Lodestar incentive program, ARB airdrop chaos & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #555 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily read fuel where we cup the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is honor and since the 24th of March 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today we have an announcement from the lodestar team or the chain safe team the developers behind the lodestar consensus layer client here that they uh have a prize pool of twenty thousand dollars to give away to people that run the load stock client now these uh the share of this twenty thousand dollars will be paid to stakers who provably propose a block on the network using load style and full details and eligibility requirements are down below in this blog post I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I think this is really cool this is uh I guess something

that has been spoken about in the past where teams can basically incentivize usage of their clients uh through monetary incentives and you can prove things on chain uh and it's and you can have like cryptographic proof on chain that people are running your client and they're proposing blocks using it which is obviously really really awesome and as I said the the details of that are in this um in this blog post uh it's running from I think yeah it's running from March 23rd uh so basically yesterday and we'll be running until August 23rd so about five months from now uh and uh yeah as I said like it's for people who propose blocks using the load star client so if that sounds like something you're interested in doing you can go ahead and change your consensus

layer client over to lodestar and as I said read the blog post for full details on how to participate to make sure you don't miss anything there um but yeah I don't know if this just applies to only Solo stakers or if it applies to um well not just solo stickers but like if it applies to mini pools as well I should say uh because obviously it would apply to any validator but if you're staking via say Lido for example uh and you're just you just have stf you're not actually running a validator I doubt that uh that that it's going to go into the running to for this prize pool here I'm not sure if mini pool if it's just uh individual kind of validators here or if it's mini pools as well so uh maybe it mentions in the blog post I don't

know oh yeah no there is there is some eligibility criteria here so large staking operators are not eligible uh which actually obviously makes a lot of sense uh and this is how you you basically participate you put graffiti must include lodestar they'll use the crawler to scrutinize the block proposal unique deposit addresses oh and yeah rocker pool node operators are eligible actually so I can see that here so very very cool so if you're a rocker pool node operator you're also eligible for this and soon very soon actually you'll be able to become a rock-a-pull nerd operator with only eight eth and 2.48 worth of RPL so basically halving that requirement there so yeah this will open it up to more peoples and it's really easy to run uh these clients I mean they're they're pretty pretty standard

um and load star's a great client I'm not running it right now myself I'm running mostly Lighthouse I have some other minority clients running more more so in kind of like test environments or environments that uh uh that that are being used for not just testing purposes but kind of like a staging area thing because I do want to diversify my clients out more I don't want to just be running all Lighthouse because I I yeah I am running lighthouse on my solo validators right now and my rockable mini pools I'm interested in changing my money mini pools over to something else not that Lighthouse is a bad client or anything like that but I definitely want to participate in the client diversity as much as possible but anyway you can go read this announcement from lodestar I'll link it in the YouTube description below

all right so the block has put out a report on a project called drpc which is a decentralized RPC Network that has been launched for ethereum apps uh so you can see here the RPC Network supports ethereum based apps but there are plans to support apps on other evm chains and the full details are in this post here as well as links to the relevant things now obviously rpcs has has been the disc a big discussion point over the last 24 hours because uh the uh default RPC that metamask uses for arbitrim was overloaded because of the airdrop which I'm going to talk about in a little bit uh but generally rpcs can become a pretty big bottleneck rpcs can censor you there they can be quite

centralizing so having a alternative decentralized RPC network uh from Dr PC and some others out there is obviously something that the community and the ecosystem needs so congrats to drpc on the launch you can get full details about this I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right a few regulatory updates before we jump into the arbitrim airdrop part which is going to be a fun discussion but uh Tom Emma who I've talked about on the um on the rear field a bunch of times before who's a congressman uh in uh in the US here has put out a tweet where he said if you don't custody consumer funds you are not a money transmitter the blockchain regulatory certainty act provides these

necessary certainty for miners validators what service providers and the entire blockchain ecosystem and then Tom continues and says proud to introduce this bipartisan bill with uh representative Darren asoto here uh so you can see this bill here and you can see some of the text here but this is basically saying that if you don't custody customer or consumer funds or customer funds and you are basically uh you know a miner or validator you're producing blocks but you're taking no custody of funds then you should not have to register as a money transmitter uh and not have to abide by those laws and regulations around money transmitters now of course the money transmitter laws exist because of things like Banks Banks do custody uh consumer funds and they actually use them for

their own purposes so and customer funds I should say so obviously it should apply to them but for a minor for a validator for a wallet software provider that uh you know almost all of them are non-custodial they do not hold funds they never hold funds really and never hold user funds like for example when I produce a block that's full of user transactions on the ethereum network I take no custody of anyone's funds yes I get paid a fee but that fee is is mine now like that's not that doesn't belong to the customer anymore that belongs to me because they paid that fee right and the network itself pays me a block reward for that uh for for doing that right and it pays me other rewards for a testing but at no point in that process do I ever take custody of anyone's funds

so I should not be required to register as a money transmitter and this is a similar argument about validators and relayers uh being censoring or non-censoring of ofac related transactions well if you're if you're just uh kind of approving these things or I guess like proposing blocks with these things in there um you shouldn't have to basically uh censor uh because you are not breaking any laws by doing that the sanctions are on the phonetic cash contracts themselves they're not on the validators and relayers but obviously there's legal ambiguity there and that's why certain relays have decided to censor I'm so I'm sure there are some validators out there that are censoring as well especially if they're validate as they're part of registered us companies and I totally understand the reasons for doing that

but we need Clarity we need things actually introduced we need bills to be introduced we need things to be enshrined in law and that's exactly what Tom Emma is attempting to do here now of course we don't know the chances that this bill is going to get passed there's probably low chances but the fact that the conversation is there conversation is ongoing is much better than us just resting on our Laurels and hoping that uh you know the government uh does the right thing which as I explained yesterday A lot of the time doesn't align with their own incentive so we have to keep pushing on this front and I'm really glad that Tom introduced this bill today all right so Rodrigo here who is who works in legal at the Paradigm VC fund has put together a uh a guide or a Blog Pro or a series of blog posts about the

uh about the SEC basically so they he says in a tweet gensler's admonition that crypto projects should just come in and register to come in and to come into a compliance is impossible to abide by we wrote A four-part series explaining why and the first part here is a title due to sec in action registry is not a viable path for crypto projects and this is part one I don't know if part two three and four have been published yet uh let me have a look at this um no I believe uh yeah and this is part two yeah part one I don't know if part three and four have been published yet but I'll link both of these in the YouTube description below for YouTube to give a raid but this again speaks to what I was saying yesterday about how the SEC keeps coming up with all this

stuff and they keep saying the projects you need to register with with us you need to uh abide by the laws and regulations and then projects ask okay what are those laws and regulations that I have to abide by how do I register and the SSC basically doesn't give any Clarity at all there's no action here they don't actually want to give Clarity they don't want to work with crypto projects to become compliant they just want to be a big bully so that's what these blog posts talk about and I highly recommend giving them a read uh because uh paradigm's legal team has always been on point they've put a bunch of these posts out in the past that have really resonated with me and really made things clear to me so I'll link these both in the YouTube description for you to check out

all right in in rather positive news at least this is positive for me um dokwan has been arrested in Montenegro I believe uh Montenegro I believe um and he's also been charged with fraud by U.S prosecutors in New York so as you guys will know dokon has been on the Run since Tara collapsed he's been hiding out in various countries around the world apparently he was caught but uh because he was using fake documentation to enter Montenegro I believe which just is weird but I mean it is what it is right uh so he was caught and arrested there now I believe Montenegro has an extradition treaty with the US they don't have one with South Korea but the

warrant for his arrest is out in South Korea but the US also has a warrant for his arrest now because they have charged him with a bunch of charges actually they've charged him with conspiracy to defraud uh two times accounts of Commodities fraud two times counts of Securities fraud two times counts of wire fraud and Market manipulation this is this is an some pretty hefty charges guys this is like SPF level charges here um and you know it's pretty crazy but for me personally I'm really glad that that he's seeing Justice and not because I believe in Vengeance or I believe in uh in basically uh by throwing everyone in jail and that does anything wrong and and not you know trying to rehabilitate them or anything like that it's got nothing to do with that for me what it's got to do with is that we need more

enforcement actions against these really bad actors in order to deter other people from doing this in the future like the amount of Cowboys that we had last ball cycle is insane and pretty much all of them blew up right and all of a lot of them have been either arrested or their companies have gone bankrupt and they faced the consequences for their actions unfortunately uh three hours capital or the the founders who's doing Carl Davies haven't faced uh haven't faced any kind of action uh consequences for their actions yet they've actually started another project and somehow duped investors into giving them money and are somehow gallivanting around like uh it's all well and good that they defrauded uh certain or I guess like they allegedly defrauded certain parties in the crypto ecosystem

they're still running wild but you know SPF has been arrested don't Quan has now been arrested uh um uh block fire went bankrupt uh Celsius went bankrupt like all the a lot of these Bad actors have just kind of gotten wiped out but we need to send a clear message to these Bad actors that and especially these really big bad actors that if you do these things there are consequences there are enforcement action consequences against you now I'm not going to get into the debate about how what these um enforcement actions should be how long people should go to jail for what the punishment should be none of that sort of stuff I'm not here to debate that I just believe that we have so far in crypto not being able to self-regulate and self-police these sorts of things so unfortunately we're

going to need other entities that do this for us now does that mean that I believe that we should have hasta regulation in crypto no I don't believe that at all I think that the rules are pretty clear and I think that uh dokon here is being charged with existing laws and regulations uh and things that he's broke I mean Market manipulation wire fraud these things are not unique to crypto obviously um but I don't believe that the response should be harsher and harsher regulation on crypto I believe the response should be Clarity on regulation around crypto so the good actors can keep doing good things and uh the Bad actors it makes it harder for them to do uh do bad things and then if they are able to grow and and basically create ecosystems like

Terra that blow up and hurt a lot of people they should definitely face consequences for their actions now that's just my general opinion on these sorts of things I know others have have other opinions and that's totally fine I'm not saying that I'm right here in that opinion but I do believe that when you do things at this scale when you hurt this many people you can't just walk away from it and start something new I mean that's what three hours Capital did and it really pisses me off that they're able to do that but I don't believe that you should be able to do that I believe that everyone should face uh the consequences of their actions whether good or bad uh and honestly I know people have disagreements about what those consequences should be but that's just the way I I say things but

anyway I'm going to leave that one at that that's the latest on dokon I don't think we'll be hearing about him again maybe until he goes to quarter something like that but honestly he's kind of boring to report on uh no one really cares about him anymore he's he's old news now but I figured that was worth updating you guys on all right we come to the meat of the episode which is the arbitrim airdrop now of course this airdrop was hilarious because essentially well hilarious in a in not off in in a kind of like not not a haha funny way but in a oh my God like of course this happened away so essentially as any of you will know that tried to claim the airdrop as soon as that went live everything fell over RB scan fell over the arbitrim website fell

over uh you know the rpcs fell over I don't know if the sequencer fell over I don't think it did but I mean the RPC fell over so no one could claim really and anyone who could claim was able to sell at a really high price because it was it was a very liquid market right there weren't many tokens out there so some people were able to sell upwards of like six seven eight dollars and then of course once people were able to claim the price Came Crashing Down from there because that was not a true market price and now I believe the price is a dollar fifty or something like that uh and I believe anyone can claim now because the the craziness is um is over now uh and I claimed mine when I woke up this morning slept through most of the craziness but

I don't plan to sell mine uh the cool thing about Australia now is that when you get an airdrop and it's an and it's an initial kind of um creation of the token the airdrop has a zero dollar cost basis which means you don't pay income tax on that airdrop uh and you only pay capital gains tax when you sell it I don't plan to sell my ARB tokens for a very long time um it really if ever right uh and you guys know I'm an investor in arbitrim as well here I'm really bullish on the project of course so I just delegated my tokens to to l2beat actually uh because they're one of the delegates that I really want to support um but yeah I hope you are all able to claim your tokens uh whether you sold or not is up to you like there's no shame

in selling an airdrop especially if it's worth a lot I mean I think the the largest individual airdrop that people could get per address was around 10 000 tokens so if you got the whole airdrop that's 15 grand at current prices uh us uh no one will blame you for taking that that's a lot of money right a lot of free money um uh but like as as I said like it um you can sell there's no shame in taking profits or you can hold and you can delegate your tokens it's totally up to you what you want to do I know there's a lot of speculation about what arbitrim's price is going to what are this price is going to be in the future I'm not going to comment any of that of course but obviously arbitrim is the leading L2 right now I think by most

metrics so whatever the biggest L2 should be worth it's up to the market to decide really but yeah anyway enough on the on the uh the value of the ARB token I think that this marks a new era for arbitrum obviously with their token going live they now have a decentralized governance process they're going to be uh slowly decentralizing out the entire arbitrum one and other networks like arbitrim Nova uh and this is going to be really cool to see because because I think they're them and optimism are the the further so long this path right now there are obviously a lot of thing a lot of um other l2s going live soon the ZK VMS and they're going to have their own path of decentralization and all that sort of stuff but it is a journey it is a long journey it's going to take

multiple years to get there it's not going to happen overnight I mean arbitrum and optimism went live in uh mid to late 2021 right uh and and it's already almost mid 2023 so this this stuff's going to take time to get out there but issuing a token creating a dow obviously is the first step but we want to see permissionless uh fraud proofs we want to see people being able to run sequences and validators on the network and that's all going to happen over time for all of these networks and I believe that decentralization is actually a key selling point and I believe that the l2s that get there are the fastest will stand uh the best chance of a long-term success but obviously we don't want to rush these things we don't want to make any mistakes uh but yeah it's going to get there now just a couple of metrics

around the ARB airdrop you can see here that the activity on arbitrim1 spiked up pretty crazily you can see their normal activity here well it's just spiked up massively and I think I don't know how accurate this is on l2b right now but it says it peaked at about 31 TPS I think uh arbitrary one was able to do more than that but there is a cap on how much they can do based on their own I guess internal gas limit as part of the arbitrum one network and then you can see here on RB scan the uh transactions per day if I go to the charts charts and stats and go to daily transactions charts that also spiked up massively 2.7 million total transactions happened uh basically in the last 24 hours because

of the airdrop and you can see the unique address chart obviously spiked up as well uh because people needed to claim their app tokens on the arbitrum one network and actually that's something I didn't correct that I mentioned last week I got confused with the docs where I where basically the wording was a bit confusing to me and I said that the ARB token was claimable on ethereum mainnet not on arbitrine one it turns out it obviously was only claimable on the arbitrine one network and then you could Bridge it from there to uh wherever it was supported so apologies for for that last week but as I said the confusion stemmed from the uh confusing wording on the documentation which has since been fixed I believe uh but but yeah anyway I don't think uh anyone was too sad about that especially because claiming on arbitrine one is

cheaper and faster than claiming on the ethereum mainnet anyway and you can only claim on arbitrine one if you go to the arbitrim dot Foundation website but uh but yeah anyway I'll link these uh kind of charts and stuff in the YouTube description for you to check out but as I said I hope you were all able to claim your airdrop I hope you hope you got a healthy airdrop I hope that you you know if you did cash out it's money that you can be used to improve your life uh as I said if you've got the maximum airdrop you got fifteen thousand dollars maybe you you can use that to pay down your mortgage maybe you can use that to pay down a car payment maybe you could use it for some bills that you want to pay down or buy yourself something awesome

or go on an amazing holiday right like this is the awesome thing about these airdrops is that you don't have to hold them you can sell them you can take profits here you don't have to hold them in crypto at all and no one should shame you for selling them uh and then you can better your life for simply sticking around using these products as I've said plenty of times before use these products guys stick around anything doesn't have a token it's probably gonna have a token in the future they're probably going to airdrop it you have so much opportunities uh with just airdrops alone to enrich your own life not just from the I guess money itself right maybe you've sold the faith maybe you stacked movies maybe you can now spin up a validator right maybe a solo validator or a rockable mini pool there's so much

opportunity in just getting this money and getting shared these um these tokens to you for basically using these networks and a really cool thing about this is that if you've used apps on arbitrim1 as well they got uh airdropped a bunch of tokens so maybe they'll do retroactive airdrops to users of the apps or uh uh um or future users of the app so all it could be mining programs so there's so much opportunity guys not just obviously on Arbiter one but like on everything just continue to stick around don't go anywhere like they're they're not just monetary opportunities as I've said in the past there's career opportunities too if you're interested in doing something like that and I think these airdrops are a perfect example of those opportunities materializing in a monetary way but also materializing in a in a kind of social way as well because

it basically uh brings more people into the ecosystem I believe but anyway gonna leave that one at that moving on to the next piece actually wait wait there's one more thing on the arbitrim airdrop that I wanted to say I did just gush about how positive the airdrop was but there are always negative as aspects of airdrops and one of the biggest negative aspects are airdrop farmers and cyber Farmers you can see here that this is a airdrop farming operation that has unique addresses and unique IP addresses uh unique ethereum addresses and unique IP addresses that farm the arbitrim airdrop and then went and claimed it and you can see all the windows here unfortunately no matter how much work you do to get rid of these kind of airdrop Farmers or or airdrop cyblers it is extremely hard to filter them all out

because they are very sophisticated they make themselves look like regular users they basically do everything that they can possibly think of to be eligible for the airdrop in terms of criteria and then as I said weeding them out is incredibly hard now in saying that there are certain tools that are here today and that are getting better over time such as things like proof of humanity sismo is a ZK badge stuff the ethereum attestation service all these sorts of things that can further prove your identity improve your kind of proof of humanity and prove that you're not cybulling and things like that right that I think the project should integrate with for future airdrops now obviously they're not at their mature State today they will be in the future uh but that's a that's one way we can get around this

sorts of stuff but it is hard you're never going to have 100 coverage here over um removing these people from the pool that's just the way it is at the end of the day you can only do as best you can uh and I truly do think that Arbor trim did or elf train Labs team is best that they could to weed out the um table Pharmacy because obviously you want you don't want that to be false positives right you don't want to weed out legitimate users because you think that they're a cyber farmer that's actually worse than waiting up disabled Farmers right uh so yeah it's a rock and a hard place a lot of the time but uh projects are doing the best they can right now but I think they can do better with the new tools that we've got coming out uh in the future as I just mentioned

a few of them are there all right so ZK sync is teasing something for today now maybe by the time you watch this episode it has already been revealed what this is I have my own theories on what this is given obviously a few different Clues here so one uh they're air dropping their token right that's my first theory on it two their ZK sync era ZK VM mainnet is going live right I I think that that's pretty I mean it's it's a pretty kind of like safe bet considering that they said uh a few weeks ago that they'd be launching their ZK sync our main net I believe in like six weeks or something like that so that's a pretty pretty easy guess uh third there and they've got all these

major Partnerships that they're announcing because they're not the only Twitter account that tweeted out this video there was a bunch of others like rockapool um and some others out there that tweeted this out uh and uh fourth it's a nothing burger right because we saw one of these cross I guess promotion things done a few weeks ago and it turned out to be a nothing burger if I had to put my money on anything I would say that it's their ZK VM going on mainnet just because it's pretty obvious that it is I'm based on all the signals that I'm seeing and there was also another blog post that they put out today talking about how they're going to be securing ZK sync uh and uh with an execution delay and and and different kind of security councils and stuff like that as you can see in this Twitter thread and

blog post so yeah I think the timing lines up I think teasing lines up I think that given the the past kind of like context around the ZK VM coming to mainnet within six weeks after their their arm uh kind of uh uh developer only mainnet from a few weeks ago so the main open to everyone right the permissionless mainnet it makes sense so we'll see if I'm right I don't know when this news is coming out but it's coming out today as I said you're probably going to be watching this after the news has already gone live uh but but yeah that's that's what I think it is but anyway you can read this blog post for yourself and I'm sure I'll be talking about this news on Monday when uh it's already out and live all right so speaking of ZK EVMS I spoke

about tycho's Alpha 2 test net that launched uh I believe uh yesterday yeah about a bit over 24 hours ago or 36 hours ago since this week was put out and they've put a tweet thread recapping what has happened since then well there's more than 160 Community L2 nodes in the network 12 unique proofers have generated ability proof and there's been over 14 000 blocks over 8 000 wallets 67 000 transactions 2 000 contracts and more and you can read this full thread for a breakdown here now I want to say that obviously some of this activity is going to be airdrop Farmers that's to be expected as I've said before airdrop farmers are everywhere they're on every single project that doesn't have a token yet and they're going to be doing

whatever they can to get an airdrop and that's totally fine I mean it kind of acts as like a symbiotic relationship where the airdrop farmers do this because they're farming an airdrop but by doing this they're helping to test out the uh the software uh not just on the user-facing side but on the prover side here as well as the the node side which is obviously very positive so I think that airdrop Farmers as I said have their positive externalities as well as their negative externalities uh and I do think it can be a symbiotic relationship as long as you're essentially forcing these airdrop Farmers to to stress test your network to test your software to make it better for everyone and then essentially they get rewarded for doing that right if they're not caught in the um the

analysis here but as you guys know Tycho is one of the l2s that does not have a token yet has not announced any plans for a token but we all know that pretty much every L2 and most projects are going to have tokens out there so I'm sure there is some farming here not to take away from the fact that this is an amazing achievement in just 36 hours though so congrats to Taiko on this and you can read their full thread I will link it in the YouTube description below all right finally here we have an announcement from Spruce so Spruce has announced that signing with ethereum has now been directly integrated with metamask so they continue by saying with standardized message formats wallet providers can create sign-in experiences much closer to what we expect in web web

2 like a clear like with a clear sign in button uh and you can see in the screenshots here a screenshot here users should be able to clearly see when they are simply signing in versus authorizing bad acts actors to drain their assets so instead of it just being a sign uh button now this is just signed to sign a transaction you are now have a sign in button that basically says that you're just signing into the site and you're not signing a transaction you're not signing a token approval or anything like that you're just signing in to the website itself which I think is a pretty huge ux Boon for just like really the character change here is like three characters they've just added the dash and then the in but I think it's a really great safety Improvement for for users and a really great UI ux

Improvement overall and you can see a year that uh there's warnings and stuff as well like signing requests uh and how they can be potentially deceptive uh and more stuff like that so you can read these full blog posts from the spruce team here metamask also had one I believe uh for full details on this but this is this kind of stuff that makes signing with ethereum ubiquitous we want to make it ubiquitous we want websites in the web 2 world to also uh basically integrate with signing with ethereum so that you can use your metamask wallet to not only sign into web 3 enabled websites but also web 2 websites imagine being able to sign into Twitter with just your ethereum address that would be insane you wouldn't have to give them your email right you wouldn't have to give them your mobile number you could

just sign in with your ethereum address and then you can you can obviously add to a fate if if you want to on top of that uh and then you'll be able to and then Twitter will be able to integrate natively with web3 enabled features too imagine Twitter having like a on the left hand side here having like a portfolio button or a wallet button or any that shows you your assets and things like that imagine them having a um an nft store for a example of something right that brings in all of these um different or Aggregates all these different nft marketplaces I mean the Imagine them having like a like a place to to vote in Dows and stuff like that and imagine you being able to follow the Twitter account for a down that automatically gets uh updates of their snapshot votes and stuff like that

like the possibilities are endless here when these Integrations happen and I think signing with ethereum is like Gateway that big unlock that needs to happen before any of the other stuff uh can be integrated at scale there but 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 that video a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone