Kiln merge testnet, Ukraine airdrop rug and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #327 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony and today's the 3rd of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so just a quick update on the merge here so rembroy.8 put out a tweet today say saying the kill n or k-i-l-n ethereum test net launch is confirmed for next week so as you guys know this is the next kind of like merged test net uh the the kind of like next major one after the kansugi test net that we saw happen over the holidays this could potentially be the last one before we get mainnet uh because everything goes if everything goes well with this specs frozen no more kind of major client changes or anything like that the clients can get ready for maynet which as i said to you guys

before is still targeted for june as far as i as far as i know but yeah this is this is awesome i mean progress is being made things are moving you know as i've said before it may seem like the merge stuff is kind of quiet right now there was a lot of hype around i guess the holiday period about it but quiet is good because i mean building is still happening in the background guys like if you kind of go and look at the the main places where this building is happening like on the discord and the github kind of like forums and i mean there's so many different places to kind of keep up with this sort of stuff but if you go look there all the building is is is is happening you know the research is happening everything's going on i think

pretty much all the research is done at this point it's just getting that built out getting it all tested and making sure that we can get to mainnet in a very safe way so it's uh that's the kind of like the latest update i have for you guys can't wait to see this go live uh to see this testnet go live next week i'm not sure what day just says next week yeah maybe there's not a day yet or anything like that but as i said if this goes all well and smoothly and everything kind of like happens as it should it seems like the next step would just be mainnet and uh maybe we get that main net in june like i've been saying hopefully we do like i think that'll be a huge right if we were able to do it in june massive vote of

confidence obviously for ethereum for the ecosystem um and i think it'd be very very positive overall uh so yeah going to keep tabs on that and i'll let you guys know about that all right so after the over the last few days there has been a bit of a donation drive going on for ukraine uh obviously uh due to the ukraine russia conflict going on right now and that people have been sending in bitcoin and eighth and tokens and stuff like that to their different addresses and i think it was yesterday or the day before the ukrainian government uh said that uh they were going to airdrop or kind of like take a snapshot to airdrop uh something to people they didn't specify what it was but they were going to air drop something to people who donated uh and now just before um i think they say

his name mikhailo fedorov uh the vice prime minister of ukraine um minister of digital transformation of ukraine put out a tweet that said after careful consideration we decided to cancel the air drop every day there are more and more people willing to help ukraine to fight back the aggression instead we will announce nft to support ukrainian armed forces soon we do not have any plans to issue any fungible tokens so obviously mikhailo here knows exactly what he's talking about uh you know he is the minister of digital transformation of ukraine so you know you know he seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to crypto uh but he just rug pulled us all right i mean i put a tweet out when i said did you get rugged by the ukrainian government anon because there were a lot of people that donated after they

announced that they were going to do an airdrop and as you can see here scott lewis tweeted out kind of like the amount of donations that came in per hour in terms of number of donations and basically the left-hand side feb 26 to about march second-ish or much kind of like first-ish was uh just normal donations coming in and then it spiked because they announced oh yeah we're going to take a snapshot for an airdrop uh and you know if you kind of like donate you'll get you'll kind of like get an airdrop there now obviously as i just said they kind of like rugged people on that there's not going to be an airdrop but this is the power of the carrot at the end of the day right this is kind of like daily something in front of people being like hey if you donate

we're going to give you something in return and obviously that didn't materialize but i mean i had some kind of varied thoughts on this i spoke to some people about this basically this is what happens in and outside of crypto you know no matter what it is if you tell people that there is some potential way to make money if they do something whether that something is donating to a cause such as the the ukrainian kind of like defense effort here or doing whatever else it's more likely than not people are going to going to donate right like i mean it's the same thing in like investing you buy if you buy tokens you buy other things because you expect a return on investment if you didn't expect to get a return then you wouldn't buy those things right i mean very little people would buy those things because at the

end of the day you'd only be buying them out of kind of like full kind of like selflessness and you know i mean humans mostly aren't selfless right like we do things because incentives incentives rule the world now i had discussion with people today and and someone brought up a good point by saying um you know this isn't necessarily a bad thing it just should be you know people who care but needed a carrot to get them over the edge which i agree with i mean like there are probably people who cared out there but just didn't care enough to do a donation um but then giving them that carrot kind of like makes them makes them care enough to send the donation but at the same time i think and as sad as it is there's plenty of people who don't care about this

conflict at all right i mean for a lot of people it's just something on the other side of the world that they have no context around they're just hearing about in the news and they're just going about their everyday lives and to be honest like we shouldn't uh deride people for that at the end of the day right there are things going on all around the world people have their own issues their own things to deal with they you know and a lot of people can't afford to just sit and doom scroll all the time watch the 24 hour news cycle and see what's going on there and a lot of people just don't uh you know what one can't afford to donate uh and two they just don't care enough to which i guess this is the reality right but you know as as i said like you dangle the

carrot in front of people well it changes the the equation right you basically say to people well here you go there's a potential for you to earn money the penalty potential for you to get something out of it uh if you do this kind of like a good thing and a lot of people did it but again i don't think they did it because they cared i think they did it because of the carrot at the end of the day like there's a lot of people who just simply don't don't care um but i think this just shows the power of incentives like as scott lewis says here virtue has an incentive on the left so the only incentive to donate was like a virtue thing whereas on the right virtue plus expected value or ev as an incentive um this is the power of

ethereum as a coordination machine when used correctly and i totally agree with him i don't think this is a bad thing guys that you have to dangle a carrot in front of people for to get them to do things i mean in its most basic form if you say to people hey you know uh i'm gonna pay you this x amount a year to work for my company and to do this work right of course they're going to do it right if if the if the um the pay is up to what they expect it to be and if they're happy with it they're going to take the job they're going to do the work and so it's all going to be well and good but if you said to someone hey i want you to do all this work for my company i'm going to make money off of

it or i'm going to get the value out of it and i'm going to pay you nothing well i mean no one's going to take that job right unless you kind of like really love what you do and and kind of like have other ways of making money you're not going to do something for free i mean with me doing the deadly way for free is only possible because i have other ways of making money uh if i didn't have any other income coming in there's no way i'd be able to do the delegate for free right uh but it's kind of like those incentives at it again right and kind of like virtue here on the left and virtue plus expected value on on the right there so at the end of the day this is this is the reality people have uh you know to

be truly selfless is is is very unknowable but uh a lot of people just can't afford to be truly selfless they need something out of it like they want something out of it and uh i don't want to make any kind of like moral judgments here you can have your own opinions on this but in my opinion i don't think this is a this is kind of like a um a bad thing and you know the funny thing is is that you look at something like git coin which i'm going to talk about in a sec but look at the git coin grants matching rounds yes people eventually got a token for donating but there was no indication that github was doing a token and airdropping that token to people for the longest time so really most of the donations that were done were done as kind of like a virtue thing

and it was done because there was still a carrot there the carrot was the matching funds because during the matching rounds you could donate one die and it could be matched up to 200 die that was the carrot to get people to donate because they felt like oh wow okay my donation actually has more pack you know more punch in it because of this matching so there's still i mean it's different it's different the fact that the people donating they didn't really get anything out of it in terms of kind of like actual value for themselves they got the you know they got the feel good you know feeling of supporting a team that they like and all that sort of stuff there but they didn't get a tangible thing back there wasn't kind of like there wasn't any roi on that but in saying that uh the the kind of

like what what the carrot was as i said was the fact that uh there was those matching funds there so there are different ways to do this ethereum is really great at being used as a coordination machine as scott lewis mentions here uh but that only works when you have a car like you can't coordinate around something if there is no carrot like even in another simple example when i did the delight nfts right uh we were able to raise uh like over 28 for for core developers after paying akira his share which was over a hundred thousand uh kind of like dollars at the time or close to i think it was like 80 80 something thousand dollars and then it went up and i mean obviously because it's 8th goes up and down um but if i had just said to you hey guys like

give me your money and i'll donate it to core devs i mean i wouldn't have really raised anything right i had to dangle that card i'd be like hey guys here's a really cool nft for you guys to own and it's going to a good cause and that way people got something out of it but they also got to go to do something for a good cause so i mean these examples of this sort of stuff absolutely everywhere and as i said it is not a bad thing guys it is just the way things work incentives run the world and the incentives that are the most powerful are the ones that give something back to people like even if it's as simple as giving someone apart for doing something that's still something that is simple something that is kind of like you know not necessarily

worth anything in terms of monetary value but is a great carrot to kind of like dangle in front of people so i just wanted to kind of give you some thoughts on that because i think it's really important and i think that ethereum is going to continue being used as a great coordination mechanism going forward all right so speaking of get coin we're only one week away from a grants around 13 so this would be the 13th matching round on git coin grants around 13 features a whopping nine ecosystem rounds worth 769 1 420 uh dollars combined which will break down in this thread and that's what bitcoin does so the tlci is that each round brief with an overview of eligibility and inspiration can be found here on this google doc which you can go link into and you can go read this thread as

you guys know i always bug you around matching round time to go donate to your favorite projects um go donate to basically everyone and as always i expect i um i appreciate all the donations to the delegate and ether but they're definitely not required or anything like that but yeah i mean this is always an exciting time for the ethereum community i think it shows the best of what ethereum has to offer in terms of being a coordination kind of like machine but also bringing people together to donate money to a good cause i guess multiple good causes in the projects but also um basically you know not not get anything out of it because right now you don't get any you don't get coin tokens for donating right like maybe some projects will airdrop their tokens to you if you donate to them like

individual projects but you don't get any uh any other kind of like projects uh sorry any git coin tokens from doing that so right now as i said the only carrot for people is that is those kind of like matching uh funds which is a pretty big carrot because i feel much better about donating 10 die and turning into 200 then i do about just donating 10 die and being like oh man that sucks i only donated donated 10 die right um so yeah anyway i'll keep you guys up to date on when round 13 starts and and remind you to donate throughout it as i usually do all right so there but there's a bunch of arbitrary updates to get through today so yield protocol has gone live on albertum one so yield protocol for those of you who don't know is a fixed rate

borrowing and lending protocol that is now on both ethereum mainnet and layer two on arbitrary layer two so users on layer two can now enjoy the benefits of collateralized fixed rate lending and borrow at a fraction of the gas cost so for a full kind of like breakdown of what's going on here you can read the blog post of course and this is just another thing to play around with on arbitrary as i said guys it's going to become very impossible or it is impossible to keep track of everything going live on all the l2s and this is just another instance of that i didn't see this until until recently same with a bunch of the other stuff that i'm going to talk about what to do with arbitram and that's because it's become a little bit unceremonious where it's kind of like okay well they're on

arbitrary you know that was expected you know i kind of like what's next sort of thing because i think there are a lot of things people get excited about but it's kind of like everyone's expecting these apps to just migrate to layer two because i mean they're not going to stay on layer one and not capture the users because as i said to you guys before i don't think layer one ethereum is really growing in terms of users because it's just too expensive uh users have obviously alternatives in the uh other layer ones uh but like we're capturing you know the layer twos are basically capturing the that crowd essentially and that's the crowd that they should be capturing at the end of the day later to ethereum is competing on the execution layer front which is not what ethereum layer one is competing on so so yeah

very excited to see this and i got an email actually earlier from binance saying that they had re-enabled withdrawals for arbitram so if you're on binance you use binance and you want to withdraw some assets to arbitrarily to get started with all it has to offer now it'd be a great time to do so through binance it's cheaper to do than going on ethereum layer one it's still expensive binance over charges for these things but i think it's cheaper than going through ethereum layer one to do it uh and also you won't incur the double gas cost because if you have assets on centralized exchange or binance for example you have to transfer them to layer one ethereum then put deposit it into arbitrary whereas you could just go straight to arbitrary from from finance there all right so a kind of like new app that

i don't believe was ever deployed to layer one called chromatica finance uh launched on arbitram one today so uh what chromatica is building themselves as is a next generation order book limit trading on uni swap gasless trading no swap fees no front running bots and no slippage so i had a bit of a read about this um i think there was a there was a description somewhere from someone in the discord channel that actually summarized this really really well i'm just scrolling through trying to find it right now i don't think i'm going to be able to to find this let me have a let me have a look if i can find it just quickly without borrowing you guys no no i don't think i can find it someone i think i i can't remember who said it but basically i actually really like the description

of it but anyway i'm going to leave it at that but basically you can check out this at app.chromatica.finance and play around with it it's powered by uni swap uh and and and it does something really cool with unison i don't wanna i don't wanna say what it does um i don't wanna kind of like say it wrong here but essentially what it allows you to do i think is uh utilize um let me just read to the blog post here um no no okay you guys can read through it uh i've just completely kind of like forgotten oh here we go here we go the chromatica protocol uses the the unisop v3 feature of concentrated liquidity to enable traders to make limit order trades without top fees in the background the user is providing liquidity to a pool until the price reaches the target for the specified

limit order that's the really cool feature that it does so essentially what it allows you to do is earn a yield while your order is sitting on an order book like so for example you can't do this when your order is sitting on a you know centralized exchange for example say eth is three thousand dollars and you wanna sell either three thousand five hundred dollars you set a sell order selling one eighth at three thousand five hundred dollars and then it just sits there doing nothing whereas with uh chromatica protocol you do the same thing but uh you basically get to the um you're providing liquidity uh and you're getting kind of like the the uh i guess like um swap fees there i think uh you have to make them all the trades without so yeah basically so uh and they've also got things like gas less limit gasless

limit trades um and you can also earn sorry use chrome which is their token for commentating the relayers uh and obviously all this is experimental but i suggest reading the blog post to get a full kind of like breakdown of this and reading about what chromatic is trying to do i think it's uh it's pretty cool it seems pretty innovative to me and the fact that it's on arbitrary means it's cheap to play around with so there's no excuse not to kind of like go check it out at least and i think this is maybe the final update on armatrum i've got for you guys yeah i i think so yeah yeah so basically uh this uh i guess analytics service called footprint analytics has announced an arbitrarium data dashboard that is now live on their website so you can go to this it'll be linked in the youtube

description it'll just fetch you the analytics here and it'll show you things like a network transaction so arbitrary transactions have actually been spiking quite uh quite a lot recently and i think that's because of all the apps going live on there and obviously the activity going up so you can see that in the last seven days there's been 500 000 uh uh transactions which you know i guess like averages to just under 100 000 transactions per day in the last 30 days it was 2 million so very very cool to see and you can see like the chart here of it growing over time with daily transactions and the average fees going down as well obviously if the fees are affected by ethereum l1 phase two which have been going down but also arbitrary has been doing improvements to their uh their system as well daily

unique addresses has been going up too i mean you can as i've said to you guys like i'm not concerned about any of this sort of stuff right now like i know people have been a bit concerned because like it's a quote-unquote bear market and there's a lot of um you know there's a lot of quiet periods going on right now but man these these things are up and to the right this adoption is up and to the right like things are still growing on these l2s which is exactly what we want to see and you can kind of like see top 10 tvl by protocol tbr by category this is a pretty comprehensive dashboard here tvl ranking all that sort of stuff there so i definitely recommend checking out this uh this dashboard here i love looking at this sort of stuff because at the end of the day guys

the data doesn't lie if it's being ingested correctly it doesn't lie and because it's all transparent on on on chain you can check the chain as they say uh and basically see it all for yourself you know you don't need to trust me i don't trust anyone really you can spin up your own uh kind of like uh a full node for ethereum and in the future you'll be able to spin up your own kind of like um albert trim note maybe you can right now i think you can still spin up your own kind of like arbitrary node i'm not totally sure yet and i'm not sure how easy it is obviously you can't spin up a sequence or anything just yet but you will be able to and it'll just be kind of like totally transparent you can check for yourself in order to trust

anyone sort of thing um and there's you know multiple sources you can get this information from as well which is i think still the coolest thing about blockchains is that they're so transparent obviously that's probably not gonna last forever especially at layer twos there's gonna be privacy that comes and things like that but we're using zk stuff i mean the cool thing about the zk stuff and the real magic with it is that you can actually be sure that something is true without knowing how the kind of like um without knowing why without knowing how that kind of like our truth came to be which is black magic it's it's just it's insane how that actually works but uh but yeah go check out this dashboard um i kind of like tracking arbitrary i'll link it in the youtube description all right so alpha road finance

announced today that they have uh created a website called stocknet.ecosystem.com which basically tracks the starnet ecosystem so as that's you guys very hard to keep track of what's going on with layer twos let alone start net but now you can by going to stocknet ecosystem.com and checking out everything this is very similar to other ecosystem dashboards that you may have seen before like the one that arbitrarium has and i think optimism has a similar one too you can sort by different things like different categories like defy game fight governance all that sort of stuff there and of course you can see which ones are live there are quite a few things that are live right now on on kind of like starting it or stark ecosystem with a lot of things on the test net obviously i've spoken about influence before which is a kind of a a

gaming uh project i think i've spoken about jedi swap before um a few others like orbiter obviously the the bridge that i've spoken about a lot uh snapshot x the governance tool i pretty much covered a lot of these before zigzag of course and stuff like that zigzag's on sticker sync right now but but coming to starknet so so yeah if you want to keep up with the stark net ecosystem see what's live have you know easy links to get to each of these projects and also put your project here if you're building one on stock that you can just click the supply button definitely go to starknet.ecosystem.com and you'll be able to kind of like track it all on here so speaking of new websites optimism have updated their homepage with a major what they're calling a major glow up and you know what i think optimism out of

all the kind of like layer 2 websites that i've seen or scalability websites that i've seen is one of the best um i think you know polygons is really cool i haven't checked albertum's lately actually i usually just check um rb scan i i usually just track up head track albertum's growth i don't actually go to their their main website very often um but uh you know i i think the fact that these things are just like they look so nice they kind of advertise their benefits right optimism is advertising right here the gas savings which is at the end of the day 90 of what people care about when it comes to these layer twos maybe even like 95 plus of what people care about um you know links to kind of like joining their discord the community or all the usual stuff that

you see but i like this because it i mean look front and center it just says ethereum's scaled optimism a low cost and lightning fast ethereum l2 blockchain that's it guys the low cost and the fast transactions is really what the majority of users care about so that should be front and center and then obviously the two call to action buttons here developer documentation which is one of you know one of the most important and then bridging into optimism obviously the next important so they've got something servicing developers and something servicing users which is what we want to see here so very cool to see this i mean they're they're there i got the kind of bridge there they've got the ecosystem kind of like page as well as i said very similar to the stock net number trim one that i've showed on here

before all looks very nice and you can go check this out all for yourself at optimism dot io all right so lido announced that they now have polygon staking available so you can now stack stake your matic with lido for what they're calling an effortless staking experience at polygon.lido.fi now i've spoken about using services like lido and centralized kind of like exchanges and that staking your tokens before when it comes to eth polygons a bit different because it's not a it's not like eighth where i mean it's it's different in that kind of like there's a delegated system where you kind of like delegate your tokens and you stick with other kind of like people whereas with ethereum it's it's different to that it doesn't really work

like that it's a very different proof of stake system so i think staking your matic with with light arrows or uh with lightroom is probably the best way to stake your medic to be honest because you not only do you get um i kind of like the yield from matic but you also get st matic which allows you to kind of like use that anywhere that's accepted within you know i guess like ethereum or within polygon within the layer 2 ecosystem as it's just an erc20 token and can be used anywhere there so if you have magic tokens and you're not staking them you could definitely check this out there's a blog post with more details about this as well um but obviously i was always riskier guys like using these sorts of things uh there's always a risk of like a bug or or any kind of

like that sort of stuff and there's also kind of like deposit limit right now so phase one it has a deposit cap of one million dollars which maybe it's already been hit and they're not removing it till april i don't know if it's been hit or not yet but i mean this is 24 hour old news so it probably been hit one million dollars is really not that much money um uh when you're talking about kind of like allowing everyone to stake and especially lido because lato is quite big um but still check them out you know maybe kind of like wait wait till april if you have to to kind of i guess put some some somatic tokens in if you want to stake there uh that's that's kind of like really cool to see uh but yeah definitely go check it out all right finally we have uh peter pan

teasing something called eth down under now i haven't dug uh deeper into this into what this is i'm gonna assume it's kind of like an australian-based conference i mean they're saying the biggest web 3 conference in the southern hemisphere being in australia uh yeah i'm here sydney december 22 by dow under yay we get a big conference in australia that is coming i i mean i'm really excited about this you know the last big conference that i went to in australia for crypto was um in early 2019 it was my first crypto conference it was uh what was it what was it oh man i've gone blank on it right now it was an eth conference um oh i've gone completely blank on it it'll come to me but that was such an awesome experience obviously early 2019 was like the depth of the bear market there were no moon boys

around there the specula i mean eighth was like a hundred bucks or something like that the d5 was just starting to kind of like get off the ground a little bit there wasn't really much kind of like going on there um but uh you know people came from all over the world really and i met like so many awesome people that i kind of made friendships with during 2018 some people who so many people who followed ethan followed the podcast that we were doing and things like that and i wasn't even working in crypto yet at that stage but that was you know such an awesome experience i loved it so much uh it's edcon edcon in sydney there you go came to me um and i met so many you know as i said so many cool people there but there hasn't really been a major

australian-based uh ethereum conference since then there's a crypto conference which is heavily focused on ethereum happening this month which i'm attending called blockchain week in sydney and melbourne so i'll be at both of those um and i'm actually speaking at both of those as well uh and then as i said recently like last week i went to an nft event in melbourne but as i said that wasn't like a crypto conference that was like a club kind of event it was very it was a very different vibe so i'm definitely looking forward to to eat down under i mean i know that australia is very far away from the rest of the world guys i know that uh the travel here takes 20 plus hours from europe and the us because i know going there takes me 20 plus hours and the jet lag is

insane because of the time zone difference especially coming from the us totally get that but i think that you know if you're coming to australia for the conference you can make a holiday out of it like visiting sydney and melbourne um and even kind of like the the gold coast or even other parts of um of queensland is is definitely worth it i mean obviously i'm biased here but it'd be really cool to see a lot of you at a kind of like australia-based conference as i said i'm going to be at a bunch of other conferences i'm pretty sure i'm still going to to amsterdam like i don't think i mean people kind of like saying oh like some people that i know in real life here were saying are you still going like what about this war stuff and i'm like guys like the wars on the other

side of europe and i had to explain to them things like nato and stuff like that and how like you know if if uh if um russia go uh kind of like starts advancing towards the like more western part of europe then it's kind of like i mean we have much bigger problems here then but um and then that i don't think it was going to do that but i think uh yeah i think i'm still going to be attending that so i'm very much looking forward to that but i mean i i i hope this goes forward i mean obviously australia's borders have been closed for quite a while we've recently um opened up our international borders again so people have been able to fly in uh which means this conference is is hopefully going to happen but it's not till the end of the year still

december 2022 i mean we're only in march right now but it's going to come probably faster than we expected to and as i said it's in sydney not in melbourne sydney and melbourne are like an hour and a half less than that flight from each other so it's not far unfortunately we don't have like a rail system that goes between the two cities which we should we can get a high-speed rail system because i remember i was in japan and they have a high-speed rail system that goes you know between all the different cities and it was just awesome to use but i mean unfortunately we don't have that we like to just keep digging out of the ground and selling it to other countries rather than investing in infrastructure but i'm not going to go on a rant about australia's infrastructure right now i catch myself doing that too much but

yeah anyway i hope to see this just gen my general point is i hope to see a lot of you at the other conferences around the world but also hope to see a lot of you at eth down under go follow the twitter account i don't know how much information there is about it yet it's like 8thdownunder.com yeah you can just subscribe for updates on the website the month and i guess like location has already been announced obviously it's an ethereum themed conference and everything like that i would love to see a lot of you guys in australia um and you know it makes it easier for me to i don't have to suffer the jet lag for once you guys can suffer with jet lag and the long flights uh but yeah i'll keep you guys updated on that as more information comes uh out about

it but i think on that note i'm gonna end it there for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone