Flashbots update, Uniswap dominance and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #461 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where he kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 5th of October 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so a simple tweet from Tim baiko today but one that I think holds a lot of meaning behind it he said kind of wild ethereum is now just running proof of stake in the background like it's no biggie and I mean as I said like there's a lot to unpack when you look at this tweet it's a simple tweet but there's a lot in the background here and it is wild that I I mean I I mentioned this one after the merge that basically like the merge happened it went through so smoothly that no one really talks about it anymore right ethereum is just running on proof of stake we obviously

have a lot of stuff happening in the background with regards to proof of stake and I'm seeing rocket pool actually grow a lot recently which is really really cool um and yeah there's a lot plenty of stuff happening around that but the actual transition itself I mean there's no reason for us to talk about it anymore since it's done but it's just funny how like such a big thing something that was talked about so often and like I talk about it almost every day on my show leading up to it uh it just happened went smoothly and now it we're just running ethereum on proof of stake just awesome and you know I I don't know if it would have been talked about more if it was like a bull market I don't really think that it wouldn't matter that much maybe people would have

been like oh look you know the reduction in Supply led to eat pumping blah blah but in real like immediately pumping but in reality it probably was just bull market things it's always hard to know what you know what correlates with what and everything I mean if it was that easy everyone would be able to to tell where the price was going to go right um but yeah I just thought it was something simple that Tim put out today that has a lot behind it and I've been doing a bit of reflecting over the last couple days actually about the merge and proof of stake and everything surrounding it because uh there's a thread actually um from uh Bert Miller from flashbots and I'm going to read out but I've been thinking about about it in the context of Mev in the context of obviously these Mev boost relays and

things like that and how we can well how I can personally help with uh with kind of strengthening the network from that point of view so that got me just thinking a lot about the fact that ethereum is now on proof of stake and going through all the Motions there so yeah just a great little tweet from Tim today that I wanted to quickly highlight on the refuel and speaking of proof of stake and the beacon chain Michael Sproul from the sigma Prime team here who built the lighthouse uh consensus layer client uh kind of put out a tweet where he said update on the beacon chain archive node efforts here's a formerly uh three terabyte plus Lighthouse archive node in 273 gigabytes so the performance improvements that are coming to clients are immense I mean as I mentioned I believe on the refill

previously all the focus on the clients was obviously getting the merge done but now that that's done and there are I mean there are other upgrades coming but those are still obviously in Flight we don't know exactly which ones are going to go into the network and things like that uh team members of the these um of these client teams can work on optimizations which is obviously what we want to see for a number of different reasons one of the big reasons actually is that uh the more optimizations there are the potentially more profitable a client will be over another client so that's obviously an incentive but also things like this where we're getting like a lighthouse archive no no down from three terabytes or over three terabytes to just 273 gigabytes which isn't very much at all so just great to see this great to see that optimizations

have uh still been continued to be worked on and are kind of ramping up here and Michael reckons that we can shave another 50 gigah byte off the block storage using another optimization that he tweeted about a few weeks ago so the total should be less than 250 gigabytes for at least a few more months so very cool effort uh great job here to Michael and whoever else worked on this uh love to see it all right so uh John Becker here from a transpose data for putting out a tweet today so saying ethereum data is about to be easier to access than ever and there's a screenshot here of basically a transpose extra SQL playground of accessing ethereum data and I've highlighted a bunch of these Services before on the refuel I think they're extremely important for a number of

reasons and I think the the best thing about this is that this actually fits into a I guess um I don't know if the thesis is the right word but it fits into something that I spoke about yesterday about how there's going to be third-party services that store certain data and data in the sense of state and and things like call data uh in place of them actually being stored on the ethereum layer one chain and the example I used yesterday was Proto dank sharding how that cool data is only going to persist for one month on the ethereum layer one chain and then after that it expires and then you know if you haven't downloaded it yourself then if no one's downloaded the data is technically lost but the thing is you don't need that data for uh to verify that it was

correct to verify the state of um of the layer twos what you need it for is things like accounting things like querying balances at a certain period of time and that's something that may some of you may not know is that the main difference between an archive node and a full node on on ethereum is that an archive node will give you everything that ever happened on the Chain every state diff so stay different so what I mean by that is say you want to look up the balance of an account at block such and such right some block one year ago or something and you want to look at what their balance was what their eth balance was what their token balances were all that sorts of stuff right to do that you would need an archive note right you can't do that with a full node

but the thing is is that an archive known in a full node they'll give you the same security guarantees it's just that a full node is obviously much easier to run it's much smaller in size but the only reason that you would need the data from the archive node is for a historical accounting purposes right and obviously that is a a service that is needed by a lot of people probably most people but we have third parties that offer that like I don't query my own archive no to get that information I go to eat the skin right I go to other block explorers now is there centralization concerns with that I mean sure but the thing is it's not like it's centralization concerns in the sense of ethereum being centralized it's more centralized Azure concerns around the availability of that data and obviously as I said that data is not unneeded but

it is not needed for the chain uh for you to run a full node in order to make sure that the chain is secure the make sure sorry to order the chain to make sure everything's as it should be right um but as I said like transpose uh data here is just one uh or it's called transpose it's just one tool in the tool about there's plenty of others out there that are going to be doing this sorts of stuff that are going to be storing this because as I said there is a business opportunity here for these companies they can offer this uh and for maybe a subscription fee or maybe a one-off fee or anything like that and there's also going to be people who just store all this stuff for free and offer for free as well so we're going to have a

spectrum there of different solutions but obviously that's better than just leaving everything on ethereum layer one uh and making and and the cost basically gets born by the network so it's not free like every time you do something on the ethereum layer 1 Network that has to be stored has to be stored by the people running full nodes people validating the network obviously if you want to be a validator on the network you have to run a full node so if the chain just gets too bloated and too big and because you're just storing everything well then it becomes more and more expensive to run a full node less people do it and then it centralizes things right a very it very much centralizes things and that's why we're against monolithic blockchains in the ethereum uh in the ethereum ecosystem so I've I've talked about this before so I won't rant on

about that too much but uh cool to see another solution that I hadn't seen before pop up uh with regards to querying the chain for data all right so Terence from the prylabs team has written down some consensus client implementers thoughts on erp4844 which you guys you guys know is Proto dank sharding so these are just his thoughts around what would be required to be changed on the beacon chain and what things to be considered on the beacon chain so on the consensus layer side of things there's a great number of things here I suggest giving this a read it's pretty cool to get into the mind of a consensus liar a consensus a layout core developer and see what they're thinking about because these are all things that need to be considered and as I've said before 4844 proto-dang shining even though it's way less complex than

full dank sharding it's still got its own complexities it's still got its own open questions its own things they need to be smoothed out need to be worked out before we can actually implement it into the network that's why I've said previously that we may get a standalone fork for just withdrawals instead of with for bigger chain withdrawals instead of just big instead of being chain withdrawals and 48.44 it just depends on how fast we can get 484 to 48 44 to a point that the X execution layer and things like what developers are happy with and I don't we're obviously not at that point yet but they're working on it I mean as I said as I've said multiple times now I I thought they were going to take a break the core devs but they're not they're just working on this stuff which is awesome to see but

also I hope that like at least taking a bit of a break from time to time to make sure they're recharged and make sure they're not just kind of uh overworking themselves and burning themselves out but I'll link this in the YouTube description you can go check it out all right so I mentioned this thread before from Bert Miller talking about flashbots Mev boost uh flashbots is currently centralized infrastructure and competition this is a great thread I really really highly recommend going giving it a read especially given everything that's been happening over the last few months around flashbot Mev boost the ofax sanctions censoring all that sorts of stuff stuff there but doesn't explicitly mention ofac alternator cache in his Twitter thread I think that's for obvious reasons the

flashbotter's legal team probably said do not explicitly mention it but I mean you raid between the lines it's all there so he basically puts This Thread together saying that flashbots was created as a to be a public good as to steer ethereum ethereum MAV ecosystem towards a place that actually isn't parasitic to the network all that sort of stuff that I spoken I've spoken about in the past as well and I mean I still think they're doing that right and some people have actually asked me or come at me privately and said hey you know you should draw more attention to the fact that flashbots is uh air relay our sensors transactions senses the o5 transactions and I'm like okay well I have drawn attention to it multiple times in the past but there's kind of a delicate balance here for me personally

I don't want to like for lack of a better term all over the flashbots team and then cause them to turn inward and we stop getting all the amazing stuff from them that we have been getting I know what they're doing with their relayer is shitty right and I think but the thing is is that I think with the censoring I think they actually made up for that by open sourcing the Mev boost code very very quickly after that happened I don't think these guys have flashbots the guys and girls the team at flashbots are malicious actors at all I think they're good actors I think they're in a very very rock and a hard place right now uh because of the fact that they're us-based oh fact sanctions uh extremely serious and you don't want to be seen even hinting at

breaking them and as I've said in the past I do believe they're over complying but for them it's probably worth it to over comply rather than risk uh massive fines you know jail time all these other stuff that could happen to them personally so I do not expect anyone to be a motto here when it comes to this sorts of stuff but one thing I will say is that the criticism that they kind of get is definitely Justified for this uh and there has been a lot of a lot of um open questions around should they even be running a relayer if they aren't able to offer a relayer that doesn't censor I'm torn on this like in one hand I understand the arguments for them shutting it down but then I understand the arguments for them running it as well like there's there's good arguments

on either side here I think the best argument for them shutting it down is obviously that they can't offer a censorship resistant relayer so if they want if they actually care about ethereum they should just shut it down and let the other ones get the market share but then the argument for keeping it live is that the flashbots relay from what I know is the most mature is the best rear layer available today it's the most stable it's the most reliable uh and we know I mean there's trust involved here but we do know that the flashbots team Works in ethereum's best interest on the technical side of things obviously on the social side of things where the team as I just explained with the sanctions and stuff like that the criticism is definitely warranted but as

I've said as I said before I don't think we should just be all over them constantly and and basically uh forcing them to turn inward which means that we get less cool stuff out of them I think that they're doing what they can they're producing what they can they're building what they can and the fact that they open sourced it so the other relayers can come online is amazing it now it's just up to the market to work its work it out now it's up to you if you're running a validator not to use the flashbots relay if you care about censorship resistance on ethereum if you care about ethereum's credible neutrality you would use a nonsense ring relayer and to be fair it's not just flashbots that is censoring here there is some of the other relays are censoring as well I mean blocksrat has a

censoring one um uh uh block native does and Eden does I I think that manifold is the only one that doesn't right now but I mean you can't guarantee that won't always be the case and obviously we're working on all these other Technical Solutions that I've spoken about plenty of times in the past but this is in the context of flashbots as a team I think it yeah it doesn't do any good constantly berating them about this they they're aware of this it's not like we have to keep reminding them what we should be doing is berating the people running the validators where they be people institutions companies to not use that relay that's fair game to me at least I think that that that's fine um but on top of that as well we should also be very

um a very uh very conscious of the fact that their flashbots relay isn't the only one that's censoring so we should direct people towards the ones that uh you know are best for the network so to speak so yeah I just wanted to give some uh context around that and one last thing I wanted to explain actually now that I remembered is you hear me use all these terms and you're probably confused by them so what I want to say is flashbots is a company right they develop the Mev boost software which is a piece of software that is considered like a sidecar or an optional piece of software you can run alongside your beacon chain validator right or validators so flashbots company Mev booth software then the relays are also

this kind of like software that's run that relays the transactions relays the bundles uh and the bundles are basically Mev transactions in the bundles and then there's like a Marketplace that sorts out which ones get included in blocks and stuff like that and then there's other companies like a block native like manifold like Eden like uh blocks route that offer their own relays but they use the Mev boost software and Marketplace as well right they just have a different relay that does not censor in some cases in some cases it still sensors uh those ofak transactions right so those are the delineations to be made there uh so when you're hearing people talk about flashbots they're most likely talking about the company Mev boost software the relays software as well right the Mev

booster software is the same across all the relays just the real the relay implementations are different depending on if they're censoring or not and I mean other things as well right there are there are other other thing other variables in that too but that's the last thing on that one go give this photo read I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so the block is out with some news today that Fidelity has revealed an ethereum index fund uh with five million dollars in initial sales so far in a new filing so this filing is with the SEC and as I said it showed the fund has has adjust over five million dollars worth of sales already obviously a really really small number uh five million dollars isn't really anything to scoff at but it's cool to see that these bigger institutions are still kind of

getting more involved in crypto and launching you know a new ethereum Index Fund uh which provides its clients exposures to eth of course and they launched it on September 26th uh I look I think I've mentioned this in the past Trad fire is going to keep launching these things they're going to keep wrapping it up in Pro in in different types of products that there's going to be staking products and other products out there and then these institutions are going to take their own fee and everything and it's going to be a nice little cash cow for them but given it's a bear Market given that I mean September's been the probably the worst well one of the worst months of the bear market so far I don't expect the uh um the uh five I I don't expect it to be much more than the five million dollars

that's been quoted so far but as the market eats back up again there's obviously going to be more sales here so you want to be launching these products in a bear market so that you're ready for when the bull market comes around that's actually a pretty um Sound business uh I guess strategy is launching things in a bear Market growing them getting those initial customers in making sure the product has at least some sort of product Market fit and then when the bull market rolls around again you reap all the benefits and that's what happened to a lot of things within the crypto ecosystem uh during the last bull market and I expect that to happen again in the next one all right so lens protocol has announced today they've partnered with ens to allow lens data to be queried via ANS resolution so lens data such as display

name profile photo cover image and address can now be queried as ens resource records using erp3668 off-chain resolution the lens protocol core team is operating a resolver via star.lens.xyz however all code will be open source so that anyone can create their own off-chan resolver serving lens data data stores like lens need secure authoritative means of lookup and there is no better partner in this space than ens look out for some more lens xns news soon this is awesome to see two of my favorite non-financial products in the ecosystem kind of coming together to offer this uh this really cool user experience to people uh lens protocol came under Fire for not integrating with

ens originally but the reason is because ens isn't live on the polygon POS chain and that's where lens is right now so I don't think it was so because lens created there own naming system because of that limitation there but that doesn't mean they can't integrate with ens doesn't mean they can't integrate ANS when ANS comes to the polygon POS chain and it's great to see that the teams are still working together right like it's not like they're hostile with each other or they're like oh no screw you you didn't support us no that's not how we do it in ethereum we work together it's all open source anyway it's all able to be um to be worked on in an open way and that's what's really amazing about this and lens protocol I've talked about a little bit on the refill but not that much but I've been

keeping an eye on it it seems to be gaining some pretty good traction uh which is really cool to see there are definitely signs of early adoption but it's like very very early still it's definitely not anything that's going to replace Twitter anytime soon but we may end up needing it more and more as time goes on because of the fact I mean Elon Musk has to buy Twitter now I'm sure you guys saw the news today um he can't get out of his contract I'm simultaneously like excited and scared about that like excited because Twitter has being kind of meth for a while they haven't really done much and maybe Elon Musk can give him a kick up the ass but also scared that I don't think he's going to be able to do that because he has so much other stuff going on the

fact that he didn't actually want to buy the company in the end uh yeah I don't know what's gonna happen to Twitter right and sometimes I think about this and I'm like okay well I have a massive social graph on Twitter what if they just screw it all up like what happens then what if everyone just leaves and goes somewhere else I can't bring my Twitter profile with me right I can tweet and basically say hey come follow me on this but it's not the same so when you have something like a lens protocol that's a decentralized social graph you basically don't rely or aren't at the mercy of a front end it's a decentralized protocol that you can take your data with you wherever you go to different front ends it's the same concept within defy and other things on on on chain but I think that's going to

be very very powerful for social graphs for digital identity especially in the age where these web 2 companies just get more and more centralized more and more uh I guess like they I censor things more and more and they're pretty aimless as well like that as I said Twitter the front end hasn't really innovated at all in a long time I mean they've done bits and pieces here and there like nft Integrations they're doing an edit button but I mean an edit but come on like that was Drew ages ago was that supposed to be a huge innovation no I mean and it's not just Twitter it's a lot of these web 2 social media platforms uh and they're also not great in terms of the algorithms too the algorithms are completely opaque we have no idea how they're serving us things I

mean I haven't noticed it so much on Twitter but on YouTube the algorithm is just whack on there it's suggesting me that I have absolutely no interest in interest in I don't know why it's suggesting it to me and I say I'm not interested in it and it keeps suggesting it to me so obviously I have no insight into that at all no idea why they're they're suggesting that to me and I hate that because it's like are they trying to force a particular thing on me are they trying to force a particular view on me um as part of some internal trial that they're doing I don't know how many of you are aware of this but face book has actually done many many trials uh of their algorithm and forcibly suggested content to people to see how it affected them their mood see how it affected

their behavior on Facebook uh and it was really really bad at one point I think they did a study where they showed people just bad news exclusively in their news feed and they wanted to see if they could see uh if People's mood changed materially because of that and they it did of course it did if you get exposed to bad news all the time then you're gonna start feeling really and that's a major problem with the internet today is that we're all so connected and these algorithms just control our mood so with decentralized protocols we can choose these algorithms we can choose which ones we want to use which ones we don't want to use and I think it's over the longer term hopefully going to be a better solution than what we have today uh because today we just have this completely opaque

system where we're at the mercy of these massive centralized companies that uh monitor everything we do sell our data to the highest bidder manipulate us via algorithms you know something's got to give eventually and I think that lens protocol is just one of those things that can help us get to a more decentralized uh social uh future all right so Horizon today announced a 40 million dollar funding round in a series a funding round I should say now disclosure I participated in this funding round as you probably would have assumed by now I I know I say that a lot about a lot of things but I like disclosing these things um for those of you who don't know who Horizon is well they're the parent company behind a few different things skyweaver which is a trading card game uh using nfts

obviously and and things like that uh sequence which is a smart wallet and a developer platform and Nifty swap which is a Marketplace for swapping sfts or semi-fungible tokens so they're building a bunch of different things here and this 40 million round had participation from a bunch of different investors that you can see listed here as well as a bunch a bunch of different Angels so I personally chose to invest in them because I think what they're doing is building not only you know obviously a game but they're building this game and they're probably seen at some point hey like we need to build tools to attract more Builders to the platform to track more develop us track more users so they went and built sequence which I don't know how many of you have used sequins but it's a pretty cool little developer

platform and smart wallet that they've been working on for quite a while here and then obviously as I said they're also building Nifty swap which is uh for a Marketplace for sfts so they're building things like on top of things that they've already built so to speak so they're obviously identifying problems and being okay well no one's done a solution for this yet we're going to be the solution here and I I saw kind of the um the metrics the statistics around this and I was like wow okay this is growing this is actually uh this is actually being used uh these are things that people are really interested in in interacting with I'd love to to kind of back these guys when obviously the opportunity came up here and you can check out the the sequence website for more information about what that does

obviously the skyweaver game is uh self-explanatory it's an nft trading card game like God's Unchained which I'm sure a lot of you have heard of before but you can check out sequence uh and check out all the information on their website here which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh but yeah congrats to them on this massive series a funding round really great to see more of these legit teams building really cool stuff get funded and obviously I'm a proud angel investor in them all right so unisaw put out this tweet today uh saying the unisoft V3 on arbitrim has just hit an all-time high of 78.7 market share now it's been one year since V3 has been live on arbitrim here and you can see that units of V3 is just absolutely dominating I mean it

wasn't at the start right but it is now it's just killing everything else and I've explained before that I think this is in large part due to just brand awareness and you know marketing generally everyone trusts uni swap instead of other things out there uh and obviously it's a it's a bear Market as well so people are probably less inclined to try new things new amms things like that but if I actually uh lo I always had this before had this up before but if I actually load unisop.info hopefully this works for me it's a site that tracks the different metrics of uh of unicever across different uh chains here this is ethereum layer one we don't really care about that right now uh let's look actually let's look at the polygon POS change so 24 hour volume on the polygon POS chain is about what it can range

from it's about 150 million depending on the day obviously so it can range from anywhere from 50 to 150 million uh which during the bear Market result which is obviously some great growth there optimism uh you've got uh 24 hours you've got 50 to 100 million I mean it varies wildly here but uh what anywhere between 30 and and uh 90 million or so and then arbitrim uh you can see here as well if I'm gonna bring up the 24 hour stats yeah it's actually gone up a lot recently but it's just kind of between I guess 50 and 100 million depending on the day and before that it was more online I guess with optimism but arbitrimps had a big had a big September that was for sure now we can look at some other chains here actually there's

one other chain here uh Salo or cello which is a layer one that I always thought was kind of like completely pointless I didn't really get the point of it I was looking at this before the the total monthly volume they had monthly not daily for September was 2.29 million dollars like basically nothing it's a rounding error so I don't even know why they're live there but if you compare this to ethereum layer 1 in terms of daily volume uh ethereum layer one uh or I think I don't know if this is ethereum layer one a daily volume here uh I think this is wrong these stats on ethereum layer one it's showing like 20 30 million no that's definitely wrong I think ethereum uh layer 1 daily volume is more than that but I don't know if it's handy right now but still cool to see it growing obviously uh as I

said Arboretum had a big September and unusoft had a big September on arbitrim as well and the market share has obviously gone up because of that but it's been trending up since June here so it's not like it's a recent thing but still cool to say uni swap dominating for uni swap's sake but also I do like to see competition when it comes to these things but your new size brand awareness and dominance is just just proving to be too much I think all right so Zappa announced today that you can now explore nfts on optimism using the Zappa platform so if you're looking to explore the optimism ecosystem you can check out this thread from zap up to give a bit of a highlight here but yeah you can basically look at all your nfts on the optimism chain via your zapper dashboard which you can just

go do if you go to Zappa's website I'm sure you've probably already seen this if you are really into your nfts on optimism so great to see this supported here all right so defy saver I missed this the other day but they're excited uh to introduce their latest and most complete integration yet which is compound V3 so you can go to D5 sorry app.d5saver.com compounds to get dedicated dashboard automation support notifications loan shifting and a recipe Creator so I've spoken about D5 saver a bunch of times on the refuel before uh but these guys are great this platform is really great it supports a bunch of different things within a D5 and now they're supporting compound V3 which is great to see and I'm sure some of you have used this

especially during the bull market when maybe you were taking on some Leverage The defy saver is pretty famous for allowing you to essentially set up these kind of insurance polls not in literal insurance policy but like uh automated backstop so that if you're you're liquidation price gets near it automatically tops up your collateral pays back your debt or things like that but they've also got a bunch of other Integrations that you should check out as well they're basically trying to do D5 management but in like a more advanced way way than what you would get from the Native front ends so definitely go check them out and check out this compound integration I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right last up here we have a new dashboard from D5 llama which is which has been soft launch which is funding

around in crypto so this dashboard will show you information around uh funding rounds within the crypto ecosystem who are the lead investor was what sector they're a part of the round details and obviously a source as well so you can see that Horizon is listed here of course as I spoke about before but there's a bunch of others as well and you can keep scrolling down and it just goes further and further back obviously this won't have everything yet this is a soft launch of this but I'm sure they'll be adding more and more as time goes on so if you're interested in seeing all the recent fund raises over the last couple years actually well the ones that they're currently got listed here I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out but on that note that's going to be it for today so

thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone