Immutable zkEVM on testnet, Loopring dev portal - The Daily Gwei Refuel #640 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the dailyway refuel where we cup the latest news and if your maker system I'm your host and the designer and today's the 15th of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so we have some fresh news here about SPF today actually from meta Lawman where he says there is a new SPF indictment the indictment alleges that SBF lobbied members of Congress and other high-level government officials to promote cryptocurrency regulation that would favor his business and personal interests now of course this is nothing new to us we already knew that this was the case he uh SPF had made multiple donations to the Democratic party uh in the US and that he had also um uh donated I think five or ten million dollars or was like the second

biggest donor to uh uh Joe Biden's presidential campaign when he was running for president there so this is not new news but what's interesting about this is that this may make Gary Gensler a witness which means sbf's lawyers would be able to cross-examine gensla under oath at trial now Gary Gensler was also very close at least it appeared like he was very close and buddy buddy with SPF before obviously FTX fell apart there and there's been numerous kind of um discussions about this as you've probably seen and I've gone over it on the refill before but I felt this was interesting because if this does happen and then Gensler has to basically be examined under oath and there could be some juicy stuff that comes out of that now I mean who knows if this is going to materialize and who

knows and how long until this happens maybe maybe gensla isn't even like uh this the SEC chair at that point and no one cares anymore because realistically no one's going to care about gensla once he's not the SEC chair anymore we're not even going to talk about him really I mean unless he goes and goes to some other high level position which gives him I guess some influence or even you know just a lot of influence over crypto I don't think people in crypto are going to be interested in talking about him uh anymore there but yeah just something interesting that I wanted to put it on your radar uh you can go check out the The Meta Lawman's tweet for yourself if you would like there's a few replies and stuff in there as well as well as a link to the actual indictment here from

Eleanor Tourette all right so I put out a friendly reminder today because I've been seeing a bunch of I don't know if I'd call it fud but discussions around running ethereum knows running ethereum validators and what that requires and stuff like that well you guys know that I run a bunch of different ethereum nodes and validators at home all at home uh all of my own infrastructure my own Hardware I manage it all myself you know it's all self-custed everything like that and one of those devices is the Proteus device which is made by Joe from the rockapole community uh by his company mercadian systems here now what this is is basically a rock 5B uh model model B board which I've talked about before it's the low powered device that

is similar to a Raspberry Pi uh and that is inside this 3D printed case that obviously is themed as the daily way here with you know an orange color to it obviously to represent rocker pool there which is all well and good but on this device I actually run a full ethereum node I'm currently running Geth on this device with uh Lighthouse I believe it might be Nimbus I get confused because I'm running like so many different clients across my infrastructure I often forget which ones are running on on which infrastructure but I'm pretty sure it's actually Geth Nimbus on this one I'm gonna switch Geth to nevermind but uh I I I was going to do that but now the Geth is such a low kind of percentage of uh the the client diversity as as opposed to what it was I'm not I'm under no kind of like rush

to change and it seems to be it working all well and good so I've left it like that but yeah in the actual housing here is just that rock 5B board which uh with a two terabyte solid state drive which you can easily get for less than 500 US dollars so that's your hardware setup cost there that's that's it to run a full node uh or a full node with validators you can run either or now there was a few Tweets in reply to this basically saying yeah okay the hardware cost is low but then you know the capital requirement's so high because you need 32 heat to stake okay that might be true on the surface but there's a lot of nuance to this and I reply to my tweet and I said no you don't need 32 eth or really any eth to run a full node

running a full node is completely free anyone can do it on pretty much like any hardware really I mean there's some even lower powered Hardware than this you can run a full node on um and and it's all well and good from there so you don't need eth to do that you only need 32 ease if you want to run a completely solo validator and I mean like completely solo you do it all on your own you're running all the software yourself and you know there's no kind of like fees are being charged for you to do that or anything like that you you're a completely self-sovereign solo validator but you can run a validator with less than 32 8 and you can do that by using uh services like rockapool obviously The Rocker pool has their their smart node stack a lot of you will know about this

stack you install that you can install that on this device this device actually comes pre-loaded with the rockapool smart node stack I re-imaged mine so mine is just solo validators because I'm actually using this for the E3 is part of my retirement account um to stake that eighth but it does come preloaded with rocketpool software and then you only need eight plus I believe 2.48 worth of RPL in order to spin up a mini pool so in total will be around 10.48 but that's the minimum you need to uh stake with rockapool and to become a you know nerd operator or a solo validator um with that amount of ether now there are also as I've discussed a lot of times on the reefer before plenty of other Solutions coming out that will allow people to solo stake with very

little eth um some as low as a two eth requirement I know that uh puffer Finance wants to do it with a two eighth requirements but I haven't looked into or they haven't published how they're going to achieve that yet so obviously you know take that with a grain of salt but also Rock the rockapool um uh service wants to reduce from eight eighth to to 40th to two eighth it was at 16 8th then it got reduced to eighty in the future they want to go from 40 to 2 8 and maybe even beyond that but also on top of that Technologies like DVT or distributed validated technology uh will allow for something called Squad staking which is what I've talked about in the path in the past which in theory means the requirement could be as low as you want for the eighth requirement so

essentially if you're solo staking um or if you're Squad staking with like 32 other people just in theory you could each put one eighth in to the DVT uh contract and then run the software yourself so you essentially have uh one eight as being the requirement here you can go lower than that obviously and there's there's different kind of uh Solutions like stakewise V3 as well that's going to be having uh pools and things like that there's going to be Mega pools in rocketpool there's going to be all these different kind of ways of staking eth um but the point of my tweet was that on this very low powered device uh it was really about running a full note it wasn't just about running validators because validators are very lightweight it's the full node that is the heaviest part of the chain here like validators

are extremely lightweight adding more validators doesn't really increase um harder requirements unless you're running like thousands of the things I think that there's actually a rockable node operator that's running hundreds of mini pools on a device similar to this as well so uh but what does go up by adding more validators is bandwidth so if you are limited bandwidth-wise if you have kind of like a crappy upload speed or maybe you have a bandwidth limits and you're not you don't have unlimited data then it will affect that but other than that the hardware requirement stays the same now for ethereum 4 node as I said doesn't really require any eighth to run a full node and you can you can run it and you can run it just fine by by using a device like this now finally on this note someone asks you know what's the

benefits of running your own ethereum full node obviously you don't get paid for writing an ethereum four node you only get paid for running a validator right you only get rewards for running a validator but even though there's no direct monetary incentives there are a few soft incentives for running in a full node you can relay your own transactions instead of using a third-party RPC so instead of using inferior or some other third-party RPC where in your wallet software you can use your own uh note right and that obviously gives you better guarantees around censorship resistance and things like that and means that if an RPC becomes overloaded uh then your one's not going to be overloaded because you're the only one that's using it so the third-party rpcs may become overloaded but you'll always be able to relay your transaction because you're

using your own you can verify the state of the chain for yourself obviously very important if you want to make sure that you are on the right chain that you basically we have a copy of the chain uh and and and and and in doing so you help the overall decentralization of the ethereum network because there's more replicas or copies of the ethereum chain out there uh and there's more decentralization because of that so yeah hopefully that breaks that all down for you guys um but yeah that's my little kind of one of my little boxes that I stake from home with and yeah as I said you do not need a high-powered device to stake and you know you don't need 32 Heath right now I strictly need 32 Heath and in the future that ethical climate will come down even more all right Victor bunin from coinbase

today uh tweeted out uh he's that he's happy to share that coinbase has launched stand with crypto.org so you can uh go to the website sign up and get involved uh and he says this will be one of the most impactful things you'll do all week and it only takes 30 seconds so essentially what this is is this it's a way for you to uh basically be a crypto Advocate basically stand with crypto against uh kind of like unjust regulations or unjust legislation laws particularly in the US and you can do that in a few different ways you can join the stand with crypto movement I believe this just um lets you mint an nft here uh you can contact your representative so I believe this is just limited to the US right now um maybe they'll open that up to other jurisdictions later uh and then you can

mint the uh the nft uh the the stand with crypto support or nft here and you can share it on Twitter as well so it's just a website for keeping track of uh you know people that are kind of getting involved with this and people that are that are essentially uh standing with crypto and they've also and at the bottom here got a bunch of uh crypto policy stances for different politicians you can actually go and see them all uh by by kind of um by state here so if you click into a state like California for example this will take you to a page hopefully it loads you uh yeah let's take it to a page with all the representatives and what their stance on crypto is so you can see here the positives are at the top so some are very positive on it some are a little

bit positive on it some are neutral on it and you can scroll down and see what their sentiment is on and now obviously there are a bunch of politicians that do not have um a kind of like stance on crypto and they're also listed here this is obviously just for the us but this is incredibly powerful I think this is a really great way of making sure that people are very informed about the politicians that they vote for when it comes to voting for things that have got to do with crypto and on the front page here you can actually see the people that have been the most visible uh in I guess like in crypto policy in the US and what they kind of like stand for and what they are kind of against yeah and the funny thing about this is that typically we've seen that uh you know

Democrats generally have been against crypto but that's more narrative than truth because as you can see from from this page there are two Democrats on the left hand side on the very supportive side there's Josh gotta homie here who is um he was a democrat in New Jersey and there's Richie Torres who's a democrat in New York that are very very supportive of crypto and there is a republican uh David here from Arizona who's also very supportive but then on the right hand side the people who are strongly against obviously are the ones we've heard of before like Elizabeth Warren Brad Sherman uh who are both Democrats but then you have Michael McCall who is a republican who is also uh seemingly against crypto as well so it really doesn't seem like it's any kind of one particular party it really

does seem like a mixier it's just that the loudest ones like Elizabeth Warren and Brad Sherman and Gary Gensler right uh the loudest Democrats seem to be getting the most air time but Richie Torres is a Democrat he's in he's in New York and he's been very very pro-crypto right and there are a bunch of other a bunch of these politicians on either side that that are pro-crypto and on this website you'll be able to view basically all of their stances so yeah kudos to coinbase for launching this this is going to be great if you're in the US this is definitely something that you want to be informed on so go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right some exciting news out of loop ring today so they now have a new developer portal that's live at docs.loopring.io they said yeah we've

put a lot of work into updating all of our docs plus guides making it even easier to build on or integrate Loop ring products so if you're a Dev if you're a Dev this is now your new front page to access everything you need so as I said you can go to docs.loopring.io and you can go and explore all the documentation for yourself now of course this is something out there for developers only it's not really for something that the end user needs to worry about or read but the documentation is quite extensive here and you can find that all as I said at docs.loopring.io all right so speaking of layer 2's immutable has announced today that the immutable zkevm testnet is now live you can go to hub.amutable.com to start building and check out the test net

yourself now uh for those of you who don't know I need a refresher here the immutable ZK VM is powered by polygons ZK technology there is also immutable X which has been a live a bit live for a while that is powered by stockware and this is kind of what the immutable ecosystem looks like you have all of the immutable apps at the top here such as their passport app their nft trading app their gaming sdks and then underneath that you have both of their Solutions here the immutable X solution an immutable ZK VM and that all ultimately settles down to ethereum as that settlement layer there so as I said uh today marks the test net launch of the the ZK uh polygon ZK it's polygon immutable ZK AVM here and you can go check all of that out for yourself you

can see here there is um uh there is kind of like a login using passport uh button here you can create your pass but I'm not going to do that on on on the refill right now just because it's it's kind of cumbersome to do it live there but they've also got a Twitter thread explaining what this means you know what it will currently what what the ZK VM testnet will offer here is a list of things that we'll offer of course it will offer AVM composibility oh sorry compatibility and mutable product compatibility native l24 set for test IMX deposit and withdrawal Bridges block Explorer and mutable relayer which is coming soon so obviously all the things that you usually expect from one of these layer 2 launches these days but great to see another layer 2 live out there in the wild obviously just on test net for

today but I'm sure mainnet isn't too far away all right so fire has announced their hyper ethereum Quest today so they say here Beyond excited to launch hyper ethereum quests this new collection is super high level but you you're gonna make it if you're a if you are a genuine ethereum Enthusiast so you can go check this out this Twitter thread out for yourself but basically it's a bunch of new criteria uh that you can fulfill in order to earn a bunch of new items within the fee ecosystem here uh that you can check out as I said in the Twitter thread now there is one that you can get out of me so there's actually one here you can see me in the little kind of spaceship era or in little like private jet here you've got my little

face there with the hat on now to get this one is actually pretty tricky you have to have spent 1 000 gray on gas in a single transaction now the reason why that's tricky is because how many of us have actually spent a thousand way on a transaction that is a huge gas fee right there and typically you only see people spending that much if they're like an Mev bot or something like that right so I'm sure this is going to be a very rare kind of like item or nft to have within the fear ecosystem here I mean I'm pretty sure I'm not even eligible for this I think the highest gas that I've paid is maybe five or six hundred so I'm eligible for the little Dottie flyer here but I'm definitely not eligible for this and I guess I could put it through

a transaction right uh that uh at a thousand gray um actually not no I probably can't now um uh because basically is is a lot lower now and that would actually I wonder I wonder how I could do that I wonder if I would have to kind of like uh offer it and then if someone would take it it's it's kind of uh it's kind of insane to do because the gas fee would be really really high I mean the the dollar value alone would be would be massive and maybe it's worth it just to get that nft because it's me but yeah anyway if there's not as I said it's not just that one and there are easier ones to get as well there is these ones you can get like the the uh Hypersonic and supersonic bat you can execute transactions for one gray five grand

tengue which I'm sure we've all done at this stage uh and then there's obviously other ones here as well that you can check out uh which I'll link in the YouTube description below but exciting new item items for the fee ecosystem here that uh you can that you can check out and there's also a bunch of uh final quests here which I guess like uh you can execute 2000 transactions to get this I guess like ether themed spaceship I'm pretty sure I've done 2000 transactions on multiple addresses so I'm gonna go see if I can claim that after after I finish recording this episode but yeah you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so some exciting news out of Bitcoin today as well as some drama which I'm going to get into in a sec but

the exciting news is that Bitcoin grants rounds 18 is now live now I believe there is a million dollars worth of matching funds up for grabs you can go support all of your favorite projects here and get them funded it's live until August 29th so a couple of a couple of weeks yeah you can go to grants.getcoin.co to get started now get coin grants is currently live on the op mainnet as well as the public goods Network so yeah you can donate using ether and optimism and ethon on the public goods Network yeah so you can Bridge into either of those things and and get started with Bitcoin grants around 18. so you can go check that out for yourself make sure to donate you have two weeks to do so

all right now on to the drama from Bitcoin today now I'm sure a lot of you saw this but I think I need to dive into this and give my take here because it kind of caught me by surprise but first I want to count I want to give some context here around what git coin is today so when you think of git coin you think of this monolith right you think of this monolithic brand that has been around for quite a while that has existed as as kind of like one entity that's essentially funded uh things like the Bitcoin grants match uh that ran things like the get coin grants matching rounds and and other uh similar products to that but the way Bitcoin exists today so there's actually kind of three different prongs to get coin there is the Dow because he's now a dow there are

the Dow contributors themselves then there are work streams within that Dao and this one uh that that kind of like had this announcement today which uh I I I'll get to in a sec is the public goods funding work stream which runs the featured rounds right which runs the featured rounds for for things within Bitcoin and then there are the products that are credible neutral protocol so you can basically Fork it coin if you want and create your own version so the reason why there was a lot of drama around this today is because Bitcoin announced that they're partnering with shell now shall Yes you heard that right shell the oil company not shell as in like the Linux shell or something like that right no not shout as in the literal kind of seashells no they're

partnering with shell the literal Oil Company the one that pretty much like everyone hates because they've been doing bad things for many decades now and destroying the planet and all that sort of stuff there the reason why this is I guess controversial I mean there's two major reasons one it's just a very weird move for Bitcoin to make because Bitcoin is all about you know regenerative stuff like um uh regenerative Finance um you know public goods funding uh making it so that we can coordinate around things that aren't just like profit maximalist uh Endeavors those sorts of things right that's what Bitcoin kind of stands for and uh by extension that's what ethereum stands for so that's that I guess like number one reason why people thought this was

uh was very um controversial but the second reason is also it's just bad Optics right because of the first reason it's just very bad optics for Bitcoin to be to be partnering or to be I guess accepting money from Shell because the partnership is actually shell um I believe I'm giving them money here um uh uh for for the for a kind of like featured round so yeah the Optics are terrible now I put a tweet about about this today where I said as a longtime fan and user of git coin I have to say that I'm extremely disappointed in their decision to partner with shell this partnership goes against ethereum's values ethos and principles to use a crude analogy this would be like the US partnering with North Korea so what I mean by this is that ethereum is a permissionless system right like anyone

can do anything they want in ethereum they can build whatever they want in ethereum it's credibly neutral censorship resistance and it should potentially resistant and that is a feature not a bug and I've talked about this at length before and about how I think it is ethereum's most bullish property but that does not mean that we can't criticize what is is built on ethereum it doesn't automatically make everything that's built on ethereum good right there are plenty of things that get built on ethereum that are not good like think of all the scams and rug pulls for example right we're not going to say that it's good that they can be built on this that's a good thing just because it's built on a permissionless system no it's still you know it's obviously a subjective thing but I think generally we can all agree that scams

and rugs are bad right they're not a good thing but they're still enabled by this permissionless technology and at the end of the day I understand that and I understand that comes with the territory of having a decentralized permissionless technology but when it comes to something like Bitcoin where they're basically partnering with the devil you know their devil essentially right and the way I view it uh it looks really really bad and it goes against the ethereum community's values and their ethos and their principles it goes against our principles of kind of ushering in a new and better and more sustainable world because that's what we're trying to do especially because ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake right uh for that more sustainability there to get off the energy intensive proof of work all those kind of arguments you've heard a million

times before that's why a lot of the controversy kind of happened here now as I said uh git coin is not just one monolith anymore it's many parts obviously I'm sure uh most people in the Bitcoin ecosystem and Community do not agree with this decision but the I guess like um entity that did this partnership uh they I guess obviously think that thought it was a uh a net positive for Bitcoin thought it was something that they should be doing and I really don't agree with that and for those of people the people out there who aren't familiar with why I guess generally um there is a disdain or dislike for Shell outside of the fact that they obviously are a huge uh polluter of of the planet right and I understand the arguments that okay they're a huge polluter but everyone uses gas and oil

and yeah sure they do I mean I drive a gas powered car of course obviously right but I think that doesn't it doesn't detract from the arguments against them right because not only are they that obviously massive multinational corporation that is a profit Maximus Corporation um that is is harming the planet but for decades it there is proof there's literal evidence that they've funded Mis information and disinformation campaigns against efforts to actually move us towards our more renewable energy more sustainable energy in order to reduce or I guess like reverse the harmful effects of oil and gas right so when you look at it like that it goes against everything ethereum stands for at least from from my view and it goes pretty much against

everything Bitcoin is traditionally stood for as well because git coin is definitely an extension of ethereum's values uh so yeah that's why this this partnership has been generally controversial here now a related thing to this and this is a tweet that I put out today that was inspired by uh this controversy was one around Dallas now as I said Bitcoin is a dow right now and Dows are very messy they're not great generally right and they're not great for one overarching reason uh that I I believe like one main reason and I put out a tweet where I said unpopular opinion but I don't think this is an unpopular opinion but I I just kind of put a question mark after it I said pretty much all dowels should just be run as on chain companies rather than trying to run as hyper decentralized

communities leadership and coordination is key in any Endeavor that involves groups of humans we should not shun Dows for embracing this now of course I'm just using the term Dao here to refer to the thing that everyone calls Dows but really Adele is a very specific thing right it's a decentralized autonomous organization there are very few actual Dows in the crypto ecosystem and you have to kind of stretch the definition of it to make it fit but like Bitcoin and ethereum for example as a networks could be considered douse right but generally a lot of the things on top of ethereum at the app layout that call themselves Dows they're they're more like Do's digital organizations they're not autonomous right they're not decentralized they're digital

organizations they're just organizations that are on on chain that are fully digital they have stakeholders right they have voters with the governance tokens and all that sorts of stuff there yeah but the problem becomes and this is the core problem of of dows or of do's or whatever you want to call them is that they often have leadership and coordination voids where essentially no one wants to fill that void for one reason or another maybe the team doesn't want to do it because it's regulatory or maybe they want to try and decentralize as fast as possible because they believe that's good for the project or whatever other reason and what ends up happening the leadership voids get filled the people have no business being in a leadership position which leads to an ineffective Dao it leads to an inefficient doubt it leads to Dow's

treasuries being raided as well because obviously there's money on the line here and it leads to just an overall bad product or service that the Dow is actually responsible for so that's why I said that we should embrace leadership and coordination doesn't matter if it's the app layer or the protocol layer because that does not imply a centralization it just implies order because you can't just have everything be chaotic you can't just have everything being disorder and ethereum has actually gone through this itself if ethereum protocol for quite a while actually until probably 2019 I would say was it was mostly in disarray in terms of its road map it didn't really have a very well-defined road map that was being well executed on it was more ad hoc there wasn't really any kind of like

leadership or coordination there was a bit of leadership from vitalik but he obviously wanted to step back for for a variety of reasons um and it wasn't until I guess Danny Ryan and Tim baiko stepped up that the leadership and the coordination of the ethereum called devs and researchers at the ethereum roadmap generally got much better now does this mean ethereum is centralized no it's not right ethereum is definitely not centralized around Danny Ryan and Tim baiko most people don't even know who those two guys are and what they actually do right but it makes it so that we can actually execute on the ethereum road map and we can actually have coordination around this which makes the ethereum protocol a lot better off obviously in both the short term and long term but it still doesn't mean that uh Danny and Tim could push

through upgrade to ethereum uh you know laterally no they have to go through the normal governance process just like anyone else and though they are typically not the ones who will be uh submitting eips themselves right maybe they'll submit it on behalf of someone else or maybe they'll be editing erps or kind of a coordinating around them but they will not be kind of like the center point of of the governance process they are really just the the coordinators and you know in in kind of like um in relation to that the leaders as well of the ethereum kind of road map and executing on the roadmap and I think that that's the best way to do it I think it's the most efficient way to do it I think it's the most effective way to do it and I think that Dows should embrace that and should look more like

that and should just be run as on-chain companies rather than these hyper decentralized communities that don't get anything done they just get stuck and I guess like that's just my general take on Dallas there and it definitely applies to git coin because I think that with coin since they tried to decentralize since they became a Dell there's been a lot of disarray uh there's been a bunch of controversies there's been a lot of of I guess like lack of focus uh and it's sad to see because as I said I'm being a big fan of Bitcoin for a very long time now I mean I donated in uh pretty much every round as early as the first round right I've been a recipient of donations as part of the git coin grants matching rounds and I've aligned myself pretty closely with bitcoin's values but if they continue

down this path of just disarray and embracing things like shell and and you know partnering with with companies like that I can't in good conscious support that right because that's not something that I want to see embraced and I want to see uh kind of like pushed forward uh in in this ecosystem but yeah anyway I think 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 it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone