Geth v1.10.0 released, EVM is the moat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #70 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the fourth of march 2021 all right everyone let's get into the news uh quickly before we get into that i just wanted to give a quick shout out to my good friend kite here he's going to be doing a series of nfts uh called the world of ethereum uh he'll be unveiling them i guess over the next few days uh you can follow him on twitter to keep up to date with that and uh the genesis mint will be dedicated to get coin uh which means that uh parts of the proceeds will be donated to bitcoin as part of the next uh matching round which is really really cool so yeah fun fact about uh about kidder

he actually had a lot of um i guess like uh feedback in the deligue logo i had my friend in real life designed it and then kitty kind of like um you know refined it gave a lot of feedback on it so he was pretty instrumental there and he's been a good friend for a long time so definitely check this out you don't have to buy it or anything like that but i've seen the art itself and it's it looks really really cool um but if yeah if you're into nfts into crypto art or anything like that definitely uh you want to be checking this out and it'll be the the bidding will start on the fifth uh friday the fifth for these auctions i think they're going to be on wearable or something like that uh but yeah basically there's a there's a few

different things to kind of get your hands on so definitely go check that one out so i put out this tweet today called uh called basically saying turns out that the evm was the moat all along now i wrote about this in delhi newsletter today a more detailed piece but i just wanted to quickly mention what i meant by this so for those who don't know ethereum has a virtual machine called the evm or the ethereum virtual machine and this is basically what powers the smart contracts and all the code and logic behind it um and without the evm you couldn't have kind of like smart contracts without a virtual machine now the reason why i say that the evm is is is the moat right because in crypto people are always asking like what is the moat of an open source protocol right is it the users

is it the developers is it the liquidity is it the code you know all this sort of stuff um i think some of that plays into it but i wouldn't call them like massive modes i think developers is a pretty good mode um but liquidity definitely isn't right because you can make liquidity go from protocol to protocol just by incentivizing it at the end of the day so i don't think eq liquidity is a very strong mode developers are but i believe the strongest moat is the evm the ethereum virtual machine now this is the case because of the fact that if we look at something like bsc binance smart chain which is as i've mentioned before a centralized clone of ethereum it means that developers if they want to can just take their code take the applications

and just redeploy it on bsc with next to zero cost because the code and the smart contracts and everything like that are going to be exactly the same because bsc is evm compatible because it's essentially ethereum and bsc isn't the only one there's a bunch of other evm compatible chains out there and there's going to be evm compatible layer 2s i mean there already is with polygon um you know slash matic and uh everyone's excited about optimistic ethereum of course um you know which coming out this month uh which is going to be evm compatible and then arbitrim as well so that those are all layer twos but in terms of other blockchains you know there are these kind of things and i think i put out another tweet a few weeks ago saying that it's funny how all these other you know quote-unquote ethereum killers or other

chains you know spent many years raising billions of dollars to build all this fancy tech and then you know binance just comes along clones ethereum and gets more users and usage than than they do in all the years that they've been around and that's simply because of the evm you know developers don't want to have to rewrite their entire app for a new ecosystem right that takes time it takes money you have to reorder the code you have to learn a new language right if it's not solidity you have to learn some other language it just doesn't make any sense so if you're a developer you know exactly what i mean um but if you're not just know that developers do not want to have to rewrite their entire app just to support your chain especially when your chain has no users right so that's why the evm i believe is the

moat and i did conclude my piece in the daily way by saying that i don't think that it's actually parasitic to ethereum i think it's additive because i do believe these other chains are a stop gap between you know ethereum and ethereum's layer 2 where the fees are higher and ethereums people are using these other chains but then once the ethereum layer 2 ecosystem is kind of more you know fleshed out i believe pretty much most of the activity will just happen on there and these other chains won't really have you know be much right they'll just be like kind of like a check mark in history sort of thing um because these as i said there's other layer twos at least most of them are evm compatible and that's exactly what you need right you don't want to have to force developers to to recode everything and

and anything like that and the reason why you're seeing actually projects port to you know bsc and other places is is is because of this as well it's like free for them to do right you just take your existing code redeploy it right this developers have deployment scripts for their smart contracts so it is so super simple and out of that you get free marketing right you get uh you know potentially some more users who have been out priced out of ethereum and you also get the favor of binance um because you know deploying to bsc means that binance views you more favorably and maybe you'll get a token a listing for your token so i understand why projects are doing it and at the end of the day if it doesn't take off and nothing happens and the chain like dies down and dies it dies

off and you know ethereum's layer two ecosystem takes over then it really didn't cost you anything to do it and you got like a bit of benefit out of it at the same time you know you might lose some community goodwill and all that sort of stuff but i don't think you know i mean i don't think that matters too much right there's people that like me who who i are ideological about this stuff but we're not the majority unfortunately uh or fortunately whatever way you look at it look at it so you know i totally get why projects are doing this and i don't blame them for doing it at the end of the day uh but at the same time i will always kind of like fight back against like centralization and centralized chains and and always promote the ethereum alternatives which are decentralized

right like the layer twos but it's kind of hard to promote that right now when a lot of it still isn't live or just kind of going live and being fleshed out so looking forward to that and on that note as well metamask added a really really cool feature today where developers can now kind of recommend layer 2 networks or sidechains to people as they come to their app so say you go visit an app that's living on say a layer 2 right say you go visit um the optimist an app that's running on optimism at some point in the future and then you know metamask needs to kind of like maybe switch networks or something like that uh you can basically embed this in the app so that it'll give a pop-up on metamask and tell the user to switch right this is especially um really really good for

things like uh you know side chains i guess like x die and stuff like that where you have to actually change your network rpc manually you know now you can just basically go to an app that lives on x die and the app will tell you hey you're on the wrong network uh you need to add this network um and then you add it and then it just gets automatically added in there and then you switch over to that network and you can go about your day so yeah pretty big big feature release here i think it's pretty cool that they're not only supporting like layer 2 but other chains as well you know if users are going to do this anyway we may as well just make it easy for them right excuse me so yeah really good release here from metamask and i think

it's i mean i saw a tweet saying that like uh this is better for leia tours and ethereum and the ethereum ecosystem in general than the other kind of sidechains and stuff like that and i think i mean it's it's good for all of it um i i don't think that um it's a bad thing uh for any any particular kind of chain i guess um but it'd be interesting to see kind of how it plays out and the usage number is around this i do hope that metamask publishes some public use usage numbers around you know how many people change their network and are using like different networks as opposed to ethereum not just like other chains but layer two ecosystems as well because i'll be very excited to see what the the the traction is like on that so georgios uh for constantinopolis from

paradigm put out a really great thread uh today and i'll link it in the youtube description you go check it out but basically as i've been saying over the past few days the berlin ethereum network upgrade is scheduled to go live in april uh i i blocked uh blocked 12.2 million around there and with it becomes a bunch of different eip so it's about 41 days away from now and the eips that are coming are quite technical as i've mentioned before so um georgios does a great job of breaking it down here i'm linking to further kind of reading on these sorts of things so if you want to you know learn more about that definitely go check this out uh one thing i will note is that eip1559 is not in this network upgrade i want to make that very clear if it gets accepted on i

think tomorrow or friday's all-call dev call if it gets accepted into the next network upgrade which is called london um it will be scheduled for around july or at least tentatively scheduled for july so i'm expecting and so is you know pretty much everyone else that one five five nine will be accepted and then we'll pretty much have it in july which is not that far away i mean we're in march march april may june july it's like four or five months away and we'll have one five five nine on the network and we'll start burning those fees which i think is gonna be really really cool and really good for the narrative as well i mean there's always some debates about one five five nine and how much impact it will have on ethereum's price i think the narrative you know of of the

fee burning is stronger than the actual fee burning itself uh and on top of that i think making the ethereum network much more usable in general because it improve you know it doesn't only just burn fees it it greatly improves the kind of ethereum gas market um or free market i think that as well will add a lot of fundamental value to to ethereum too so looking forward to that but yeah there's a bunch of different um and interesting eips in berlin that you should go check out as well uh you know if you're a technical person you'll enjoy it more than more so than non-technical people because maybe you won't understand it i'm gonna say i don't understand most of it because a lot of it is pretty technical but um you know just reading the surface level stuff it's it's very exciting so matthew feinstein from lupering put

out a really cool tweet today saying that over 50 000 8 is now in the loop ring layer 2 and that's been growing pretty steadily as you can see from this chart right i mean it started off you know pretty much like under 10 000. 10 000 under 10 000 in uh i guess you know december it looks like here uh now it's up to over 50 000 ethan just growing at a really steady pace here which is really cool and he goes on to say you know forget about usd tvl he cares about the eighth tbr we measure the ethereum economy in ethan i agree with him you know i think there's 8.5 million eighth locked in d5 right now last time i checked and you know that's just such a great measure of of how the the health of the ethereum economy

um i think you know tvl and usd is is fun but also it counts like a lot of the non-eth tbl um which which is fine but it can be inflated in certain areas and you know it cannot make like total sense to kind of compare that but definitely um you know seeing it grow and seeing the eth locked in not just looping but in d5 and general grow is great because it means more people are using eth as a collateral asset or as an economic asset in their d5 activities which is what we want right as i've explained on the refill before that's one of the three core value pillars of its value accrual um and it's a critical one that it's used as trustless collateral within d5 as an economic asset to increase the economic bandwidth of the ethereum network so

really really cool start from from matthew here so arbitram another team building optimistic roll-ups uh uh basically announced today on twitter that their uh kind of technology is no longer patent-pending which means that they are not going to patent any of their technology i think or any of their kind of layer 2 tech here and they and they go on to say that arbitrary is a community project and abandoning the patent was a critical step for them in preparation for their upcoming mainnet launch you know i think their mainland launch is going to come like probably this month or next month right if i had to guess just because of the fact that optimism is launching and arbitrary basically i guess you could call them a competitor or at least they're building kind of like similar tech so they definitely want to get to um get

to mainnet uh you know just as just as quick there but it's really cool that you know this is not going to be patented now right all the the code will kind of be open source people will be able to use it fork it all that good stuff so yeah good job to arbitrarily here and for those who don't know i mean arbitrary is just the the name of the optimistic roll-up technology it's actually being built by a team called off chain labs and you know optimism and uh gets a lot of attention right but i think arbitrary and off chain labs are just as important to the future of ethereum kind of scaling here um with optimistic roll-ups and i think that they've got just as much smart people as optimism does so always good to have competition healthy competition and different options we

don't want a monopoly on anything in in the space and you know it's really great that maybe other you know others can kind of like fork this code and if they want to and maybe make their own ecosystem i think it's really cool so god's unchanged now for those who don't know god's unchained has been a trading card game that's been around for quite a while now you know all the way back in maybe 2018 maybe 2019 i can't remember exactly how long it's been around for but it's been around for a while and this was built by a company called immutable who are also building a tool called immutable x which is their layer 2 zk roll up nft exchange that is going live very very soon as well but what they announced today or what they published today i should say in this blog post is basically a rollout

plan for god's unchained on immutable x now the reason why i think god's unchanged hasn't taken off like you know people have would have hoped it would is because when you buy the trading cards you know a lot of them aren't worth very much so when you try to trade them the gas fees end up being more than you know what the the card is worth so you know the trading ecosystem is pretty pretty poor because of that now with immutable x this kind of solves all those issues because we're going to layer two there's going to be like basically free transactions super scalable all that good stuff and i think godzilla chain is going to be the centerpiece of of that ecosystem there so this post basically runs through the rollout stages how it's all going to work um you know what the features are like

how it improves upon the experience all that good stuff so you can go check out this blog post it'll be linked in the youtube description obviously i won't read out the whole thing but yeah this is another solution that i'm actually really excited about because they're focusing on nfts you know a lot of the other platforms are generalized so you know they're not gonna they're just gonna put their tech out there but not have any kind of specific focus i think optimism is definitely you know going to be focusing on on d5 first and i i i think you know arbitrarily will be the same thing simply because of the fact that d5 is that killer use case but you know d5 i think nfts are are getting you know no they're not as big as a d50 in terms of like value kind of like flowing through it but

they're going to get there so i'm i'm really looking forward to immutable x kind of um being released and you know showing the power of what you know what i guess like ethereum scaling can do not just for d5 but also for nfts so speaking of optimism uh ben from rari uh capital put out a really cool tweet today and i'll link it in the youtube description so you can go to all these links but basically he he says if you only just kind of understand optimism it's time to get serious i present to you optimism boot camp so he he gives four links here which are pretty much like required reading and watching um and he put some times here i think that's just part of the joke that it's like a boot camp you don't have to wake up at 6am to read vitalik's blog post

here but basically i mean this is vitalik's kind of like incomplete guide to roll-ups there's a video here um about it about optimism uh from calvin feature a victor victor who works at optimism of course uh paradigms research that they published a couple of weeks ago i think uh or a few weeks ago now back in january wow okay um or end of january to be fair uh that i that i kind of talked about on the refill that you should definitely go read um and then the optimism docks themselves so yeah they've got like a really great kind of docs um kind of um section here so if you want to dive deeper into optim optimistic roll ups and how optimism works specifically definitely go check out these resources that been provided here so a major release for go ethereum today

on the eth1 network uh this is version 1.10 called the i think the pangaea expanse they've co-named it with this release comes snapshots uh through snapsync to pruning and database optimizations and they've said it's got everything to make ethereum better so if you're running an eth1 client which you should be if you can you should definitely upgrade your client to this version uh because there's like a lot of upgrades i mean this blog price is packed look at that look how much up you know upgrades have come to it a lot of it's technical upgrades but you know by running this you're helping kind of like the the network um you know by by decentralizing it by running a node and there's a new sync called um snap snap sync which will actually get you kind of synced up faster with the ethereum network which i think is really

really cool as well so yeah if you're running in an eth1 node definitely go uh go download this check it out i mean you know if you don't want to you don't have to because like there's other versions that you can be running a little bit older versions but i think that you should definitely um upgrade this and they made a note here as well saying that this doesn't come with the berlin hard fork which means you'll have to upgrade again when the berlin hard fork client is released here um apparently there was some set 11th hour concerns about specific erp so maybe it will come out next week or something so maybe you you want to skip over this version and just wait for the berlin hard 4 compatible version because you'll need to upgrade uh i i kind of upgrade that

um upgrade to that version if you want to be on on the berlin heart fork there so an update from yam today they released a new i guess kind of like feature called dow house which is a treasury management solution for dows now they're actually using set protocol under the hood here which i think is really cool because as you know as you guys know i'm an advisor to set i worked there for quite a while um and i mean they've basically already kind of like got products on sets infrastructure uh they've got like the yam dao house where they're managing yams treasury through um through a set essentially and you can actually go on token sets and see this um and you know they're basically releasing this as a kind of open solution for other dowels to tap into it

basically and you can see here this is how how it kind of looks the dao house sits on the top um and then the yam dao is underneath here and yam dao house is underneath that and then you know there's other dowels that can be on top with the dow houses under there as well so yeah really really cool i mean i wrote about kind of like i guess governance yesterday in the delegate newsletter but i didn't talk about treasury management much in there or at all from memory but i think treasury management for dows is is critically important you need ways for dows to kind of i guess be flexible with their treasury because they have large treasuries i mean i've spoken about unisop's treasury before that's massive right it's billions of dollars worth i think and there's a lot other protocols with with

big treasuries as well now you know a lot of these treasuries are denominated in their own token so maybe they want to divest out of that token and go buy you know some eat with it or go buy some stable coins and do yield farming and all that sort of stuff so this is what this kind of solution aims to help with and and and you know because it's built on set protocols infrastructure it can do a lot of this stuff um natively through through set protocol um and through it like you know i can i can kind of vouch for set like it's a very kind of secure protocol it's been around for a while um you know the team knows exactly what they're building for here and you can actually see here like all these features are built in as well you know into the token sets website

where you can do trades you know i'm using your kind of like you know your dow house which is essentially like part part of all of your treasury um which i think is really really cool um but yeah i mean you know what's funny about yam is that i think i've been talking about them for for a while now on the refuel and i know a lot of people still think yam is a joke right because it started as like it started off pretty random right it launched during d5 summer there was like that whole craze about it then it it was a massive bug in it which kind of bugged out the rebalancing uh rebasing sorry um feature and then they disabled the rebasing feature and now they're just doing like all these cool products like this dow house they've got like umbrella protocol which is like an

insurance protocol i think they're working on a few other things as well so really cool to see them like not capitulate and just become another kind of footnote in you know ethereum defy summer history they're actually building things they're actually doing really cool stuff and disclosure i mean as you guys know i own yam tokens and i i mean i own them because i'm bullish on the project i think it's going to go far not investment advice right i don't know if it's gonna go up or down but you know i'm taking the bet that that that it'll go up over time because of what all the stuff that they're kind of building here and it's funny i didn't buy yam until they removed the rebasing either because i didn't want to hold a rebasing token because if you if if you haven't looked at them lately

pretty much all the rebasing slash algorithmic stable coins they're just wrecked right they're absolutely wrecked because they were all ponzi games essentially so yeah i didn't want to hold it then but now they remove that it's fine and it's just like a normal token and everything like that with governance rights and all that shebang so yeah really really cool to see this out of yam finance today uh there's a pretty lengthy blog post so definitely go read it if you want to learn more about it so uh speaking of governance m stable and another project that i'm advising uh and an investor in as well just the disclosure there they put out a pretty lengthy governance update here so i've been kind of like working on them uh uh working with them sorry on this uh you know kind of in the

background not not too involved but like you know i've been seeing it evolve over the last few months and it's been really cool to watch they've basically created a whole system where they've got a bunch of different kind of dowels right there's actually a picture here of how it works down down here i think uh yeah so they've got like an association which is um in in is a swiss not-for-profit kind of entity um which is basically kind of like separated from the protocol itself so you can see here in the image there's like an ethical wall between the association and m stable dow and the protocol dow and what the m stable doubt is it is a it's an entity that manages m stables uh public token treasury so as i was just saying this treasury management which they've kind of separated into a

into a separate dial here and then there's a protocol dial which executes and manages upgrades to the m-stable kind of protocol and there's there's it's if they're multi-sigs right now and there's also um you know mta token holders can vote on what happens in the protocol but the execution is actually done by the multi-sig and the fun thing is or like at least i i thought it was pretty cool is that the signers on the m-stable dao and the protocol they are actually different and there are certain parties that are part of the m-stable kind of ecosystem that can't be a signer for one you know dao or or or both of dao's because of conflict of interest and stuff like that um so you can actually see all the details about this in this blog post i won't kind of like go through it here but i

think emstable was doing some pretty good uh pioneering work here on governance i mean i mentioned in the daily grade newsletter yesterday that we can't solve governance right it's not something to be solved as humans we've kind of like built up governance systems over thousands of years and the best system we came up with is democracy and democracy is great right but it has deep flaws i would like i would call democracy like the least worst system right there's lots there's lots of other systems and ways to govern like you know a nation but democracy is the best we've come up with it's the you know it's pretty much the fairest most inclusive and you know um you know it represents stakeholder interest relatively well but also it has its deep flaws right where you know

it's it's it's kind of like uh with politics in general not many people kind of pay attention to it so people just end up kind of like either not voting or voting for someone that that is against their best interest because they're just not keeping up with it right i mean there's so many different different issues but the thing is is that there are issues because we're all human at the end of the day right we all have our own views we'll have our own kind of ways of doing things and we all believe in different things and it's very hard for us to agree on everything so there's never going to be a governance system that is just going to like please everyone that's that's impossible so what what we do in governance and not just in kind of crypto but in general is

that we iterate towards the best solution and democracy took a long time to come up with right so i think the same thing is going to play out with kind of protocol governance within d5 where we're going to see a lot of experiments play out we're going to see lots of iterations of different things play out and we're going to see what works right what doesn't work what represents people well what people like being a part of you know the power of these things is that the community doesn't have to stick around it's not like you know where you're a citizen of a nation and you kind of like stick around for because you're you know in meat space and there's lots of different reasons like your family's there right you have citizenship which you know to get citizenship of another country depending on where you are is is

quite hard whereas on chain you know even if you're you're known or you're anonymous you can just move like if you don't want to be part of like m stable anymore or the m stable governance system you can just sell your mta tokens and and go away right that's the kind of exit cost there very very small um but if you want to on the flip side if you want to be part of a protocols governance all you really have to do is i mean you don't have to but you know it's good too you know you buy the token right and then you go on the forum and you start participating you're on discord you start talking to people it's like giving ideas you know if there's a governance proposal that gets posted you say to them hey you know i think this is a good idea

or harry i think this is a bad idea and you can do this completely anonymously or you can do it under your own name you can jump on community calls right um you can kind of speak speak to the community on there and speak to the developers and all that sort of stuff whereas as i said in real life it's a lot harder to do this sort of stuff to enter and exit like i can't just say oh i'm gonna go become a citizen of you know some european country right uh because you know i i mean something that's not in actually something that's not in the eu because i could get eu citizenship if i wanted because i've got a background i've got an italian background but you know i say you know i wanted to become a citizen of like switzerland which isn't

in in the kind of the eu uh there um uh then you know i couldn't right it'd be very hard for me to do it i have to go there get residency right um go through the whole process and it usually takes a long time i know in australia you have to basically live here for five years and then you can apply to become a citizen and you know that's that's just that's a long time right you have to make a commitment right you have to be sure that australia is where you want to kind of settle down in and that you want to become an australian citizen and that you're not like a a citizen like if another country that won't let you become a citizen of australia like there's all these kind of rules whereas with crypto governance there's none of that you can go in and out

whenever you want which i thought which i think is really cool so yeah kudos to m stable here for innovating i mean i don't want to shield too much because as i say i'm an advisor and investor to them but i think that they're doing very really cool pioneering work here and so are a bunch of other projects i mean there's another one that i spoke about yesterday in the delegate newsletter uh inverse finance which actually ended up seizing the tokens of people who weren't voting in governance proposals and the fun thing is is that this token isn't tradable yet it'll be tradable soon so the only way you could actually get the token is you have to get it from an airdrop and i got something in the airdrop just disclosure here uh and then you know if you didn't vote on any of the governance proposals

there was a governance proposal to seize people's assets and people said uh it sees people's in tokens and people said okay you know do that and then what ended up happening is that there was plenty of warning beforehand but because people weren't paying attention their tokens got seized and then as soon as their tokens got seized all these people came out of nowhere and came back to the discord and started complaining right being like what the hell you took my tokens away from me what is this right so it's just kind of hilarious that these people were were essentially freeloaders right they were not paying attention to any of the inverse finance channels because it was posted all over twitter all over discord right i think the the the governance kind of forum as well um but what they were paying attention to was their kind of like wallet right

and kind of like tokens in their wallet so they were purely speculators they were just waiting for the token to be tradable right to be able to kind of either sell it or trade it or do whatever and that's not what inverse finance kind of wanted to to optimize for which i think is is pretty cool right i don't think that could work at a large scale like inverse is a is a pretty small project i don't think something like maker governance could get away with doing that right could you imagine making governance basically being like okay anyone who doesn't vote in this proposal is going to have their mkrc's i think at most there's like i think the biggest vote maybe 10 15 of mkr tokens or something like that so you could imagine all those other tokens being seized that would be catastrophic i think a lot

of people would uh would be upset about that and on top of that they're actually a lot of um i think big players especially vcs and funds that own mkr they can't actually use them in governance because they're not allowed to because they're they're regulated against doing that so it doesn't always work but i think it really works for these smaller more nimble and innovative kind of like projects that can innovate faster because they don't have that massive kind of like you know network effect or anything yet they don't have like that massive kind of holder base so that was interesting but yeah definitely give this this post a read from m stable i i i think it's well worth it all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching be sure to give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the youtube

channel join the discord channel subscribe to the newsletter and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone