Ethereum's roadmap, Cross-L2 DAI and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #250 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where we cap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's 11th of november 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so david meehaul known for his crypto fees website that i've talked about a lot on the refuel before and i'm sure a lot of you have seen me post screenshots of it on twitter has updated both uh the crypto fees.info website and the openorgs.info website to now track ens so if you go to cryptophase.info you can see the the ethereum name service is actually generating a lot of fees and these are fees basically paid to the ens service when someone registers a new ens name right and this is actually related to brantley here putting out a tweet saying that there was 7 000 new dot ether names

registered just yesterday or on l1 with the high gas fees and the previous one day record was 3k now he does note in this twitter thread that the there's no ens they're getting airdropped to people that are registering names now the snapshot was taken on the 31st of october but i think that what what the kind of like token did was that it just i mean what's that what's the way to put it kind of like increased awareness like much faster about ens than anything else would have because everyone heard about the token they're like what's this they go and check it out and then they say oh okay i can get my my own.eath name and they went and did that now there's obviously some in there that thought that if they registered.ethan they would get tokens uh i don't know how many of

those there would be but uh definitely there'd be some or a lot of them that would have just kind of like heard about ens for the first time and gone and registered their own ethnic which is really awesome to see and that's why you see the spike here of 719 thousand dollars of fees uh going of kind of like ens name fees going to the ns treasury over the last 24 hours and speaking of the ens treasury it is huge so you can see here that the total amount of dollars in that treasury is almost 5 billion most of it sits in the ens token which is mostly uninvested uh some of it is vested already i think there's like 340 million dollars of that ans is vested already and then other is 48 million i think

other is eighth in the treasury as well so i mean i am really happy to see this and i hope it doesn't i mean okay it's kind of like a double-edged sword here i'm really happy to see that the treasury is like really large but at the same time i don't want it to turn into kind of like the uni treasury where it's so so big and it just doesn't seem to be being used at all really and i know that there's been some kind of like talk about can this really be considered kind of like a treasury asset because it's the native token i mean probably not but at the same time it is money that is there and it is money that could be you know it is ens tokens they are uni tokens that could be sold into the market or just paid out to

people who could sell them and get kind of like whatever they wanted out of it like eighth or dollars or whatever um but what i'm really excited about when it comes to ens and even other ones like get coin that have a large treasury as well 645 million but really any project but really they're kind of the the core public goods projects like ens and git coin is that they do a lot of really awesome kind of like uh you know donation initiatives funding public goods funding core devs stuff like that stuff that i've been talking about a lot lately and ens falls right into that so i'm very very curious to see how this goes and and kind of like what people uh what the delegates decide to do with the ens treasury um and i actually i claimed my ens tokens today and i actually delegated to superfiz

who's a long-time ethereum community member and is are very very involved in the east taking community and and he's a good friend of mine as well so i just delegated my my tokens from cecil.ed to him so if you're looking for someone to delegate to as well two still you could delegate to him um but don't just take my word for it definitely look up all the other delegates as well because they're going to be responsible for essentially managing this treasury and paying out to specific people specific projects or initiatives so i'm very very curious to see kind of like what happens there with with that treasury um but yeah i think i already went over this tweet from brantley here in a related kind of um uh topic uh spruce announced today that they've got their first example of signing with ethereum now live at

login.xyz now i have spoken about this a few times on the refill before but you can go to the website here login.xyz and i've already got it up you have to scroll down a bit to get to it but i already kind of logged in before uh with my sassal.ethe kind of account here and you can see that sasu.et has this kind of nft connected to it because you can actually make uh there's a field on the ens kind of like manager app for your assassin for you for your ans name where you can actually tie your nft to your ans name as a profile picture which is which is obviously really awesome and then you you know you're presented with this poll to vote on the kind of like unicorn emoji or the rainbow emoji i voted for the unicorn emoji and all i

had to do was basically the the signing flow was it was basically i can show you what the signing flow is if i click sign out here i won't be able to do it again but essentially you click sign in with ethereum it comes up with what wallet you want i selected metamask um and then from there i went and signed a transaction and the reason why i can't do it now is because i don't have my my ledger with me to sign the transaction um but i signed the transaction and then it kind of logged me in now what i find i mean there's a couple of things that i find really amazing about the signing with ethereum kind of initiative and movement the first thing is the fact that i'm able to sign in without any kind of like username or password i'm just using my ethereum

wallet which is a public private key pair and i control it all client-side there's no server-side stuff going on there that's the first thing the second thing is that having sign-in with ethereum across like every website is going to be amazing for ethereum and just to give an example of kind of something that's happened in the past that uh i guess kick-started a brand or basically led to a lot of growth for a brand is the sign in with facebook button there's actually a funny story that and i think this story is true if not it's still a cool story but essentially mark zuckerberg asked bill gates like how to make facebook ubiquitous across the web and bill gates basically told him well why not have a sign in with facebook button on all different websites because you already have people sign up for a facebook

account it's kind of like their identity so why not have this login with facebook button um across everywhere so it you know people can easily log into these other websites and by embedding the that button into these websites people also there's also brand awareness there as well and i think that the same thing is going to play out with ethereum could you imagine the signing with ethereum button on all these websites the brand awareness would be insane and even people that don't have wallets it'll pop up like with you know what wallet you want to sign in with and then people can go and create a wallet and you'll just have this mass onboarding going on and you know that signing with facebook but log in with facebook was a very very big driver of facebook's early growth uh it kind of like led to them becoming

as as mark wanted ubiquitous across across the web and that's exactly what we can do with signing with ethereum but the really powerful thing about signing with ethereum is that not only do you get to sign in just like you would normally to a website but it also allows you to sign into the unchained ethereum ecosystem where essentially you you not only have kind of like uh the the um the information layer that you're normally kind of interacting with but you have the value layer now which is ethereum so you have one kind of like set of i guess credentials you can call them or one kind of like set of public private key pairs that allow you to do everything and this is really what web three is all about at the end of the day it's allowing you to basically do everything from with just kind of like your you

know theorem wallet you don't have to do it you'd have to change well it's gonna have to change accounts because right now i can't log into my bank with um you know with my facebook account for example i don't have a facebook account i think i do it reactivates itself sometimes it's weird but i you know it's twitter for example i can't log into my bank account with my my twitter account and i don't even know if i'd want to do that and and vice versa but having kind of like that global settlement layer as as ethereum and then having kind of like a sign in with ethereum button on the classical web 2 websites i can basically sign in imagine being able to sign in to twitter to discord to you know all these other social apps using your ethereum wallet and then just kind of like having that

wallet be ubiquitous across both web 2 and web 3. that is the promise of this that's why i'm so excited about signing with ethereum and it's just really cool to have a little demo here so definitely go check it out for yourself you can go to login.xyz just scroll down a little bit and try it out i mean it's a very basic demo but it's still cool to see it in practice there and if you want to make your profile picture for your ens be one of your nfts uh there's i think there's a guide for that you can probably google for it but essentially uh no there definitely is a guide so just go like ens nft profile picture on google and it should come up um and then you know it it kind of walks you through how to do it it is a little bit

like it's not dead simple right now but i think in the future they want to do like a one-click thing but it's not that hard it's kind of like copying pasting a few things it's it's very easy um at least it was easy for me maybe you know maybe it's not for other people but it wasn't it wasn't that difficult all right so zk sync announced another kind of fiat on-ramp off-ramp to their layer 2 network so by bit which is a very very popular um perpetuals exchange and bitdow uh which uh i i don't really know much about bit dao um but i guess i guess another onboarding vehicle into a fiat onboarding vehicle into zk sync and off boarding um i was talking the other day when zk sync did their raise that they were they raised from the right ecosystem

strategic partners because now they have those strategic partners uh like um as part of kind of like their cap table they're gonna be they're to go out and get zk sync integrated everywhere and that's exactly what happened here marana ventures which is the venture partner of buy beat and bit dow uh invested in zk sync in that round so they basically um you know have quite literally a vested interest in seeing zk sync succeed so they've gone okay well we're going to do a fiat on an off ramp uh to to zk sync now in saying that there's not much to do right now with on zk sync as you guys know you can do bitcoin donations you can play around with curve on test net there's a few nft things to do but it's more like getting all this kind of plumbing in place for when the kind of

the zk porter and zkvm goes live with zk sync and zking 2.0 and all that good stuff there so that it's ready and able to to kind of like get that adoption like off the bat right we have to wait for that so super super exciting to see this uh we need more of this as i've said every time more and more of this more l2 supported it's coming i just hope that you know this kind of like kicks these exchanges and fiat on-ramps into gear and gets them kind of like uh supporting more of these uh sooner rather than later all right so in a tweet here from scott lewis today where he said ethereum needs polygon just as much as polygon need ethereum if that bothers you get over it now i have had this kind of like discussion with so many people over the last i

guess not hour what is it 11 months now almost 11 months since i joined polygon as an advisor 10 or 11 months where they keep asking me it's like what does polygon add to a theorem like what is the main value add here is it kind of like a pressure release valve for ethereum on the polygon pos chain like when are they going to have their l2s coming um you know what is the actual value prop and value add of polygon to ethereum because a lot of people think that polygon is kind of like a a separate ecosystem or a separate l1 to ethereum and i i kind of like i can sympathize with why people think that because it is a bit nuanced but i've explained before so i'm not going to rehash it here but essentially what the polygon pls chain is is it's it's a

hybrid kind of like commit side chain where it relies on ethereum for its uh for itself to exist because if ethereum went down polygons pos chain would also go down um but it has its own validator set uh and it also has like a bridge across that is a a kind of like multi-sig bridge so there are kind of like centralized points of failure of course um but the way i saw the polygon pos chain and the way i still see it is that it's a friendly kind of like a place for ethereans to go that obviously you know can't afford the layer one gas space because they're ludicrous um go to the polygon pos chain and still enjoy a ethereum defy experience um for you know with much cheaper fees and yes it's less secure less yes it's less decentralized

but for these people who maybe just playing around for the first time and only have like 100 200 or something like that i think that's perfectly fine for them that that and then they're not going to be able to use ethereum layer 1 anyway so instead of them going to one of these other kind of like hostile chains like bsc or something like that getting them onto the polygon pos chain is a net benefit for ethereum um and on top of that you know polygon is not just the pos chain they're building layer twos as well they've got polygon hermes which i'm going to talk about in a sec which is live um they've got ey nightfall which is kind of a hybrid between a hybrid optimistic zk roll up they've got you know they're doing like app specific chains all that sort of stuff they've got polygonal veil which

is a data availability layer they have other things in the pipeline i mean there's just so much going on in the polygon ecosystem that for people to say that they're kind of like um not not consequential for ethereum or that ethereum doesn't need them i i don't like that framing at all and obviously i mean as an advisor my opinions you know could be biased here but the reason i'm an advisor is because i saw this coming like i saw it coming when um when the fees went up i basically i wrote about this in my newsletter in like june of last year um where i said that i think the high fees are bullish for ethereum but i also think that they're going to cause people to go to other chains because of it and the reason i said it was bullish because i mean there was a

number of reasons but the number one reason was that i figured it would push layer twos um to launch uh quicker and i think they have i mean it's still taking longer than we would like but i think they've launched quicker than they normally would have and there's been more innovation there because of the high fees because no one cares about layer two that the fees are cheap right like why would you build the layer two the fees are cheap so less money and less research goes into it there's less of a pressing need um so i i mean i i called this a long time ago and that's when where that's when i when i saw the polygon pos chain i was like okay i understand what this is it is not a quote-unquote true layer 2 but there's going to be these other evm chains that

spin up and they're going to suck users and liquidity out of ethereum and i'd rather keep them in the ethereum family obviously so yeah i totally agree with scott here that uh polygon and ethereum are in a symbiotic relationship but he's not parasitic either way they both uh benefit each other and i would say that polygon has benefit probably net benefit ethereum more because of the fact that the pos chain allows for overflow right like kind of like this overflow from users that are priced out of layer one ethereum just to experience this sort of stuff and then you know long term the pos chain may may just kind of like become a roll up or maybe everyone just migrates to a polygon roll-up such as polygon hermes that could happen as well and you know i think the polygon team expects that to happen over the long

term but in the short to medium term when when the layer twos aren't where we want them to be and the roll-ups aren't ready the pos train is perfect and that's why i've always supported it so hopefully that gives a bit of extra color from my view there but i always i just i thought this was a great tweet from scott just basically putting it in in very simple words the other that i guess i just expanded on and i guess one more thing about polygon uh they had the uh a hermes update where they basically had a fireside chat the other day with leading lights in the zk space so the tldr is that hermes is working very hard on zk evm which is a evm compatible zk roll up uh i think they said in the blog post that they're expecting to go live with a test net of

this uh next year i think in the kind of like q one q two of next year and then once the test net proves itself go to mainnet so you know i i remember warning you guys that the generalized evm zk roll-ups are still further away than than you think they will it's what starkware's launching this month starknet that's not a general that's not an evm compatible roll-up that's their own thing using cairo using stock or stockx that is not um evm compatible they have avm compatible ones are coming there's like four teams working on them right now i'm pretty sure starkware's working on some sort of solution but you have polygon with hermes you have scroll scroll tech which is basically i think either an arm of the ethereum foundation or works closely with them and then of course you have zk sync working on it as

well so it's all being worked on but it is still kind of like a little further away and we probably won't have a main net evm compatible zk roll up until i would say q3 q4 next year which is fine because we have optimistic roll-ups and we're nowhere near the scale that uh uh we're sorry we never knew the limits of the scaling of optimistic roll-ups let alone zk roll up so that's totally fine uh but yeah awesome to see an update about polygon hermes here so speaking of optimistic roll-ups i've been talking about optimism's 2.0 upgrade that is going live right now so this was kind of like a tweet posted earlier in the day but i think the network i think it's happening right now or or very very soon uh and the network

is expected to be down for around six hours but then after that the ovm 2.0 upgrade is live they have a glorious evm equivalence and uh much and performance improvements including i think cheaper fees as well so super excited to see this as i've been saying for a few weeks now i really hope this uh or a few months i guess i i really hope that this means that the white list is coming off soon like the one number one thing holding back optimism right now is that white list if they remove that after they do their upgrade which which i i think they will i just hope it's sooner rather than later then the floodgates open and then when these networks do tokens the the floodgates open even more and we're really going to see the power of these l2 so very much looking forward to that

very much looking forward to using ovm 2.0 and seeing how much cheaper the fees are as well because you know the roll-up fees are cheaper than l1 but they're not as cheap as we can get them to so i'm very very excited to see how that's going to play out so speaking of l2 and i did talk about this the other day but it was just the teaser um yesterday chris from the make a dial team detailed how their layer 2 or maker kind of like wormhole was going to work and this is basically cross chain die between different l2s and you know these l2's as i explained the other day optimism homemade zk sync darknet album trim and fuel the true kind of like roll-ups on on ethereum so in this tweet thread and in this post uh chris details how it all works not going to go

over it on on the refuel but essentially it's actually a true kind of like bridge where it burns dye on one chain or they're calling a domain here and then uses an oracle to provide an attestation of the burn it uses make oracles to do this and then mince fresh die on domain b or kind of like another chain here so this is actually trying to be a true bridge where it's not just locked in a contract it's burned and the only provenance you have is on um on another change so you can't actually go back uh sorry so you can go back but it's not like if that kind of um if that diet was stolen on an optimism or if something happened to that die on optimism it can't because it literally doesn't exist anymore if you

bridge from optimism to arbitram uh as from what i understand that die no longer exists on our optimism it only exists on arbitrary whereas with a lot of the other bridges um especially the multi-sig based ones the it's all about where the native asset actually sits and as i've explained before so this is really cool because this is just taking bridging to another level where it becomes an actual bridge instead of you know a kind of like pseudobridge or whatever you want to call it so definitely give this a read and give the blog post to ready for further details on this i'm super excited about cross chain die um you know i've been getting more and more excited about die again lately especially because the usdc backing die is coming down again and more ethy's backing it so it's becoming more decentralized again and the maker

team is just knocking it out of the part with parked with integrations and new features i mean they have their peg stability module they have one-to-one slots between between stable coins they have a lot of cool stuff happening right now within their ecosystem so very very excited to see that and also super pumped to see this cross-chain dye stuff go live and you know we can probably have true bridges right like none of these pseudo bridges true bridges which i'm definitely very much looking forward to all right so as i mentioned the other day arrow glacier is the next ethereum network upgrade it is going live on december 8th there is an official announcement blog post now from tim baiko where he upgrades us all to uh sorry it reminds us all to upgrade our nodes in this blog post it goes through what

arrow glaze here is and i've explained before it's just pushing back the difficulty bomb but it also has links to all the different client versions for the eth1 execution clients so if you're running a full node which you all should be if you can definitely download the latest version so that you're ready for this network upgrade this is on december 8 so less than a month away from today so don't dawdle because obviously if you're not upgraded when the hard fork happens uh you will kind of like go on the minority chain and uh i mean you won't lose anything because um this isn't staking whatever but your node will just basically be useless so if you're using your node for anything it won't work anymore um you know for example if you've got your metamask connected to your own full node if you end up on the wrong chain

nothing's gonna happen um especially if it's a dead chain where no one's mining it anymore so yeah definitely uh need to kind of like keep that into consideration all right so finally here we have an awesome blog post that was posted in bankless newsletter by trent van epps called ethereum oh sorry i should say titled uh ethereum roadmap update end of 2021 now uh this blog post i mean this is required reading for any ethereum if you want to know what ethereum's roadmap looks like for i guess like the next maybe 12 to 18 months ish this is the kind of like blog post to read and you know a lot of this stuff i've already talked about on the refill of course and i've kept you guys up to date with all of this but this kind of like brings it all together puts um kind of like hard

day hard kind of like dates against not hard dates or like soft dates against it and there's a bunch of links in here that you can kind of click on to read more about all these different roadmap uh items and things like that um but yeah just a great piece to read i mean trent from uh he works at the ethereum foundation as part of the ecosystem team he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the theorem roadmap he's across all of this sort of stuff you know he's basically my go-to guy for a lot of this stuff as well and if i'm if i'm ever confused about the other roadmap or timelines or anything like that so so yeah i mean i i loved reading this it kind of like got me suit it got my got even me excited about uh about what's

happening with um with ethereum and the roadmap but even though i kind of like already knew all the all the items on here it's just like a nice concise and detailed uh uh kind of blog post here so definitely go check that out one one other thing that i kind of wanted to talk about with regards to the ethereum roadmap is timelines now when it comes to timelines in ethereum at the core protocol layer it's historically been there'll be a kind of like window given window of time given but like we'll always overshoot that so for the i mean you you can use proof of stake as like the the clear example here um people thought proof of stake was going to go live in 2017. it didn't go live until december 1st 2020 and it's technically not live because we still

have like proof of work right the merge will be q2 2022 so it'll have been like four or five years since people expect it to go live now i'm not saying that uh the merge is going to be delayed by that long or there's going to be delay there i'm not saying that sharding is going to take till like 2026 i'm not saying the statelessness is going to take that long or any of these roadmap items core development today is actually a really well oiled machine um and it and it has a lot more eyeballs on it at both like the dev and research level but it's just whenever dates are given or like windows of time are given you really need to kind of like take it with not not really maybe not a grain of salt but like if it gets pushed back

don't be surprised really and and they do it for good reason it's not like they're just delaying it because they want to it's normally for a security reason and you can see here i mean like trent says the merge is you know five to eight months so he's he's put like a massive window here but you know it could happen longer than eight months from now there could be some critical kind of issue that gets found out and the developers and the researchers aren't comfortable with doing the merge and you know to be honest i'm i'm happy that if that happens because the merge is the biggest upgrade in ethereum's history if it goes wrong it's really really bad so we we only have one shot at getting it right i mean technically we have multiple shots of getting it right but like if you don't

if we don't get it right the first time i've gone through what can happen before i've talked about how like it could be catastrophic and there's a lot of kind of social coordination that needs to happen it would just overall be really a really shitty time for everyone so we want to get it right the first time we want to just do it smoothly and if that takes longer than what's anticipated if we have to wait until q3 or even q4 which again don't quote me on any of this and and this is not me saying we're gonna have to wait till then but if we did for whatever reason i personally wouldn't be upset about it and i don't think anyone else should be i know that the wider kind of like talking heads on twitter you know some people will fight it some people will

say oh there's another delay blah blah but there's actually been no official timeline given i've given q2 as my own personal kind of like window of time but if we get to like q1 and i don't feel like it's going to happen in q2 i'm going to tell you guys i'm gonna be honest with you i'm gonna say well look guys i personally um i can't see this happening in q2 it's probably gonna be q3 um but if i see it happening sooner i'll also inform you guys but like rarely if ever is it gonna ever happen sooner than what people anticipate but just you know when you think about it from that perspective it's good just to kind of like stay humble don't get ahead of yourself this is all a long-term game if you're in ethereum for the long term like i am this is all

noise at the end of the day right like i've been in ethereum since 2017 i plan to spend the rest of my life in this ecosystem so for me this is just noise even if i have to wait another five years to see uh shouting and statelessness as well i'm fine with that yes i'd love for it to happen sooner uh and it actually needs to happen sooner for other reasons like uh the competitors kind of like you know getting ahead if ethereum takes too long to scale things like that but more generally i'm okay with things taking uh a while if it's done for the right reasons such as security and making sure we've got everything right um and there's no bugs and things like that so um but the the wrong reason is that you know for some reason we got lazy we

didn't do it right the coordination kind of messed up or whatever other reason there so so yeah hopefully that's a bit of extra color on how i think about timelines when it comes to the ethereum roadmap but i'm sure for those of you who have been around for quite a while you know exactly what that's like and how there can be delays on things and how you know people can kind of come up with their own dates and then if there's kind of like another date given they're like oh this is a delay but in reality there was never an actual date given and there was never actually a date decided on it was just kind of the community getting ahead of themselves so yeah anyway on that note i'm gonna leave it at that for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be

sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone