Goerli merge date confirmed, Zapper v2 live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #412 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel worry cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host the anthony's designer and today's the 22nd of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it uh actually just before we get into it for today i did want to apologize to the podcast listeners i forgot to edit out the little coughing fit i had on yesterday's episode i edited it out for the youtube video but i forgot to do it on the podcast so you would have heard me doing that so apologies there i have replaced the kind of um the audio file with the edited one so you won't hear it anymore uh but yeah that was a little snafu on my part at least it proves that i do these things live and the only time that i edit them is when i have a

coughing fit or i'm yelling at my dog lucky it wasn't one where i was yelling at my dog because you probably didn't want to hear that um you might hear him back sometimes on these videos uh because uh he kind of like just loves to do that because if you see something outside or whatever he'll bark but anyway i'm getting off track here we're gonna jump into the news now that i just kind of like mentioned that so there's a lot of news actually to get through so let's let's go through it first i want to start with kind of this slide that stani posted on twitter from vitalik's hcc talk now if you haven't watched this talk i highly recommend doing so vitalik covered basically i guess like the ethereum roadmap from his point of view so you should definitely go check out that video i'm not going to summarize it

here it's well worth the watch slash listen uh but basically this slide in particular i do want to focus on so it's a slide that says why settle down as the title and then there's three dot points here the first stop point is layer separation vision l1 is for security security and dependability l2 is for rapid iteration and action second dot point is functionality uh escape velocity thesis once l1 is strong enough the rest can be done by l2 and third dot point developers need a break new features need time to de-risk and i think he means core developers here uh need a break now this is basically i guess like the ethereum road map in a nutshell right like we are trying to keep layer one as secure decentralized and dependable dependable as possible and then make sure that l1 can uh kind

of like offer its features services its scalability to the l2s to do their own rapid iteration i've talked about this you know over the last couple of refills so i'm not going to rehash it there uh and then the second point here i don't think is i guess talked about enough and that's the functionality escape velocity thesis of you know once the l1 is strong enough the rest can be done by l2 the ethereum layer one protocol will continue to evolve slower and slower over time there'll be kind of like a ramp up over the next i guess maybe two to three years and then from there it's going to be very slow iterations because we're basically just trying to get to the point where we can give these layer twos uh the main things that they need obviously the main thing they need is

scalability uh and that's coming in the form of proto-dank shining in the dank sharing effort more generally and once we kind of like do that then we can definitely uh kind of like slow down the process here and uh make sure that layer one just continues to be highly secure and highly dependable now of course that can't happen for the next two to three years because of the reasons i just outlined but that is the thesis really and then the third point i think is very important as well about developers needing a break and new features that need time to de-risk as i said this is referring to core developers i mean guys like developing this sort of stuff is not easy and developing it in such a way that's secure and safe is also not easy and then always having to worry about there

being a bug in the code for a 200 billion dollar network is definitely not something that core developers take lightly and it's definitely something they kind of like they stress about and also there is always work to do there's always people wanting features to go into the protocol so we need kind of like to slow down here for their sake for their kind of like mental health if anything and also we do need these new features to give these new features time to de-risk the reason why proof of stake on ethereum was rolled out in phases where we launched the beacon chain and then we waited pretty much like over 18 months before we do the main net merge he said that we gave of stake ethereum time to bake in time to settle in time for bugs to uh show themselves if there were bugs time

people to get used to staking and then do the merge so that it's significantly de-risked now this is true for other kind of like things out there such as sharding which i'll talk about in a sec but definitely we need new features to be kind of like d risk here so that was one one slide here as i said you can catch vitalik's talk on the ecc youtube channel it was very good highly recommend checking it out um and just as kind of like orthogonal to his talk is i mean i guess like what you can do after kind of like listening to his talk is dive deeper into the road map items that are commonly talked about and they're these are split into five different kind of like categories consisting of the merge the surge the verge the purge and the splurge now these are just kind of like

names given to these things it's a bit me it's not really kind of like to be taken seriously but the upgrades within each of these categories are to be taken seriously now i was talking before about how we want to get over the next two to three years the kind of like most important upgrades out there for layer twos and that is kind of like the merge because that kind of like lays the groundwork for everything else and the search the verge purge and splurge especially maybe the the splurge i i think the splurge is aptly named because like it's just like the nice to have features the verge and the purge you know they're critical long term but not critical in the short to medium term and long term i'm talking like five ten years sort of thing two to three years the most critical things are definitely

the merge and the search now obviously we know what the merge entails but the surge entails the dank sharding roll up basically like sharding generally right and there's a bunch of roadmap items in that now i want to focus on this part of the roadmap item for a sec here and there was a great blog post posted by pauline yeah today uh basically titled 4844 and done now 4844 is eip 4844 which is proto-dank shouting and basically in this blog post pauliner argues that for the foreseeable future once we have proto dank sharding uh kind of implemented we will actually not be able to uh saturate the the scale that this gives us on roll-ups now he also argues that roll-ups should be preserved or reserved for high-value applications so for example you wouldn't

host a crypto game on a roll-up you would host a crypto game on a volidium or an arbitrary any trust chain or some other thing that doesn't store kind of its cool data on on chain because even if it did post proto dang sharing it would still get quite expensive so we should leave uh i guess like true roll-ups or like full roll-ups for the high-value applications or for the generalized kind of platforms whereas these app chains uh such as immutable x for example that is a volitium right and that can stay of lydium that the thing is is that when you're thinking about security from a first principles perspective like the way i think about it is i always go to nation states so would a nation state care about attacking a validium that's hosting a crypto game um or are they going to care

about uh kind of like attacking financial infrastructure i mean they're not going to care about the crypto game let's be honest guys they're going to care about the financial infrastructure so it doesn't make sense to run financial high value infrastructure on a validium or on something that definitely has less security uh than a roll-up but at the same time it what's funny about a validium or something where that off-chain is uh that the data store off-chain but the proof is still still stored on chain is that there isn't really an incentive to attack these things anyway even if they are kind of like hosting relatively high value things because of the fact that the attacker can't actually steal funds all they can do is freeze funds now obviously that sucks for everyone their funds get frozen but these funds cannot be stolen so as i said there is no

incentive for an attacker to go to go out of their way to do this because they're getting nothing out of it now when it comes to nation states if they want to destabilize things if they want to make sure that something fails such as a financial system well then yes it makes sense for them to do this they're not monetarily incentivized so obviously if we want to be nation-state resistant we need these things on roll-ups with full security and i do think that the very long term will just kind of like have everything on roll-ups but that's going to take a while to get there that's actually going to require things like the um the other roadmap items that i mentioned like the verge and the purge and and the splurge and stuff like that but in terms of just doing 4844 protodank shouting sometime next year

and giving rollups some incredible scalability uh would be would be magical and and pauline actually put some numbers here to this where they basically say you know assuming the minimum gas price is seven way eip1559 erp 4844 resets gas fees paid to ethereum for one transaction to basically zero point lots of zeros three you can see on my screen it's basically negligible cost and that's with the eighth price at three thousand dollars now now because execution is a significantly more scarce resource than data the actual fee you'd pay at the roll-up would be more like 0.001 or something now i've said this on the refuel lots of times where this is going to be the costs on roll-up transactions guys with proto-dang

shouting they're going to collapse now of course you give people more scale you give people more room to do things costs are going to kind of like increase over time as the limits get hit but the good thing and the really cool thing about layer twos is that they improve themselves as well this is just layer one improvements prototank shining and dank shotting generally is fully layer one it has got nothing to do with the layer twos themselves so then you kind of like put layer two improvements on top such such as kind of like what nitro is doing such as a better compression of core data such as any other improvements that come to these networks then you get kind of like much more scale here you can get to the point where you have an incredible amount of um of kind of like tps for

those high value uh transactions just with proto dank charting now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't kind of like work towards the full dang sharing roll out but it means we can work towards it at a slower pace and make sure that we can do it uh correctly and safely because prototank sharing is significantly simpler to do and significantly safer to do than full dank sharding if we wanted to roll out full dang shouting i think it would be better to let other networks experiment with this sort of stuff and experiment with more data availability stuff such as um what other projects like data layer celestia zk porter and polygon avail are doing and then once that's been de-risked once those kind of like bugs and things are kind of like tested in the wild or once those features are tested in the wild then we can bring full dank shining to

ethereum now in the meantime we could obviously keep researching it developing it all that good stuff there but this is a really nice way to make sure that ethereum takes the kind of like slower more secure path to getting to full dang sharding now while still delivering the massive benefits of of kind of like prototype shouting to these layer twos which is very very cool so that's a bit of context around kind of like the i guess the surge which is also aptly named because the surge you know surging up the capacity of the chain um and there was also a kind of like quote from vitalik that was taken completely out of context by everyone which i really hate but this was the block works twitter account that said uh that that quote that kind of like attributed this to vitalik where he said

by the end of its roadmap ethereum will be able to process 100 000 transactions per second this is for layer one for starters guys like this is not for layer two and i i would argue this is probably on the low end of things like we're talking about the end of the kind of like ethereum roadmap that has been put out previously with all those features that i mentioned we could probably get to more than this but this is layer one now if layer one can do a hundred thousand transactions per second imagine how much the layer twos are going to be able to do tens of millions hundreds of millions right like the it really is like an incredible amount at that point so i put out i quote tweeted this and i said you know these tweets suck so much because they give zero context there's

no mention of how a theorem is scaling via layers and roll-ups and no mention of how this tps number is being achieved and at which layer so that i didn't mention how this is being achieved through these roadmap items surge verge purge and splurge right um and you know i said that i'd be covering this on the refuel now i want to give you guys kind of like just a little bit of a context here myself around why these tweets suck so much outside of this just read the replies to this it's just so so bad so you can kind of like see the replies here uh you know at 100 000 per transaction just a stupid meme reply right there's nothing uh kind of like uh a value there another reply ceo of ethereum talks up delayed roadmap for company it's just stupid someone calling out a

btc maxey more you know stupid what about fee sir one eth gas fee brought like it just doesn't help anyone there's no educational stuff to get to be get to be gained from this it's just a show and it and it really pisses me off as an educator because then i have to correct this sort of stuff i don't have to cover this on the refuel fine like whatever but in general i still have to kind of like correct this stuff constantly because i know there's so much bad information out there and i know that so many people still don't realize a lot of the most basic things i mean people still believe that all staked eat unlocks at the merge and not just anyone not just random twitter accounts actual people who should know better still believe this guys and it really annoys me because like it takes

literally two minutes of research to know this isn't the case you just have to go to the ethereum.org website and it outlines it there for you that's that's it right and even thinking through it logically yourself you come to the conclusion that why would all the staked unlock at once like that would mean that all the validators would go offline and the network would go offline like i think people just can't think critically when it comes to these sorts of things they want to outsource their their thinking to other people and it just annoys a out of me i'm happy to educate but i shouldn't have to keep saying this stuff so long after i kind of like the fact that this has been known for so long this has been known for like two years probably at this point that we wouldn't have withdrawals at the merge

right so taking that context like it just it annoys me to know when i don't want to rant too much about this but this is why i really hate tweets like this and they suck so much is because they just keep putting that misinformation energy out there where it's not direct i guess misinformation but it basically may as well be because it's just such bad information um so yeah i just wanted to kind of like cover that there i know refuel listeners and watches don't fall into this camp you guys know what's up because you listen to the refuel like obviously i try to be as accurate as possible whenever i cover these things but just for anyone that you know your friends anyone you see online like i i one of my goals with this channel was to create like an army of educated people who go out there and

push this education out there so that i can fight back against all this bad information it is an uphill battle it is a never-ending battle i'm here to fight fight it i don't mind at all um it does piss me off and you know what the fact that it pisses me off makes me want to fight it more because i just can't i just can't stand the misinformation being spread um but i i can't just be up to me it has to be up to all of you um and and those around you as well so any kind of like misinformation any bad information that you see people repeating or kind of like uh spreading you should definitely correct them if you feel comfortable doing it i think that it's it's well worth the effort there but i'm going to leave that at that i'm not going to go on a 20

minute rant there um and and just another kind of like update in terms of core development ucr so there was a core debs call yesterday an awkward eps call and they confirmed that the girly test net will run through the merge transition around august 8th to 10th so they've i think brought it for uh four today so originally it was august 9th to 11th now it's august 8th to 10th very very close here for the girl emerge now as usual as i always say if this merge transition on girly with the last public tester to run through the merge goes smoothly and there's no kind of like major bugs or errors then it is very very highly likely that we're going to get a mainnet merge in mid to late september now i just want to say one thing about this if we saw what we saw

with sapolia where like you know 15 20 or whatever it was of the network was not validating after the merge went through because of a configuration error if we say that on girly i don't think that's going to affect the timeline of the merge um it by much if anything i still think the merge would happen mid to late september it may may get pushed to early october because the core devs want to be really conservative and make sure that everyone knows you know what configurations to use how to set it up all that sort of stuff there but guys we are in the final stretch the light at the end of that tunnel is so bright like it's basically blinding at this point we are so close it's only what like 16 ish or a bit more than that maybe maybe you say like 18 days away from girl emerging

and then you know uh kind of like a main net merge in mid to late september very very close but it's going to be here before we know it guys like i mean i was just thinking about it today like i'm already in australia we're already halfway through winter i didn't even realize like the time is just flying absolutely flying so uh super excited that the girlie transit merchandising was hard confirmed it's no longer a soft date this is a hard commitment to august 8th to 10th obviously can't give an exact date because of ttd and the way that works um and then there was obviously a soft commitment given to mid to late september for a merge mainnet merge i'm thinking i'm betting that if girly goes well then that's going to be stuck to that timeline so take it from me uh you know

i'm i'm trying to give you the best estimate out there but uh i guess i don't take it as as kind of like gospel things things can still change but we're almost there guys as i said the light is blinding at this stage all right so there's a bit of drama about coinbase today i know i defended coinbase yesterday but this is drama about something else so the sec has charged someone at coinbase with insider trading uh and you know the funny thing is is that this insider trading was actually caught by kobe on twitter a while ago and then it just came to light that they were actually doing this at coinbase now i think there is an open secret that insider trading from centralized exchange employees is rampant because it's incredibly hard to to police you could have an entire

policy in place you could lock it down completely but the problem is that if someone knows an asset is going to be listed they can just go home they could fund a wallet right and they can buy stuff with that wallet on chain um and then you wouldn't even know because you can't tie an identity to a wallet unless you know they've obviously tied it to a centralized exchange or something like that but if they're smart enough they don't do that sounds like this person wasn't very smart they got caught right um and obviously like i'm totally against insider trading i think it is is really bad and i think that it should be prosecuted um but you know there's a lot of drama surrounding this of course and also the sec in their uh kind of like statement said that they're going after a bunch of kind of like

different tokens that were traded i think these are the ones that we insider traded and trying to label them as securities so the ssc doing what they do of course and then of course coinbase replied to this and the chief legal officer actually replied to this with a thread here which was a really bad thread if i'm being honest so he started off by saying cleanbase doesn't list securities period i mean okay you don't because they're not classified as securities yet but like there's a high chance that a lot of them will be classified as securities uh because of the fact that they really do look like securities like let's not kind of like sugarcoat it here just because i don't like the ssc and i don't like gary genslaw doesn't mean a lot of this stuff doesn't look like securities like in if you're taking like the howie test

approach to it a lot of them basically look like like like exactly what i was saying securities like to the exact kind of like definition of them right um so so there's that but then he also put out a tweet here in his throat where he said coinbase has a rigorous process to analyze and review each digital asset before making it available on our exchange a process that the sec itself has reviewed and then i quote twitter this way by saying you know quote-unquote rigorous process then proceeds to list tokens that literally no one has ever heard of before like like come on guys like we all know that coinbase has listed the shittest of coins uh over the last few months um i've given kind of like my thoughts on the reasoning behind it you know they're trying to compete with unisop and stuff like that

but don't try and kind of like virtual virtue signal here and say that you have a rigorous process and everything like that like if you had a rigorous process and and you kind of like analyzed these things and reviewed these things as rigorously as you you said you did you wouldn't list most of them in the first place right so i mean i know i defended coinbase yesterday about the insolvency thing coinbase has a lot of issues it's a big organization i think that you know there's a lot of place there's a lot of stuff that they're doing wrong and there's some stuff that they're doing right um but like just because i defended them yesterday over the insolvency stuff doesn't mean i'm going to defend them always and this is one case where i'm not especially with the insider trading stuff i mean if if you kind of like have

internal policies an internal review of insider trading and then kobe goes on twitter and basically catches the person for you well then obviously you you didn't catch them and obviously um this person you know kobe put this tweet out months ago this person was able to kind of like work at coinbase and still you know do this stuff even though kobe kind of like tweeted out about it so it's just insane it wasn't just kobe's but i think it was zack xbt as well so it's just insane and i get why coinbase is defending themselves like this they're a big company obviously legal speak obviously they're not going to kind of like admit any wrongdoing and stuff like that because they'll probably get sued to have die evan if they do that um but yeah i mean i'm not going to defend them over this

this is like a massive screw-up by them uh and i think that they need to be better and i think all centralized exchanges need to be better here but coinbase is one of the flag bearers of this industry so they definitely need to do better all right so zappa v2 is now live uh so you can basically start exploring i remember i mentioned this i think last week or the week before that they had the beta that you could go into so if you've been able to check out the beta then uh then awesome but now it's available to everyone so this is a brand new dashboard and interface with a big focus on uh kind of like discoverability and exploring things like nfts dows defy apps stuff like that so making it a lot easier to find everything that you need to find now i gave all my thoughts on

the refill episode where i covered their kind of like beta for zapper v2 so i'm not going to dive too deep into this today uh but i think this is very very cool i think it's very cool because of the fact that um just to rehash one point i made last week i think discoverability is becoming very very hard within crypto because of the fact that there's so many different applications now especially with like things like nfts and d5 so having a kind of like dashboard that you're used to and being able to kind of like do these things on there i think is a huge positive so kudos to zappa for putting out this i think this is really cool and i'm excited to dive deeper into v2 as well myself because i use zappa pretty much every day all right so there is some kind of like

alpha leak here from fuel labs today where uh cessna.eth says for those that didn't catch the alpha evm support is coming to sway which is the language for the kind of like fuel roller pr so it's a rust-based language that means you'll be able to write ethereum smart contracts with all of the security safety and auditability as you would on fuel this is really really cool i think that you know as i've said before the evm compatibility evm kind of i guess um dominance is here to stay the evm is here to stay it is not something that uh is going to go away just because people want it to go away and just because it's not a technology that is quote unquote the best technology and just because some people have so many issues with it doesn't mean anything and people have issues with it because they

use it because they write solidity code because they use the evm so at the end of the day you know it's the javascript of crypto as people have called and it really is and for those who don't know javascript is a language that powers most of the web there's a scripting language that powers most of the web that we use even today there's so much stuff built around it so many frameworks built around it but objectively it's a bad scripting language objectively a lot of people don't like javascript because it just doesn't do a lot of the things that it should do and it's it's relatively hard to work with compared to other languages um i think solidity and avm are exactly like that like i'm sorry guys but that's just the way it's gonna be there's so much network effect built up around it and it just keeps getting

stronger and stronger so it's going to stay like that so it's cool to see that avm support is coming to sway here so people can use uh kind of like um sway over solidity here for the evm all right so superfluid has announced v2 of their dashboard today which is a completely redesigned user app for money streaming so you can basically see the dashboard in the gif here and you can and you can visit superfluit and kind of like see it all for yourself very very cool to see that uh that this is out there now and and kind of like as i say here dashboard v2 boasts more than improved organization and a fresh new look it's been rebuilt from the ground up using the our sdks and includes a number of technical improvements and new features such as enhanced performance dark mode always love a dark mode

multi-network obviously that's needed in this day and age minimal plus contextual ui rainbow kit integration for rainbow wallet ens support love that um and more so you can check out all of this in their blog post and their tweet thread here if you haven't yet i'll link that in the youtube description below for you all right so ava v3 has been deployed to the gurley test net and the new optimism girly test net for developers to continue testing so if you're a developer working with rv v3 then you now have two girly based test nets to kind of like test avet on which is very very cool um you know the funny thing is about all these kind of like test net names and stuff like that is like i didn't even realize that optimism had its own girly test net but

it makes sense because optimism is evm equivalent which basically means it can just fork its own girly test net and it'll be the same thing as uh kind of like um ethereum mainnet because optimism as i said is evm equivalent i know there's been a debate about what evm equivalent is what what compatibility is what are true zk vm is all that stuff but i mean i think the clearest example of what it is is when you can do stuff like this like i don't believe that for example i don't know polygons zkvm for example could be kind of like forked that they could fork a girly test and then run it off that at least in its current iteration i think that is kind of like one of the major differences that's put more on the developer side of things obviously not on the user side when it

comes to this sort of stuff i think all i guess most developers end users care about is being able to use it like they would the ethereum mainnet at the end of the day metamask support support for the rpcs they're used to transaction flow remains the same sort of thing or remain similar just with that those faster transactions and those cheaper fees so cool to see i guess like this spun up from optimism here but uh but yeah i think this debate's going to rage on for a bit around compatibility equivalency and all that sort of stuff there which is just natural we debate everything in crypto especially when it comes to technical stuff it's never ending on on that side but i think that so far most of the debates have been quite civil it got a little bit tribal at times and i think that

what i see a lot of is the i guess like debs having an issue with how things are marketed but marketing so this this is maybe i'll just talk about this for a sec uh because i think this is an interesting point marketing is a funny thing i did marketing at set protocol and i constantly struggled with this myself when you're marketing something you obviously want to get the maximum amount of eyeballs on it through that marketing you want it to be as clickbait as possible because just just what works online you want to be able to get people interested in it and the best way to do that is to talk it up right and the thing is there's a fine line between like good marketing and like scammy grifter marketing so i guess that line is okay talking something up as if it's

the best thing ever because you actually think it's the best thing ever um even though it may not be the best thing ever right maybe you know it's not the best thing ever but you're still putting your support behind it because you believe in the product you believe it can get better over time and you're trying to get people to use it to help with that kind of process then there's the scammy grifty marketing of of basically saying what a product um so saying that a product is something that it isn't now there are endless debates on this and obviously it's very hard to kind of like i guess tread this line in crypto because the definitions aren't exactly uh you know set in stone for a lot of things i'm sure you know you're also the layer two versus side chain debate which has

died down a lot and we can get kind of like some sort of consensus on it but it's always a tricky thing for marketing people at the end of the day because a lot of them don't actually have this technical context as well um and they shouldn't really like have to um and a lot of it isn't kind of like settled uh so i'm not kind of like trying to defend any particular marketing from any particular team but i think what a lot of people miss is that the point of marketing is to make noise is to get eyeballs is to drum things up at the end of the day and the ones who do that best are the ones that get the most attention for better or worse like there are lots of things in crypto lots of scams the reason why they got so much

attention and so much involvement is because they did a lot of marketing like as i said for better or worse guys that's just how it works like humans i mean online the most scarce resource is human attention and to get that human attention you need to be bombastic you need to be loud you need to be basically waving a sign that says hey look at me and you need to make it interesting to look at you and that's exactly what marketing is for um but i'm going to leave that one at that i just wanted to give a little bit of context around that and how i think about it as someone who has been in marketing as someone who kind of does it i guess from time to time um especially with kind of like my twitter presence and growing that and things like that there's all different

types of marketing as well such as kind of um growth hacking and marketing through partnerships and and business development stuff like that but i'll leave that for another day i'm not going to go on it now because i'm coming up on time here just wanted to cover one last thing which was that hashflow has announced their 25 million dollar series a round backed by a few big players such as jump wintermute gsr dragonfly capital and electric capital with a bunch of other um kind of people participating including angel investors such as myself just disclosure there i did invest in this round i've talked about cash flow before on the refuel they're a decentralized exchange for interoperability zero slippage and mev protected trade so basically um i kind of like interoperable uh decks that kind of is trying to protect you from mev and

make sure that you're not getting sandwich attacks and things like that uh and trying to do and doing it with zero slippage as well so that's it's actually a really cool app i'm not going to dive too deep into it now because i don't have the time but you can check it out yourself at app.hashflow.com uh if you want to uh and i guess i congrats to them on this race here i'm very proud to kind of like be participating in this i think what they're building is very cool but on that note i'm going to end it there for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone