Ethereum staking, Uniswap raises $165mil and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #468 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where you kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host the internet is the 14th of October 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so a little bit of drama on Twitter today around ethereum staking now this thread was put out by a Mark here from the rockapole community and he starts this thread off by saying holy [ __ ] he is Lido on the topic of a solo node operators and he links to a YouTube video and he quotes uh Vasily who's one of the co-founders of Lido as saying uh and I quote we think that most of the stake should be managed by professional professional operators end quote and another quote most solar operators are not rational they do it for fun end quote now are there a bunch of other kind of things

here that that Mark put in his thread but basically when I first saw this I didn't know that it was Vasily who is as I said a co-founder of Lido I thought maybe it was just one of the the employees there who's not talking for the whole project or not speaking for the whole project obviously or maybe a Community member but no it was to my surprise eyes it was Vasily the co-founder as I said now why it was surprising was one I mean I wouldn't say it's like totally surprising because I don't expect a for-profit businesses not to be profit maximalist right not to act in their best interest because later is essentially a for-profit business right they're acting in their best interest but what was surprising is that he was so I guess transparent about this and the fact that lighter has said in the

past that they are committed to decentralizing and I've said I think on the refuel I think I've said this if I haven't then I'm saying it now I've said that in this industry you don't really want to be trusting anyone's word for on things right you want to wait and see what they actually do and until they actually do what they say they're going to do yeah you don't really want to be trusting that especially not around stuff like this and the two quotes that he kind of said here really uh struck a chord with me as well because saying that he thinks that most of the stakes should be managed by professional operators in my mind is a very non-etherium-centric view of proof of stake because every other proof of stake chain that is not ethereum runs in this model right there dpos change delegated

proof of stake chains where essentially they have a bunch of professional operators which uh where people can delegate their stake to uh and it's not the same as kind of putting your eth into a staking pool on ethereum it's literally just delegating uh your tokens to these entities and it tends to centralize uh and it tends to be just a handful of these entities basically running the whole chain there are cartels that form you know dpos is just not a great mechanism for for blockchains and we knew that back in the Eos days to be honest like the EOS showed us it wasn't great so ethereum basically said we need to prioritize home staking we need to prioritize solar staking we need to make it so that home and solo stakers are able to get the same profits or around the same uh

profits the same reward I should say from uh staking as professional operators can and that's where the second quote comes in and wherever he said most solar operators are not rational they do it for fun and this is silly because I think that uh he's basing this comment on the fact that professional operators can can out earn solo operators but this is not actually true at all and Buddha here from the beacon chain website put out a tweet saying rocketpool validators actually perform pretty much as good as Lido validators based on this formula that they used here so homesteakers can compete with institutions and they can I mean as a solo Staker you can basically uh do the same stuff that a professional Operator Operator does and you have the

ability to do that as well obviously you need 32 if you want to be a solo state car like a full solo sticker or you need 16 East with rocket pool right now but they're gonna lessen that to eight eighth and in the future hopefully we have other Solutions out there that allow this barrier to to come down even more because as I've said before the biggest barrier tier entry is obviously that e-stake but if you have that you can stake on your own you can solo stake or stake with a decentralized provider like rocket pool and you're able to compete with the big boys which is the whole point of Designing ethereum proof of stake in the way that we've designed it so we didn't have to just capitulate to the dpos mechanism uh and basically let that take over when we obviously don't want that to to be the case there

so yeah as I said like when it comes to Lido and when it comes to centralized staking operators uh they definitely are profit maximals right they want to maximize The Profit that they generate because they're for-profit businesses and I've said before that Lido is uh is a service that distributes the stake out to I think it's 29 staking service providers well these providers are not doing this out of an altruistic Endeavor right these providers are doing this in order to earn a profit and of course the more eat that goes through lighter the more eth goes into these providers so they're incentivized to promote Lido as well so it's all a for-profit thing now I'm not saying that Solo stakers or homesteakers are altruistic either I mean there certainly uh they're like

most of the them probably wouldn't be right but they are doing it for both profit but also for the health of the network because we know that solar stakers contribute the most uh to the health of the ethereum beacon chain and I actually said this in my tweet here where I said homesteakers are the Beating Heart of ethereum and then they really are right they they are literally the last line of defense as Patrick McCory replied to my tweet here by saying you know given the nature of ofac sanctions due to Mev boost we are now relying on the solo stickers at least one honest party to enforce censorship resistance and include all fee paying transactions it is our job as a community to uphold decentralization and protect home stakers I couldn't have said it better myself as you know as I just said homesteakers are that last

line of defense solo stakers are incredibly hard to to identify incredibly hard to coerce a lot of them actually do uh care about the health of ethereum or prioritize that over profits to an extent right whereas these other companies may not because they also they have uh I guess conflicts of interest a lot of them because a lot of them don't just value validate on ethereum uh aren't just running validators on ethereum they're running ballot it is on many different chains and to them it's kind of like what it was to mine is where it was just a pure for-profit Endeavor but for solid state is it takes on and uh it takes on a lot of other things as well now speaking of staking uh I mean you can go give this thread from market rate I'll link it in the YouTube description below there's a few

other comments here and some replies here but speaking of staking wanted to give a quick update on what the staking distribution looks like obviously it can't change that much because withdrawals aren't enabled so Lido has around 30 of the market share still they peaked at about I think 34 but their share went down because uh eath went into other stake insurance providers uh because uh I I think mostly because uh the steth uh I guess quote unquote d-peg um but also people started being more loud about how lato's share of the network was too great and people were like okay well instead of going with lighter I'll go with someone else right I'll go with another provider for example but that's not going to change much until withdrawals are enabled we know this uh it's just basically impossible for it to change very much

because people can't withdraw from these providers not just later but other ones and can't change who they're staking with I mean with later people can and other providers that give you an LSD you can exit like you can sell your steth right for eighth and then go stake somewhere else but that doesn't actually exit the stake from the Lido service because uh there's no withdrawals from the beacon chain so all you're doing is passing that St eth on to someone else or onto the open market but that still sits in the beacon chain uh and it doesn't it won't get withdrawn obviously until staking withdrawals are enabled so this dashboard from hilldob is great I love this dashboard you can check this out I'll look it in the YouTube description below but this tracks a lot of that stuff and there's also this

rated.network website which I've covered before which shows the percentage of network penetration of different Services out there as I said later is around 30 coinbase is at 12.2 percent uh Kraken binance uh steak us Bitcoin Swiss all between two and eight point five percent here uh and rockapool is up to two percent almost so they're growing very nicely and this is what I wanted to highlight here all the rest of these Services um are centralized right now uh pretty much all of them I'm just going through the list right now yeah they're all centralized except for rocker pool so we want to be cheering for the decentralized services more than the centralized ones especially because the centralized ones already take up a pretty hefty part of the network but it's great to see that rocker pool is is

growing I mean it's almost two percent I'm pretty sure I mean it was full the other day uh the 8th pool in rocketball there was five thousand eight in there I think that was the max that can be in there not sure if it's still full today but if you're thinking about spinning up a rocker pool mini pool all and you have that 16 eighth you should definitely do so uh and you want a stake obviously you should definitely do so um but yeah as I said I think we should be cheering for the decentralized services more than the centralized ones the centralized ones already have a huge market share I've said before that I don't think any service if we can get to the point where not none of these centralized services or maybe no service in general has more than 10 Network penetration I think that'd be really

really awesome right now there is two that has more than 10 obviously uh lighter and coinbase CR I've said before that Lido isn't a monolithic entity but it still adds that centralization Vector there because the Ste token is tied to lato and that's basically tied to all of the underlying stake anywhere that's run through Lido so there is that very centralized connection there regardless of how many operators there are right I don't want to [ __ ] on lighter too much yeah I mean I've actually defended them a lot in the past but if their co-founders on record saying this sorts of stuff well you know my benefit of the doubt go is pretty much gone out the window right um not not you know and I the funny thing you see I should disclose this I actually own um both RPL and ldo tokens I

participated in the Lido treasury diversification round quite a while ago and you guys know I own the RPL tokens but my ldo tokens are a very small part of my portfolio as well I think it's smaller than my RPL at least right now because they're vesting obviously um but it doesn't matter about what my investments are if I think something is unhealthy or bad for the ethereum network well then I'm going to call it out as that right so I think that uh we're working towards obviously getting uh the staking just as distributed as possible the not the the two things that I've talked about in the past has been enabling withdrawals which obviously is going to be huge and also just having more competition in the staking Arena which is coming guys like it's coming I

mean it's not going to come all at once it's going to be uh be done over time and once withdrawals are enabled it's just going to supercharge things so until those things happen we probably won't see the numbers change too much here in terms of narrow penetration because the only way they can change is if someone goes with uh you know if stakers go with another service but it's still good to see a service decentralized services like rocket pool continuing to grow like as I said I don't even if it's decentralized I don't think that any one server should have over 10 Network penetration on the network it's just it's not healthy for other reasons not just because it's it's uh it's centralized or decentralized but also because it adds extra risks like if there's a bug in that protocol or whatever right it can add different

types of risks on top of these things and generally we want to promote diversity and and a distributed a stake as possible on the beacon chain but those are my thoughts on that I know there are a fair few people from the rockapool community that watch the refuel hopefully uh uh that you you guys share my thoughts there on that one um but yeah if anyone's from Lido is listening I'm not trying to [ __ ] on Lido here but at the end of the day I think it's good to see uh or at least put out the signal that hey you know if you want to be transparent about this as Vasily was here and say these sorts of things well then you have to expect Community pushback because the ethereum community does not believe that most of the stakes should be managed by professional

operators and they also do not believe that solid stakers are not rational solo stickers are very rational they are the last line of defense and they are the Beating Heart of ethereum so yeah anyway moving on from that one to the next update from today so uh there was an update here that uh what what is this uh what team is this part of I think it's part of the Kevlar team here so or at least uh what is this sorry I should have I should have seen this before but oh no this kevl is the actual name of the tool here so there was a tool released uh something called Kevlar which is a tool that makes metamask or any RPC based wallet completely trustless Kevlar first runs a light client to quickly sync with the beacon chain and then starts a local RPC proxy

that you can add to your wallet and there's a thread here with more information on this this is another implementation of that light client uh that I that I like playing um stuff that I spoke about I think yesterday or the day before how Nimbus had an implementation out there well this is I believe a separate one as I said it's called Kevlar and it's on GitHub here it's open source I believe so you can check that all out if your developer want to read the code or anything like that but this is cool this is the future of the industry this is where it's going as I discussed the other day like clients get us to that point where basically we don't need to have users running full nodes to be able to relay their own transactions and have security guarantees around that from their

metamask or from another wallet for example they can use their own like client on their mobile phone they can even do it from their mobile phone in order to relay their transactions in a trustless way without enough to trust that the know that they're talking to is actually the correct one they can verify that themselves using the like client which is obviously very very powerful and obviously we don't want um that centralization around our PCS to continue but I did mention the other day that infuria is planning to decentralize their RPC which is very cool but still I mean it remains to be seen how decentralized that can become because running nodes I mean you don't get paid to do that right like inferior has been a free service and continues to be a free service for people that use it I

mean and a lot of metamask users are using fura and uh I wonder what the economics of that look like once infuro tries to decentralize maybe there's going to be a token involved I'm not sure there but regardless the end State what we're working towards is like clients so yeah go check out Kevlar I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so consensus's r d department has announced a release of their updated and extended evm equivalent zkavm specific specification to the ethereum community so you can go check this out on this blog post here um it's funny because um the ZK AVM stuff it seems like over the last few months it's just absolutely exploded like it seems like everyone has a ZK VM now well

this is just a I believe a spec I don't believe this is something uh uh or a design at least spec design I don't think this is an actual uh app or an actual ZK VM that's been developed just yet but uh this design uh the goals of this design is consensus states that here is execution of an unaltered native bytecode in accordance with the ethereum VM specification as specified in the yellow paper 100 coverage of the different op codes and delivery of a type 2 ZK VM as defined by vitalik so I spoke about this the other day on metallic uh it hasn't been linked correctly here but I spoke about this the other day that there are I think three types of ZK VMS and there was a type 1 ZK VM which is what Taiko is developing which is basically full

ethereum equivalents then there is a type 2's AK AVM which is ethereum compatibility uh so basically getting to the point where you can't have 100 coverage of the different op codes but there are still some differences under the hood there and uh there are con pros and cons to each of these approaches but as I said the other day it's good that we have all of the approaches being tried the type one type two type three I don't remember if there's a Type 4 or not but if there is I'm sure someone's attempting it um because at the end of the day like we shouldn't all just centralize around one right and there are different ways of doing things just like how arbitrim's optimistic Wallop is different to optimism's optimistic roll up right so the same is going to be true of ZK VMS they're not all going to be the same

thing they're going to be different they're going to have different implementations they're going to have different sets of training wheels on them different uh ways developers can build on them right but I guess like the main goal of all of them is to be evm compatibles just to make it really easy for developers to to develop on them Port their apps over and get the benefits of ZK technology so you can go check out this consensus blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so uni swap Labs has announced a new funding around here so they've raised 165 million dollars in series B funding to bring the powerful Simplicity of unisop to even more people across the world now this is not a token raise uh this is an equity raise so it means that the investors who are listed here it was

led by polychain Capital with participation from a16z Paradigm uh SV and variant fund here I think SV is um aesv Angel and variant fund here um this is for Equity I think the valuation of the equity is 1.6 billion whereas the token valuation is what 5 billion fully diluted right now and obviously having Equity has a claim on uh tokens that was that was allocated to the investors um but that we don't have much more details on the race here and it did bring up a lot of questions about you know what's the point of the uni token if investors are just buying equity and then the labs or unisupp larger is incentivized to increase the value of equity and not increase the value of a token and also the value of the token uh

it being increased or driving value to the Token could make it look like a security and obviously they don't want to run a fellow Securities regulations like there's a lot of questions around this and then uh Hayden put out a little tweet uh kind of announcing this as well and saying you know there's lots coming down the unisop pipeline we already figure that unisop V4 is coming but I'm curious to uh to know what else they've got in the pipeline there's been talk of uni chain which could be a sovereign app chain or it could be a roll-up chain I don't know what like what the point of uni chain would be to be honest Like Me Maybe I'll be proven wrong maybe they will actually do something interesting but the power of uni swap is in its composability like having uni swap everywhere on every chain and then being

able to compose with that with all the other apps on that chain so realistically what would happen is that uni chain would end up just being its own ecosystem right it would look more like an optimism or an arbitrim rather than an app chain because the strength of unisop is that composability is is that compressibility across many different apps across many different tokens but maybe they can make it work maybe they're building a bridging infrastructure that allows them to do cross roll-up composability right in an atomic uh in a asynchronous way or sorry in a synchronous way I don't know we'll have to say unisop's always pretty tight-lipped about their uh you know their new releases and until they actually come out but as I said unisoft V4 is pretty much guaranteed not not sure what that's going to look like

either I think you know they came out with V3 with concentrated liquidity which is a very very good uh feature a very nice feature a lot of people are getting a lot of value out of and hope they surprise us with V4 but yeah uni chain I mean I would give it I don't know about a percentage chance but I would give it a likely chance of happening so it's kind of hard right because I go back and forth with the pros and cons of uni Channel I can see some points where it makes sense and some others where it doesn't if they literally just do it for the sake of increasing the value of the token because maybe they use the token as some kind of I don't know sequencer that token or fee I can I don't know something weird right maybe that works

maybe it doesn't I don't think it would work um but in terms of like chance of it happening I don't know maybe likely is the wrong terminology maybe I should do like it's a coin toss maybe it's like a 50 50 chance at this point that it happens I haven't heard anything about it happening there has obviously been people talking about it other than me but generally we're just gonna have to wait and see obviously but the fundraise itself I guess congrats to them on this and it's not hard for you to stop to raise money that's for sure I mean unisop is the most popular app in crypto uh I I don't think there's anything else as popular as unusop I think openc may have Eclipse it for a little bit but obviously nft volumes have come down substantially open to see still a big

deal but I believe you knew stop unisop is definitely bigger than openc uh just generally here um but yeah as I said like a bit of uh talk about the fundraise itself too like the fact that it's in equity and running tokens you know what does this mean for the token value I don't have answers to this I'm uh I have the same questions as everyone else but the cynic in me thinks that until there's actually any type of regulatory Clarity around tokens I don't really believe that any real value is going to be driven to the uni token uh which is sad because the uni token I think could be quite powerful as a pseudo Equity token in the unusual protocol If Only They would enable that fee that fee switch right that fee take but they're

scared of doing that for a number of reasons not just the regulatory reasons but also uh scared of losing liquidity so if you turn it on you obviously take you know 0.05 for an example or five bips you take that from liquidity providers and give it to token holders and then token holders will stake and what does it actually drive long-term value to UNI like who knows right but we'll have to see we'll have to see how it shakes out over the next few months all right so speaking of uni swap uh Unison V3 is getting deployed on to starknet so and I believe ZK sync as well I forgot to get the Tweet up here but I'm pretty sure I saw it's getting deployed to ZK sync as well so uh as I said I believe unusoft should be basically everywhere and then it'll get

as much activity as it you know as as it gets on each chain that it's on maybe it gets nothing like I went over the other day that on this on the seller or cello chain uh which is another layer one it basically has no volume but an optimism arbitrary when the polygon POS chain has lots of volume and I believe on stock net and ZK sync and and scroll and and polygon ZK VMS they'll probably get like a ton of volume there as well uh so yeah as I said I I want to see unisop everywhere great to see that it's getting quote unquote warped onto Stark net as you guys know uh uh because Stark net is not solidity based it is Cairo based you need to run this piece of software which is uh called warp from nevermind in order to transpile the code

into Cairo so that uh Universal up could run natively on starknet which would be very cool to see because that's different to what we've seen the uni stock deployments and other chains are all on evm compatible chains or even equivalent chains this is a totally different uh thing altogether so very awesome to see that there all right last up here is a discussion about some drama that's been going on over the past couple of days at Devcon so to give some context here was a picture posted to Twitter by a person from Blue Dow which is some kind of inclusivity Dao or something like that I didn't even know about them until today uh actually there's a there's their Twitter profile here I can just read out their bio so they're they're

Adele focused on empowering women non-binary people and allies to learn earn and play in web 3 towards Financial Freedom that's basically what they build themselves as but the context here is that picture got posted uh and there was two people in the picture actually uh one of them uh was not relevant and one of them was um had a brown backpack on so it be known as brown backpack guy but the picture was posted with the caption that uh the person in the photo was harassing this this woman right um and then she didn't specify which person it was so of course the other person in the photo got uh I kind of like got handed about this as well but then it was later clarified that it was the person with the brown backpack she was talking about and he had a really [ __ ] time he came out today on Twitter

and basically put out a tweet with uh uh uh well not a tweet with a link to a description of actually what happened and there was no harassment that happened at all it was basically the tldr was that he was taking photos and apparently this woman and her friends uh didn't want their photo taken or something like that or told the guy to basically piss off and and they were being really rude to him so he gave him a thumbs down and obviously that triggered them or that got them upset and then they spent the next I guess couple of days harassing this poor guy and I put out a tweet where I said you know I'm pretty upset about this whole blue Dow brown backpack guy thing first they accused an innocent guy of harassment and then they themselves pursued the harassing for no reason

these people are a special kind of evil and I hope they are not welcomed at future ethereum events I actually hope they are banned from all future ethereum events like this sort of [ __ ] can ruin people's lives and it ruined this guy's life for the past few days uh because he had to deal with everyone thinking that he actually you know harassed this person right and then uh the Devcon organizers were told about this as well by these people and then they went up to him and they searched his phone own and then they and then he went to a club or a party I think he went to Rave and then the the um the same people told the security guards about him and then he got kicked out because of that like this is just really not on guys this is not

what ethereum is about this is not what uh you know should be considered normal should be considered acceptable from any type of community or from just like in general right like I hate this sort of stuff whenever I hear these stories I think this could happen to anyone and why are people just believing someone because they said something right because I take a photo and put it on Twitter and said something if something actually happened uh it actually really happened there should be proof of it and they shouldn't be passing it all over social media trying to cancel this person and what made it even worse is that uh after the guy explained uh what had happened right it just seemed like um it was blown it it was um it was even worse than at face value and look okay I get what you're probably thinking well

why do you believe what the guy said instead of what the the woman said well because the guy's story seems a lot more plausible than the woman's one that because she offered no proof nothing all she literally said from what I've seen at least is that uh he he harassed her and and some people right and what makes me believe him over her as well is that blue Dow the the Dow itself actually turns out to be a grift so there was a thread that I don't have a handy right now but there was a thread that put out by someone basically saying that blue Dow grifted uh one million dollars from Harmony protocol as a grant I believe um based on basically lies and then you can see another thread here another tweet here from someone called IC saying doing my due diligence and going through

blue doubt engineering work to see how their inclusivity is working out and their most promising piece of software is a shell script designed to inflate the activity on your GitHub profile by spoofing commits sounds promising for their liquidity so it's just an all-round grift blue doubt it seems like these people are using the mask of inclusivity of being you know for empowering women and all that sorts of stuff in order to take money from Dows or to just get money able to get invited to things I mean I'm sure they got a special Dev con ticket probably because they are part of you know blue Dow and it was part of an inclusivity thing that devcom was doing which is all well and good right there are legit organizations that that do that sort of stuff um but this one is not one of them and

that's why I mean you know this is a major reason why I straight away believe what the guy said but also uh it's it's also because the woman who accused him of harassment didn't go into any detail about this and also just made his life an absolute living hell from what I read on on his post there so I what I want the reason I bring this up is one because this is not on and we should be calling it out every chance that we get and two um about the blue Dow itself and about how they're a grift guys like there are so many grifters in this space it's actually insane there are so many scammers you've seen so many of them come and go over the years even if you've only been in crypto for a couple of years years you've already seen your

fair share of them I mean we saw one of the biggest grifters ever with dokon right like they're everywhere everywhere and they may not look like they're innocent they may look like they're trying to do something good but a lot of the time uh they you know that's actually the ones that people least suspect and the ones that are actually doing stuff that is grifting right and I wouldn't call it outright scamming there's a there's a pretty big difference between grifting and scamming um but at the same time I think that the lines are blurred there with those sorts of things a lot of the time as well uh but there's so many of those people so please be vigilant about these sorts of things please don't just like trust someone who says something like this accusing someone of harassment especially sexual harassment that uh

which is like just a complete lie is extremely serious this isn't just a crypto thing in real life people get accused of this sort of stuff all the time it can destroy someone's life because of what happens is a lot of the time especially if I'd say a woman accusing a guy of something because obviously there is a lot of real instances it says of sexual harassment happening automatically a lot of people will believe the the woman and say okay well you know you must have done this right and then without any proof of that anything this per person is already guilty in the eyes of a lot of people and then even if he's able to get his name cleared or even it happens the other way around as well even if they're able to get their name cleared right there are still people that that kind of

believe that and there's still people and your reputation ends up getting torched and you end up with this stigma over you and it sucks it absolutely [ __ ] sucks like I haven't gone through it myself but I've known people that have and it is one of the worst things that can happen to a person in my eyes right because it's basically like getting canceled but but worse I mean you can get canceled and come back from it for for other things but when it comes to like especially sexual harassment that just seems to be a very you know very big touchy thing for people uh no pun intended there but you know you know what I mean right um there's my Aussie humor at it again but yeah you know what I'm saying here so I just wanted to point that out but I

also wanted to warn as well that just be vigilant around Gibson scams guys they're always out there they're always trying to take your money they're always trying to play nice with you to get your money just got to be more Vigilant about that but on that note I'm going to end it there for today so thank everyone for listening I'm watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone