Ethereum scaling chat, Gitcoin Grants 11 live & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #205 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 9th of september 2021 all right everyone let's get right into it so you may have missed it i know twitter's been crazy lately there's a lot of stuff going on a lot of stuff to talk about today actually but in case you missed it bitcoin grant matching round 11 is now live so same as every other matching round you can go to the grants page here and donate to all of your favorite projects there is 950 thousand worth of matching funds up for grabs and this runs until september 22nd so you have about two weeks from today of course i appreciate all donations to the daily guay and ethub and all the daily weight kind of like sister communities

um the spanish and french translations that are also on here and i've also got my sasses card of love which has 45 grants in it that i usually donate to each round i'm probably going to update that and add them add some new ones in there because i'm sure there's new ones but there's other kind of collections you can look at here as well uh but yeah i guess just to remind us to go donate to all of your favorite favorite projects so that they get uh matching you know 950 000 is a lot of money and the way the matching works is it works quadratically as i've explained on the review i guess on in the last rounds but essentially your your funds are kind of like if you donate like a dollar or ten ten dollars or whatever uh it's matched by a larger and larger amount depending on

how many kind of unique donations have happened to uh to that kind of like grant and these uh these kind of like matching funds are split between uh well it seems like there's a lot more this round like nine different categories here so infrastructure dapps community nfts uh decentralized governance uh africa uni swap retroactive funding and latin america so that's pretty cool to see as well so yeah the delegate and ethel and stuff are in the community uh kind of um category here but definitely try and go through all of them and pick one that you like from each of them and or one or more and kind of like donate to them there but yeah really really cool to see that round 11 is live and we'll have to see kind of like if we you know how much uh is actually donated because obviously

950 000 of matching funds is going to these grants regardless but i always like looking at how much is donated just by people you know outside of the matching round so yeah if you haven't done so yet definitely go do it you've got two weeks i'll be periodically reminding you to go get your donations on um uh because it's very important it's part of being an ethereum for sure something i truly believe and i'll definitely be kind of doing my donations very soon and kind of giving back after i guess the last few months that we've seen in the crypto ecosystem it's been it's been i guess a great time to be in crypto on the money on the i guess like money investing side so giving back is always really not a really nice thing to do all right so there's a lot of talk lately about i

mean not just lately it's been going on for a while but like scalability how ethereum's gonna scale um the fact that like uh layer two chains are never gonna be as cheap as like some of these more i guess like i don't know you can call them centralized kind of like scalable chains where they basically say you know the fees are basically zero here you know come come to us and and basically do everything you want on here with these like super low fees uh and they see investor put out a really great tweet around this today where he says time to face facts ethereum friends ethereum can never remain the cheapest or fastest chain but neither can anything else imo l2 will help plus evm side chains the value prop really is that eighth becomes metaverse money on chain programmable dollars for big d5

with exceedingly valuable block space and then he goes on to say i expect people to dance around this for a while imagining we can have near free transactions but it isn't going to happen with ethereum's decentralization trade-offs we either lean into reality building on ethereum's unique value prop in the space eip1559 a big step or fade uh or fade and then he goes on and says trying to remain a perma cheapest and perma fastest chain is a losing argument for this tech not possible to execute that degree of change quickly enough or preserving value built on top this is also why i think being the cheapest fastest is not a durable value prop all we can strive for is becoming relatively cheaper faster to prior ethereum performance some new chain will have uh what will make a different uh decentralization trade-off or new tech

uh uh or new tech will and do it cheaper this dynamic will eventually work against the cheap chains of today two as they saturate so there is a lot to unpack here and i'm gonna i'm gonna go through this a bit by bit because i think it's very important and then i'm going to go through another thing that i saw a post from uh from uh uh uh reason on reddit called libreresist here uh but first i'm gonna start with these tweets so i actually replied to this and i said you know i agree with most of what dc is saying here but i would caution against saying things like never when it comes to ethereum and i say this because we i think we have enough giga brains as i like to call them working on scaling that i'm confident that we can one day

get to the point where ethereum is super scalable while still being decentralized and secure the scaling of these chains is just getting started it may seem like we're kind of like i don't know much further along than what we are but i'm telling you like we're still kind of basically day zero when it comes to scaling these blockchains you know even the chains that kind of um say you know they have like tens of thousands of tps and all this sort of stuff that is nowhere near enough for global scale and then okay they say oh well we'll increase the capacity whatever blah blah but there are limits to this um and i'm not just talking about decentralization i'm talking actual hard limits to how much scaling you can get have you ever been uh i mean i'm sure a lot of you have seen what

happens when i guess like popular social media sites get ddos like go offline um or kind of like different data centers get ddos or whatever there is a limit and not just ddos like sometimes things go over capacity like how many times have you have you refreshed coingecko when the market's hot and coingecko says sorry we're over capacity and they basically put you into a queue like web 2 a centralized web can't even scale enough to meet demand and it has all these kind of like different uh things that that help it scale like load balancing and stuff like that but still you still run into issues so any chain that's promising to be like super scalable all the time and super cheap at the same time is is long term uh that's not going to be the case when they get kind of like more usage so

that's the that's the first thing on this but secondly um to dc's point here he says ethereum can never remain the cheapest or fastest chain uh then he says neither can anything else this is this is true as i just said for basically everything because yes some other chains have more capacity than ethereum layer one um but i i i on that note i actually think ethereum layer one uh uh or like saying these other chains are competing with ethereum layer one is the wrong thing they're competing with ethereum layer two if they're competing on scale like layer one ethereum is not going to um be where we scale execution it's gonna be basically the settlement layer for the execution which which happens on layer 2 um and even with sharding it's still just going to be data sharding for you know probably forever if not for a very

long time where it just enhances layer 2. so from that perspective a theorem right now it has incredible demand to use its block space and that hasn't kind of gone down at all and of course that's pricing people out now people are going to l2s on ethereum they're going to other chains they're going to wherever they can get cheap transactions and i actually think there's a sweet spot when it comes to transaction costs i don't think that their transactions have to be incredibly cheap i don't think they have to be kind of like one tenth of a cent like 0.001 i think uh uh a kind of like 10 cents for for a kind of like decentralized exchange swap is really not unreasonable i know it depends on where people live and i know that it's going to be different depending on people's income and things like that and

we want to bring these costs down as much as possible for people in kind of like developing in third world countries i totally understand that i'm not saying that we shouldn't aim for that but i think for the for the first world at least uh anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar fee for for like a decentralized exchange swap or something like that is totally fine i really don't think that there's a ma like a massive difference between 10 cents and and a tenth of a cent for things like d5 for example that but then you can start talking about different use cases right you can talk about uh uh things that don't need ethereums like state level censorship resistance and security things like crypto gaming um and nf and a lot of the nft stuff like not all of it like the high value nfts you

obviously want to be on ethereum but a lot of the other kind of nft stuff can be done on either a side chain or at a kind of like layer two that maybe makes trade-offs around security uh and decentralization by doing like data off chain and things like that so there's all these kind of different solutions and this is why it's kind of like very much not a zero-sum game when it comes to ethereum other chains layer two whatever because every use case has its own kind of unique needs and its unique value prop and at the end of the day ethereum will sit at the center of all of these i truly believe it will because it already is if you think about everything bridging in and out of ethereum you think about uh how ethereum is the block space is still at at higher demand than

it's ever been um and you know the gas fees are high on layer one and all that but we have these layer twos taking on um kind of users and offering them cheaper fees already even even though they're even not at capacity like arbitrary and optimism still have uh uh limits on them like pretty hefty limits as well arbitrarium as it currently exists is as scalable as l1 and the reason why the fees aren't as high is because they haven't hit the kind of like scaling or limits of l1 just yet but they're going to go uh and scale from there a lot more as well right because the optimistic rollups can scale up to a few thousand transactions per second in their current state i'm sure they're going to be able to scale more than that zk roll ups uh i think a bit more than that and then you've got

things like validium and and kind of things that put data off chain that can potentially scale much more than that and then you have like hybrid solutions there's so many solutions out here so when you think about kind of like i guess scaling it's just such a broad thing it's not a oh well this chain can do everything or this layer two can do everything or well this is gonna win or well you know it's gonna be basically a a winner take all kind of situation it's never gonna be like that there are different trade-offs different kind of solutions for different values and use cases and at the end of the day all i want to see happen in the world and why i kind of like follow the ethereum ecosystem so closely and so involved with ethereum is that i just want a theorem to remain at the heart of this i

want ethereum to be the most maximally decentralized and secure chain at layer one and then i want everything else feeding into it whether that being uh different kind of networks feeding into it or layer two as well and i want users to be able to experience the the awesomeness of ethereum's decentralization and security while also getting cheap fees that's why i'm always going on about layer two i think that's a lot of the context people miss when they kind of look at these other things and they're like well you know ethereum's design is wrong it's not about what design is wrong or right it's just about a difference in design philosophy you know um i guess like celine is one of the chains that are talked about a lot right now their design philosophy is that they think that they can scale everything on one

layer on layer one of their blockchain without sharding i don't think that's going to be the case i do think that solana is either going to have to add a layer to our ecosystem into their onto their chain or they're going to have to add sharding now if they do that to me it's kind of like well you know why would i um what's the point of using solana in that case when i could just use ethereum and have the exact same experience because their um argumentation is that while they believe that layer twos and side chains whatever fragment liquidity fragment user experience and that's just a really poor user experience and i kind of get that but at the same time i just don't agree with it it's not that i i don't think look designers are a legit project or i think it's a scam i don't think any of

that i just don't agree with the design philosophy i think that ethereum's design philosophy of keeping layer one as decentralized and secure as possible at the expense of high fees right um but scaling via layer 2 is the proper approach and yes there are some trade-offs there around liquidity fragmentation and needing bridges and stuff like that but but that i think is fine and as i've been going on about a lot and i will probably go over this um uh in a sec as well i just think that it's fine that we have this kind of ecosystem but at the end of the day it's just two different design philosophies but i just don't agree with we're gonna do everything at layer one and we can scale to the whole world on one layer that's that's actually the design philosophy of of solana specifically they think that they

can scale all of the demand that's coming the infinite demand that is coming for these networks on just one layer with no sharding and no layer and no layer two ecosystem i don't buy that i don't see how that can happen they say oh hardware gets better all the time we can just beef up the hardware it's like but it doesn't moore's law has diminishing returns and on top of that by beefing up the hardware you sacrifice decentralization so to me it's that that's kind of like what i'm looking at i'm not looking at uh anything else it's just really that and the design philosophy is behind it and that's okay it's okay people have different design philosophies it's got nothing to do with um you know if you're a maximalist or not or whatever like i hate being called an ethnomaxi just because i don't believe that another

change design philosophy is something that i want to follow um i i mean ethereum and i'm so dedicated to ethereum it's because i'm bought into the ecosystem that i'm bought into the vision and bought into the ethereum values and that's what i want to see kind of like get adopted and i want to see people kind of using so at the end of the day that doesn't mean that i don't think these other networks can get usage and can kind of and can kind of like offer things to different people and no and there's no world where i believe that people should be paying you know that really expensive fees that's that's not true at all i want people to experience cheap fees but i would also love to see them experience that at layer two and that's why i'm dedicated to helping you through and build out

its layer two ecosystem and that's where i'm focusing a lot of my time on actually whether that be i'm just kind of like learning more about it reading up on things trying to help teams where i can making some investments here and there and getting kind of aligned and on calls with teams because i mean that's just the vision that i want to see at the end of the day but anyway this is a great thread from dc investor there's a lot of great comments in here definitely go check it out he's responded to a bunch of them and things like that um but definitely go check it out and i guess i didn't even talk about um zk roll ups which is the next thing i was going to kind of talk about which was a post from uh liberal aussieist librosis i hope i said

it right where i mean he put together this post where he says why rollups plus data shards are the only sustainable solution for high scalability the reason i love this post and it's one of the best things that i've read in a very long time and i highly recommend going and reading this of course it'll be linked in the youtube description but the reason i love it so much is because he didn't go um and didn't really talk about decentralization and the trade-off there what he talked about was that he thinks that um these kind of like super scalable l1 chains or whatever um are going to hit their scaling limits just as i was describing that they were going to hit scaling limits and the only way to have a technically sustainable system is through a roll-up and data shard data sharded kind of environment

and he explains why in this post and i just wanted to highlight the post because i really think that everyone should read this it is pretty much required reading at this point um he actually puts out a lot of great posts on reddit on each finance um and stuff like that as well so if you want to go sleuth through his reddit account you'll find a bunch of great posts and comments from him but but you know the trdr is basically that he kind of says that even these super scalable l1 chains are going to run into limits as i was describing before and they're not going to be able to scale without roll-ups specifically zk roll ups and kind of like zero knowledge tech around that and he used solana as an example here and bsc and even things like the polygon pos chain

and stuff like that they have he doesn't say that they don't have their place but they will run into limits and that's kind of like what i was describing before as well so yeah just go give this post a read um and yeah another tweet i put out today where i basically said i know that it's popular to hate ethereum right now due to the high gas fees but saying things like no one is using ethereum anymore is just stupid because it is stupid i mean obviously people are using ethereum it's like the reason why the gas fees are high is because people are using it like i don't know what why people can say this no one is using ethereum anymore it's just a really dumb narrative that i've seen perpetuated throughout the ecosystem and i've just kind of been looking at this and being

like this is dumb whatever so i just put out this tweet and you know as i said the gas rates are high because demand to use the network is insane try out an l2 for cheaper fees and i linked to my thread that i kind of put together a couple weeks ago with all the l2s listed here at least most of them and how you can get involved with them this will of course buildings in the youtube description for you to check out as well uh another great thread about l2s came from little cohen here where he basically broke down you know what swaps cost on each kind of each solution here so you have 100 swaps on l1 optimistic rollups give you five dollar swaps right now zk roll-ups give you 10 cents i think it's a bit more than 10 cents like maybe uh

20 30 40 i don't know what the current cost is um but these costs are going to come down as well like on optimistic roll-ups and zika robs as i've described before they work off economies of scale but you can also get efficiency gains out of it and then with sharding um these roll-ups are going to have more room to put their data on or their call data on so they're going to scale even more from there and then little kong just has like a great thread here where he goes through different kind of things like the l2 beat metrics how dydx works so rare which is a really popular nft kind of um platform that's built on immutable x uh i sorry not built on a mutable x it's built on its own uh kind of like roll up that's using star wars technology um and then you

have kind of like hot protocol which acts as a bridge and and things like that so i mean go check out uh uh check out this thread but yeah i mean this is just another kind of like highlight of the l2 ecosystem which i thought was really important to cover uh another thing i guess maybe i should cover this first another thing is this tweet from jeremy guzman who says not enough attention is being given to mere protocols execution environment developments the fact that we may very well uh we sorry the fact that we very well may be able to interact with amms like compound and rv without sacrificing uh compromising data availability by snark utilization is mind-boggling now if you didn't understand what that means don't worry i'm not going to claim to understand exactly what that means

either but essentially he links to the post here blog post from mia protocol which you can go and read you may not have heard of mia uh before i had heard of them a couple of times but they're they're very heavy in research uh and development right now i don't think they have anything live just yet but essentially the tldr of this blog post is that mir is designed to support applications that developers can build on ethereum but in an ex in an execution environment which transactions are validated with zero knowledge proof so essentially a zk kind of like uh roll up or basically an off chain kind of like zk system here which obviously is super exciting but essentially um the way i kind of like on uh understand how this how this kind of like works is that they're trying to achieve scale without compromising on

that data availability which is what i've described before about how there's different ways to do data availability where you can put it on layer one ethereum or you can do it off-chain to achieve greater scale um so yeah if you want to learn about how they're kind of like doing that definitely go check out this blog post it's it's i mean i i i think it's quite technical um it's on my reading list for sure uh but i think it's just great to read through these things and understand kind of like where the future of ethereum scaling is is going because definitely it's a zero knowledge world and we're all just living in it so on that note as well uh loopring just uh reminded everyone today that their blog post about their damm or distribu distributed amm uh that they were working in collaboration with starkware

on is available for you to read so i've spoken about the damn before which is basically across l2 amm that shares liquidity across layers um and it also allows people to do l1 to l2 kind of like cross chain stuff there as well so definitely go check out this blog post if you haven't already uh nifty table here put together a great tweet thread on the polygon pos chain where he said openc launched a marketplace on polygons ipos chain where users can benefit from lower gas fees and faster transaction times and here are five key insights so the volume was actually 51.7 million which is an all-time high for uh the platform in august obviously compared to ethereum mainnet that's a lot less the main it was like 3.3 billion dollars but um there's 190 000 watts that have bought or sold an nft on open c so

that's uh you know i think about half of what's happened on ethereum layer one um and 14 of the five percent of the wallets that have traded on polygons open c uh have also traded on um openc on ethereum mainnet which means that 85.5 percent have only transacted on polygon uh uh open c um and i think i read us that somewhere maybe here that yeah i mean the nft sales in august um 77 percent of the nft sales on polygons pos chain and on openc in august were for less than a hundred dollars so you can see here that this that polygons pos chain is acting as kind of like a a scaling uh i guess release valve for nfts uh for ethereum where people who only have like 100 or less to kind of like play with

are using the pos chain instead of a layer one because you're not going to really get an nft for 100 or less or maybe about anywhere between 500 and gas fees right it's just this is pretty crazy so really really cool to see that um and finally i think on the layer two front yeah yeah so argent kind of like recap their layer two plans apparently their layer two wallet is coming in the next few weeks with support for are there lido uh what's this in indexed finance yearn powerswap z case uh ramp network utilizing zksync so this is a recap blog post on their plans and how they plan to kind of like do everything here so definitely go uh check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description uh poly market has introduced an nft uh

nft floor price markets on on on their play market system so now you can go long or short on the floor price of crypto punks uh blip maps board a yacht club and loot um so essentially you can profit without owning the nft no minimum or limits only 0.1 percent a trading fee this is really cool uh because essentially if you want to get exposure to i guess like the floor price of these nfts you don't want to have to buy them and you want to just go short or long you can do it through poly markets kind of like i guess prediction market platform here which is really awesome so definitely go check out this links in the youtube description of course um the i guess the the probably one of the biggest pieces of news from last 24 hours was that rocketpool announced

their main net date so for those who don't know rockpool aims to be a decentralized ethereum 2.0 staking pool and their launch date is going to be october 6th so they're launching with a bunch of oracle dow members here which if i scroll down or if medium wants to load for me if i scroll down to kind of like the bottom here you can kind of see who the the launch members are so lighthouse nimbus and prism from the 82 client teams uh etherscan beacon chain consensus block daemon staked blockchain capital bankless uh super fears slash eat stakers uh fire eyes crypto manufacture manufacturer and rocket pool of course so there's a lot of great down members here as part of the oracle dell and this post i mean one thing i really love about

rocketpool's kind of posts uh is that they go into great detail about everything it's not just the kind of like two paragraph thing they're actually going to detail about what's happening and they have you know different kind of like part uh links to different parts as well on on the whole protocol and kind of like reading about it there but essentially kind of like um how they're moving into maintenance thinking how this is all going to work and how node operators are going to work and how you can get involved so if you don't have that 32 kind of like minimum limit but you want to be part of a decentralized staking network then rocketpool is definitely uh for you so i'm really glad to see that they finally have a main net launch date here it's not too far away about of uh less than a

month now october 6th right it's september 9th today so really really great to see them announce this but definitely go check out this blog post um another really good blog post from dimitri here who's a research part research partner at 1kx uh basically talking about blockchain bridges so this is something that i have been speaking about a lot lately on the refuel but i didn't know that there were over 100 uh uh sorry sorry there are over 100 public blockchains and over 40 bridge projects today so i kind of um what dimitri does is he goes through all the kind of bridges here not just the uh bridges that i usually talk about like connects and hop and things like that he also talks about the different bridges between chains uh the different bridges on these different chains um you know in their own little

ecosystem it kind of like maps it out really nicely here i believe where he basically kind of like splits them up into different ecosystems like you have the cosmos ethereum pokedot ecosystem and then you have like bridges between those ecosystems then you have bridges like around them and on top of them and all this stuff going on it's just crazy but this is a really lengthy blog post a 12 minute read it was a great read today i loved going through it i loved seeing how he categorized everything and how he kind of like went through the different security and kind of like liquidity and everything like that i definitely recommend highly recommend going giving this a read if you want to learn about all the bridges cross chain decentralized exchanges all that stuff happening it's a really really um awesome kind of like field i think it's

only going to get more important as time goes on as well uh so the ultrasound money account tweeted out that we had actually had our first kind of ultrasound day um i i think here because we burned more than uh so we had which had two of these days on september 8th and september 9th where we burned more than proof of work and the proof of stake issuance put together so you know how the other day on the refill i described that we had an ultrasound day but if we counted for proof of stake issuance uh we didn't we only had it with period of work issuance but now with uh with kind of like these two days in a row here we've had it for uh we've had it for both so we've essentially burned more on each of these two days then we issued across one and

eight two which is you know pretty cool to see i guess this is this is funny because like whenever i celebrate high fees on the theorems like layer one i get attacked by like so many people so i've stopped like kind of trying to do that on twitter i do kind of like celebrate the fee burning and stuff like that but i mean it's it's it's it's kind of like a silver lining that yes okay the fees are high on layer one and users are kind of getting priced out and moving to other chains and and hopefully moving to l2s as well but the silver lining is that this isn't just like totally negative on the ecosystem anymore eath holders are still kind of getting the benefit of this because they're being rewarded but uh via burnt eath right for example so there's that kind of aspect to it which

i think more people can actually try and pay attention to but at the same time i totally get it i'm not trying to say that you guys should be spending a hundred dollars to swap tokens on ethereum and you should be uh happy for the privilege to do that no not at all like i've never stated that people always take me the wrong way um all i'm saying and all i'm celebrating is the fact that hey we burned a lot of eighth that's cool not celebrating the fact that users got priced out and that's why i'm focused on the l2 ecosystem but anyway i'm not going to rant again about that uh last thing i wanted to talk about was that i spoke about lobby lobsters i think on the refill the other day well they ended up uh raising a lot of eighth and they're donating one

thousand eight which is 3.5 million dollars at time of recording to queen center this is queen cena's largest donation by far and this is absolutely incredible like i i love this honestly like the fact that we've been able to kind of i guess harness the degeneracy of the nft aping and donate uh three and a half million dollars to a government uh sorry a lobbying body which essentially is going to just bribe these politicians to be more favorable towards crypto i know that the coin center would never use the word bribe but as i said yesterday lobbying is literally just a fancy way of saying bribing anyone who's who's kind of like thinking otherwise is is not thinking straight um but essentially they're kind of like voting on it in this down here but this 1000 i think is going to go to coin center which is

uh is amazing i mean absolutely amazing as i said largest donation they've ever seen and i hope to see more of this kind of like happening within the ecosystem but on that note i'm gonna end it there 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