a regulatory standpoint and also from a kind of like market perspective because maker are there unisop all those gen one as people like to call them defy they're still around and they're still juggernauts of the industry and they're still providing the critical infrastructure that most of the industry needs most of defy needs in order to keep growing so here's a bit of comments around that because i've been seeing it for months now too many people making fun of of these protocols for their you know not just just and kind of like uh actually fighting the protocol themselves when in reality it's fine to go after the token because some of them have bad token designs i actually don't think arv's

token design is bad i think it's just been a it kind of like suffered after it went up so quickly and then it kind of came down from there um the mkr token definitely needs a complete revamp i'm not even going to defend it there i have owned mkr once in my life and that was for a very pretty brief period of time and it's funny like i actually had someone ask me in 2019 like why don't you earn mkr um because maker was like the most bullish d5 project back then with a token and i said i don't think it's going to outperform either the long term i just i i even back then i knew it wasn't going to outperform 8 and it hasn't it's it's at all-time lows against 8th i'm not because i don't think mkr's token design is good at all

and there are they're trying to change right there's a few proposals out there and there's newer kind of like token designs as part of these d5 2.0 projects that i actually think are really good um but but still it doesn't matter how good the token design is if if the market price is in you know the next two years worth of growth within two months it has to give it back at some point that's exactly what happens with a lot of these tokens they end up just like because because markets are forward-looking the market basically says well you know we think that this protocol is going to be absolutely massive it's going to keep growing for years to come so we're going to price it that way but the thing is is that the market is the crypto market is nowhere near that sophisticated um it prices it

like that on the hype and the fomo and then eventually it stops going up and it's it just bleeds for a long time because the protocol takes much longer to grow than they thought it would and it's just nature of how projects work and how protocols grow so from that perspective uh these these protocols just they price in their growth way too quickly and then they have to give it all back especially for the ones that have liquidity mining programs where people just farm and dump the tokens it's it's really brutal and i'm not gonna go on about it anymore here because i've talked about it a lot before but i just really think that people should focus more on the technology side of these things if you're holding one of these tokens and you you know you're feeling a bit down because you're down in eighth

or down in us dollars i mean that's a separate thing like hate you know if you if you're gonna hate something hate the token don't hate the protocol because the token hasn't performed well it's kind of like you know buying eth and you know uh at four thousand dollars the first time and then eighth going down to two thousand dollars and being like oh well you know i'm super bearish on ethno i hate ethereum it's it's it's going to zero ethereum's you know broken whatever it's just a dumb thing to think like token prices are detached both ways from reality uh uh and and that's what and that's why it's going to be for a long long time this market is not going to become efficient for a very long time so from that perspective just pay more attention to the actual fundamental tech stuff happening rather than the token

prices and and you know i think you'll be better off for it so exciting update from polygon so a lot of users have been stuck before on the polygon pos chain without matic tokens to pay for gas fees well now 0.02 matic will actually be airdropped to a user if their address has less than 0.02 matic when they are depositing funds from ethereum to polygon so you can send ethe directly from ethereum to polygon even you know say you you've even sent a lot of ether cross like you know say 2 3 8 across and then you're stuck on polygon because you don't have a pneumatic well now you'll get air dropped automatic air drop to you automatically now 0.02 is obviously not a lot like what is matic right now to

almost two dollars 0.02 is going to be uh two dollars worth of manic but matic fee is sorry polygon pls chain fees are so cheap that that's actually going to allow you to either buy some more matic on um you know sushi swap or quick swap or something that's on the pos chain to to kind of bolster yourself there uh because it's not meant to be just giving you free money right it's meant to be just giving you enough to do some transactions which i think is awesome this has been a a pretty big complaint and i've seen in the daily weight community especially so i'm glad to see that they've kind of um they've rectified this here as well so uh yeah i mean really really great to see and i think what else do they say here the receiver will be airdropped 0.02 matic provided their balance is

less than 0.02 matic and the transfer is from a selected top 20 to 30 tokens so basically yeah i mean it can't just be any token that you bridge across it has to be a selected top 20 to 30 token which makes sense you know the thing about a lot of these kind of like um air drops and things like this is that you you got to be careful with gaming around it because you could have someone game it and just like get a lot of magic tokens um you know and kind of like farm a lot of free money but i mean the fees going from like ethereum to polygon is so large that it's not even worth it because bridging across already costs a lot um in in ethereum layer one fees so it wouldn't be worth it to bridge across and then claim two dollars because you

already spent more to get there right for example so this is definitely more just to help out the users who get stranded on the pos chain sometimes because of the fact that they just didn't have any magic when they bridged across so really really cool to see this from polygon here so mcdonald's is doing an nft uh called the mcrib nft uh basically it's a random giveaway i believe you can basically retweet for a chance to win one of 10 of these mcrib nfts and kind of like quote tweeted this and said built on ethereum i'm loving it like playing on the mcdonald's kind of like marketing slogan there but you know someone pointed out to me that it actually wasn't built on ethereum which i found weird because in their in their post here they basically say uh

ethereum uh somewhere here they but they say you need to kind of like have an ethereum wallet uh to be able to get this nft but then someone else said it was built on a different network and then i didn't really follow it up so i'm not 100 sure if it's built on ethereum i think it is i don't see why they would build it on anything else really it doesn't make much sense to to put on anything else and the funny thing is like people were kind of like making jokes about this and like you know why would i want this who would want this but honestly i kind of want it i haven't even retweeted to enter the competition because i don't think i'm going to win i mean look how many entries there are but um i kind of want it just because it's

like mcdonald's first nft i don't even think it might i don't even know if it's gonna be worth much or anything but like it'd just be cool to have a mcdonald's nft don't you think like uh i don't really eat their food these days but it's still cool right um so so yeah i mean the funny thing is i've talked about it a lot on the refuel about how like nfts are that thing that are going to bring in everyone i'm not just talking about like end users talking about corporations like this is just a perfect marketing play for them look at the engagement they got on this tweet and look at how many people replied all the crypto people would have replied to this uh the crypto people have large followings i mean it's just i mean it's it's easy free marketing for them issue these 10 nfts

call them limited edition um run a competition and kind of like uh jump onto like the nft kind of hype and there's plenty of uh kind of like companies and and stuff that have done this already obviously tick tock uh is with immutable x and esl as well and there's and there's so many i mean and there's and there's going to be more coming it's it's it's really not um it's really not a surprise to see this at all like i saw i actually i saw this last night um i think i i was either on my computer or in bed and i and i looked at it and i'm like i wasn't shocked at all i looked at okay mcdonald's is doing nfts i've come to expect this now because of the fact that it makes it doesn't make sense for them not to do

this because of such all the free marketing and being able to uh to kind of like uh attach themselves to a trend that is is pretty big already but it's probably going to get even bigger into the future so i mean if you want to enter into this and you haven't already it'll be linked in the youtube description you can go retweet it but i think i'm going to sit this one out i'm curious to see what their secondary market value actually ends up being they probably will be worth something given that there's only 10 of them and it's mcdonald's first nft so we'll have to see how that goes there but anyway last thing to talk about is another tweet from paulinha here who says modular execution layers give you 10 to 100 10 times to 100 times data compression very large number uh

times compute efficiency parallel data availability layers gives you 10x to 1000x data capacity these compound together which means that you can get infinite times monolithic long term so infinite more of scalability versus the monolithic chains and volitions retain full composability after uh over multiple data availability later layers that's all and then pioneer goes on to say i imagine a long-term future where there'll be thousands of execution layers hundreds of data availability layers and a few sentiment layers and each of those thousands of execution layers can outscale any monolithic blockchain only way to global scale power laws apply just pulling out doing their thing as usual what i wanted to kind of like focus on though was that you know i talk

a lot about roll ups on on on the refill a lot about roll ups on the refuel but i don't talk about the lydiums and volitions too too often now why the reason why i don't is because i mean there's validiums that are live today but i think the more interesting thing is a volition so just a quick recap here the volidium allows uh uh the kind of like developer of the i like uh like layer two or i mean it's not technically a layout too but essentially like this this um uh this layer on top of ethereum to choose where the data go uh sorry to put the data off chain so they can put it as part of the offchain data availability committee and they would do this so they don't have to put the data on chain they only put the proofs on

chain and the costs are considerably less now obviously you have less security because of this and um there are kind of like censorship concerns with withholding data and all that sort of stuff but validium was only a short-term solution the golden solution here is a volition which is what stark this is this is what starkware calls it but essentially what a volition does is it gives users the choice do they want to go and be in valydium mode so do they want to essentially put their data in in the off chain data availability committee that's fine that has been set up by whatever um kind of like uh app they're using uh or do they want to store their data on their own like either on their own server or on their own pc or wherever and that is extremely powerful

um and you can also store it on layer one ethereum as well mind you so for example imagine you're a kind of and um i don't know if it was uri or eli from starkware gave this example on the delphi digital podcast the other day but they basically said imagine you're a trader on dydx uh or and you know dydx is a roller but imagine dydx was a volition and say you really wanted to keep like your costs like really really really low but you wanted to do like a lot of trades well what you would do is you would be in valydia mode for like the whole day doing all your trades and then when you want to settle out your transactions you switch to roll up mode because this is a volition and then you you settle onto a theorem layer one the settlement layer

you put it there so and what that does is it essentially allows you to guarantee that that is secured by ethereum layer one uh and you've always got access to that and you've always got access to your funds because of that so i mean this is just using ethereum as a sediment layer in an even better way which i think is really really exciting uh and polynomial just puts it really well here but i'm you know by kind of like calling this out and how this is gonna enable like extreme extremely great scalability and volitions are also kind of like um composable across across shards and stuff like that too so i mean there's so much cool stuff happening in this space in the layer two space i'm coming up on time here uh but definitely keep an eye on on volitions coming out soon zk

porter from zk sync and there's gonna be other solutions from the other kind of um layer two teams as well so definitely looking forward to all of that but i think on that note that's time for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone