Mini-danksharding, Rocket Pool growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #319 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where we cut the latest news in your theorem ecosystem i'm your host anthony signer and today the 21st of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so a bit of drama over the weekend about an attacker targeting uh nft users or nft kind of like holders here that were using open c now this wasn't a bug with open seas contracts or an exploit on open seas behalf but they copped all the flack for it of course because they are the largest nft marketplace by far but there's this great thread that uh from nisso here from gem that broke down exactly what happened but the tr tldr is that a bunch of users were victims of a phishing attack which made them sign things well not made them but like prompted them to sign things with their

ethereum wallet that they shouldn't have been signing because it gave the attacker the ability to sell their nfts now i've gone on about this before on the refill about how you have to be really careful about what you sign um you know what transactions you sign what messages you sign all that sort of stuff and i've spoken about how there are various um kind of like hardware wallets out there and some of them will show you what you're signing some of them won't some of them will give you more detail than others like the lattice one gives you a lot of detail because there's a bigger screen on it the ledger uh legend nano s i mean and trezor both have small screens they won't give that much information to go off of so being careful about what you sign is always prudent but uh this

one was i mean a bit shitty because it was part of a phishing attack now what that means is that basically from what i understand a bunch of people got an email that looked like it came from openc and uh because opencv has a contract migration going on right now basically uh there actually was a legitimate email that openc sent out and then the phishing email was sent out as well that kind of like copied that and prompted users to sign something after going to the link that allowed the attacker to gain access to uh be able to sell their nfts now what the attacker did was sold a bunch of nfts uh way below their kind of like actual value so people scooped them up straight away and the attacker got away with some money and then people lost their really you know prized nfts and as

far as i can tell there wasn't uh that much damage or in terms of like how people were affected i think i saw the number being thrown around that 32 people were affected obviously really crappy for them but uh it wasn't like there was thousands of people affected by this um by this export or anything like that and i think the attacker ended up getting away with about 1.7 million dollars after selling a bunch of nfts but i didn't kind of like look too deep into the on-chain stuff about what was happening there but i did just want to kind of like talk about it because i mean one i feel kind of like bad for openc that they copped all this kind of like heat over it when it actually wasn't open seas folded this happened uh two i as i said like i think people need

to be made aware of um kind of like how how uh how risky it is to sign things you don't understand what you're signing and how easily it is to actually become a victim of a phishing attack now you know some of you some of you know that i used to work in cyber security so i'm obviously well aware of this sort of stuff but uh the average user is definitely not well aware of this stuff like phishing is a very lucrative industry because it's very easy to trick people into clicking things when you imp you know when you pretend to be someone that they trust right like i mean it's kind of like phishing is like an online thing but this kind of falls into the whole social engineering playbook i mean it's funny because like you see stories of people being able to just kind of

like walk into places because they they look the part you know imagine if you just dress up as like a janitor and you walk into a secure office building and people let you in because they think you're the janitor right like and this has been done in movies and things like that i'm sure you guys have seen this before but it works like the thing is is that subconsciously we don't really think about these sorts of things like we see someone in uniform and we automatically assume that they're meant to be there we don't automatically assume that someone is kind of like impersonating them trying to gain access to uh places that they shouldn't and the same is true for uh for online phishing like if you get an email that looks exactly like uh one that's coming from from openc for example same text same

message same kind of like color scheme same everything uh same font uh you're you know subconsciously a lot of time you're just gonna trust it and you're just gonna click on that link and this is how this is why phishing is so lucrative because it's it's just it's very easy to trick people now obviously there are a bunch of protections in place on um you know the email provider side like obviously if you're using gmail they'll filter a lot of stuff out for you same with any kind of like modern email provider they'll filter a lot of stuff out but the problem is is that like uh a lot of what a lot of their detection mechanisms are based on you know uh things that are kind of like known and then if there's more sophisticated attacks or targeted phishing attacks it's very hard for them to

to actually um pick up on that and kind of block that and they also have to play a balancing act because they don't want to be they don't want to be filtering things to spam uh that are actually not spam and then piss off all their users so it's kind of like a balancing act there as well for for the for the mail providers but gen generally i mean i think the best advice that i can give is to just like when dealing with kind of like signing anything especially when you've clicked off a link from like an email or something just be extra vigilant like and bookmark the the sites that you regularly go on like if you're using uh you know unisop regularly or kind of like make a regularly or comp like whatever app you're using regularly openc as well make sure you bookmark the

website and just go to go to that don't go to like um third-party links and stuff like that and always make sure that the url you're visiting is the one that you're supposed to be visiting especially for high value kind of like purchases there and if you've got a lattis one definitely take advantage of the fact that you can see the transaction that you're signing i know you know the funny thing is i know this sounds like a lot of steps to protect yourself but this is what self-sovereignty is guys this is what going bankless is like there are there's only so much like um i guess like the actual interfaces can do to warn you about this stuff but if you ignore the warnings and just go for it and start signing just anything well then that's kind of like on you and i think that's

why a lot of people are actually scared to self-custody or scared to actually getting in to interact with things because they're like oh you know one one kind of like um bad move and all and i'll kind of lose everything i mean look i kind of understand that but at the same time it does it's not that bad like you just have to have basic due diligence it's it you know to me having basic due diligence when interacting with things on chain it's kind of like how you have basic uh kind of like um thing a basic uh risk assessment in real life like you don't cross the road without looking before you do it right or without kind of waiting at a pedestrian crossing it's the same thing with signing a transaction like it it doesn't take long to just make sure that you know what you're signing and make

sure that you're on the right website just like it doesn't take long for you to look both ways before you cross the street and i think once you get into that mindset of protecting yourself just as like a second nature thing online not just with crypto but with everything you can you'll protect yourself against the vast majority of things because a lot of the time the the scammers they're just doing a shotgun approach they're just sending it like they're casting like a massive net and then you know say they send like a phishing email to like a million people well even if they only get one percent of those people to click on it that's still a lot of people right that's 10 000 people that they've gotten to click on a link and then maybe only one percent of those actually follow through and sign a malicious transaction

or follow through with the scam that's 100 people so it's still successful for them that's that's why this keeps happening is because obviously so many people use kind of like crypto so many people use the internet in general and you only need to capture a very small percentage of the total that you send these things to in order for the scam to be worth it so don't be that one percent don't get don't get caught in that just do the basic due diligence and risk assessment on certain things especially high value transactions like if you're sending 50 of your portfolio somewhere i mean you're going to want to like quadruple check the address that you're sending it to right and you want to make sure that when you sign the transaction as well it actually has the address that you intended to send it to

because sometimes as i've discussed before there's a thing called a man in the middle attack where they can actually have a piece of software on your computer and then swap out your address with another address and then you you sign it thinking that you're sending the the tokens to your own address when in reality you aren't so i think yeah i mean yeah and like for lower value things everyday stuff you probably don't have to go that far but i mean for me personally i i can't remember a time where i was kind of like when i fell victim to any of this sort of stuff like even from like the get-go i don't think i've fallen victim to any of this kind of like stuff before um and i think that's just because i've practiced good due diligence but at the same time it

doesn't mean that i can't in the future i mean there's definitely uh people that you expect to be kind of like experts in this and they can still get kind of like fish and fish and like when people kind of like target you with fishing it's even worse this is called spear fishing where they actually do like hyper targeted stuff um to you and it's like it's naive to think that you're an expert and you can resist it all you know bragging about and being like oh you know i've resisted everything no one can hack me i mean one you're actually encouraging the hackers and two i mean that uh the the thing is is that it it's gonna sting a lot more when you actually do get get fished and there's no it's not just kind of like phishing via email it's like on discord like someone damning you

to pretending to be someone else someone like doing it on twitter you know and just tricking you just basically using all these social engineering tactics to trick you into doing something that they want and it only takes one slip up guys a lot of the time for these sorts of things like literally it only takes you um signing something you shouldn't of or sending uh uh money and money to someone you shouldn't have for you to kind of like lose or lose things so so yeah anyway i'm gonna leave it at that uh i think you know just generally there's plenty plenty of um resources out there for protecting yourself i think my crypto has a really great security guide so if you want to just start google my crypto security guide or something i think there's a bunch of blog posts around that as well to protect yourself

um but generally as i said just use common sense um do basic due diligence on things don't just kind of like throw money into anything and i think you'll be all right for the most part all right so the next devcon has been announced well we already knew what what where the next devcon was going to be in bogata i think i hope i said that right um i don't actually know how to pronounce the the city right here pagoda bagata i don't know someone's going to correct me in the comments i'm sure apologies uh guys but this is in colombia it's going to be from 11th to the 14th of october 2022. now this is defcon 6. unfortunately this was you know this was meant to happen in 2020 got postponed 2021 got postponed again

because of obviously because of covered and now it's happening in 2022 11 to 14 to october so i'm definitely going to try and be there i think i will be able to travel to colombia by that time i know there are some countries that are still restricted to travel to from australia i'm sure i could get there by kind of like proxying through other countries but you know i don't want to kind of like mess around with that because then it might be hard to get back towards australia but uh i'm hoping to to get there i'm very very excited for it i mean devcon like if you went to eath denver that's like a mini devcon from my experience like 8th denver is huge as a as a kind of like ethereum conference but it doesn't compare to devcon at devcon there's pretty much like everyone there the

event's much bigger in terms of kind of like the venues uh and it's kind of like it really does bring together not just the ethereum community but like the crypto community as a whole i think there are only people who don't go there are bitcoin maximalists but like do we really want them there probably not um but uh yeah just i hope to see a lot of you guys there i'm really excited for it obviously i'm really excited that we finally got some dates here i don't think it'll get delayed this time i mean obviously covert is still around but obviously like a lot of the international restrictions a lot of the travel restrictions have been kind of like eased up and we have the vaccines and everything now so we should be good to go there so i'm super excited for it um but october i mean there's plenty of

conferences before that as i've said to you guys i'm going to be in east amsterdam in april there's also a conference happening in australia called blockchain week uh in march and i'm hoping to get to both sydney and melbourne over the two days in order to to attend in person uh there so that's going to be exciting and then uh yeah i think that then it'll be amsterdam then it'll be kind of um uh block works and bank lists doing the permissionless conference in florida there's plenty of conferences right like there's there's heaps happening before devcon but i think devcon is going to be one of the one of the better ones for sure so very very excited uh about that all right so proto lambda here from the optimism team used to be an ethereum used to work in ethereum r d at the

ethereum foundation put together a thread that at ethereum denver we being a bunch of i guess like ethereum client uh developers and researchers hacked together a full data blob transaction prototype aka mini dank sharding so data blobs are the first milestone towards full ethereum sharding enabling roll-ups like optimism to grow 100 times in capacity and he says here's a tweet thread about the prototype so definitely go check out this thread obviously for the full information here but this is awesome i mean you've probably been hearing about uh dank sharding and blob transactions and obviously optimistic robs for a while now and we're getting towards kind of like the the point where we're like okay well this is the holy grail of like ethereum scaling like this is where we know when we need to get to in order to scale by like a hundred a

thousand x more than that over time right like ten thousand x over time paulina has been putting together a bunch of threads and blog posts about this as well which i'm sure you guys have seen if you haven't definitely go to their profile on twitter and you'll find links to everything there but i mean there's so much it's it's it's all well and good to talk about it but it's even better to actually build something and that's exactly what proto and a bunch of the other um other other people here from the teams did they built a prototype of this so i mean the thing is that dang sharding is relatively new and uh the fact that we already have like kind of like a prototype with this coupled with the data blob transactions which are obviously going to scale uh layer twos especially optimistic

roll-ups is awesome and this got me super pumped up because i mean the smartest people in the world uh or uh not in the world sorry in in the crypto world are working on scaling ethereum right now and they're making such amazing strides and i know that it's very technical i know that it can be difficult to understand i know that uh during my refuels i don't do the best at explaining these sorts of things because it's kind of hard like obviously you guys know i do the refuel off the cuff i don't have any notes in front of me or anything like that but this is why i always point you towards these resources because they do have the notes they have the structured stuff for you to read through they have links to additional information there's no way i could cover this in even like a a half an hour

dedicated video there's just too much going on it's evolving too fast and it's too technical um at this stage for me to be able to break it down uh for you guys but as i mentioned the other day about uh dank sharding what it does is basically unifies ethereum into uh data availability and and kind of like settlement layer so that we don't have a lot of the i guess like issues with composability and interoperability that we would have otherwise and that as i said it's kind of like the holy grail here but on top of that we want these kind of like uh uh i guess they're calling it um data blobs or data blob transaction types which is an erp that will be going into the upgrade after the merge called shanghai hopefully it's not confirmed or anything

but like we're hoping to get into that which will drastically reduce the costs of roll-ups and we could be in a world of sub 10 transaction fees for optimistic roll-ups by the end of the year q1 2023 sort of thing and then obviously going lower than that over time as well and this is without all the optimizations coming to optimistic roll-ups too so very very cool to see this and highly recommend checking out this thread from proto i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so rocketpool announced today that they are now running one percent of ethereum's validators so the beacon chains validators this is an absolutely massive achievement in only three months since they went to to mainnet and obviously a huge win for decentralization as rocketpool is a

decentralized uh staking pool service it is not one of the centralized ones um and i'm just super excited to see this continue growing i mean as i've highlighted before rocker pool is doing insanely well in the client diversity front i'm pretty sure prism is like under 10 or 20 or something like that i think it's under 20 so they're obviously doing extremely well there but not only that they're becoming a larger and larger share of the ethereum validator set like one percent in only three months is pretty crazy guys especially for a newer protocol that has more risks associated with it because there's smart contract risk obviously uh two they came kind of like i guess late in the game like i think you know people's staking has kind of tapered off we do we just have a bunch of people staking over time but we

obviously had the massive growth in the in the first year and i think it's just been tapering off recently until the until the withdrawals are enabled which won't be until the end of the year so you know this is just like contextualizing the growth here and you can kind of like see just how bullish this is for for rocketpool now i think that not only is it bullish for rocketpool but as i said it's bullish for um decentralization for the ethereum beacon chain and for basically getting us off these centralized providers because at the end of the day i think i mean half the reason people will use these centralized providers to stake is because of the fact that they don't have the 32 minimum required to stake right and that's totally fair i mean if you don't have the 32th minimum before rockapool was live you literally had to

go with a centralized service there was no alternative for you had to go with an exchange or a service provider you couldn't actually do anything else so i totally understand why people did it if you had 32 eth and you did it i mean i can understand because that's the other half of the reason that i'm uh that um people stake with centralized providers and that's convenience right obviously setting up your own validator and um setting up your own kind of like nodes and things like that on your own hardware and maintaining it isn't for the faint of heart it is not like a super noob friendly thing to do and it definitely is not as easy as just clicking a button on the exchange that says stake your wreath but in saying that i think that if we can just count kind of like catch

that other 50 which is the the fact that people want to stake like on their own or want to stay in a decentralized way but just haven't had the opportunity to well that's what rockapool is capturing and that market i think is massive i think there are a lot of smaller eath holders out there um that that um obviously take decentralization extremely seriously but they may be newer to the ecosystem they may maybe they didn't weren't able to stack 32 when it was cheaper or there's i mean there's a million reasons people don't have the 32 minimum and obviously over time as the 8th price goes up that's just going to get more and more out of reach for people now there's an open question of like will we actually reduce the minimum amount of eth required to stake i think we will at some point

but the thing is is that okay let's let's do a bit of a theory crafting here if we don't reduce the amount of ether required to stake until ether is like 20k say before just for an example here that would make it hundred and forty thousand dollars to steak on uh uh with with to solo steak i should say sorry um and to kind of like steak on your own uh now what if we reduced that to 16. well that's still 320 000 dollars to stake okay well let's reduce it by half again to eight eighth i mean you see where i'm going with this right that's still 160 thousand dollars where is the entry level for a solo staker well i mean there isn't like even you could even argue that ten thousand dollars is too much for for a solo staker because a lot of people can't

afford that so i think the prudent thing to do would be to not to base it off the dollar value of which we haven't in the past we based it off to kind of like network health and you know getting more validators onto the network spinning more validators up but i think tools like rocketpool help with that immensely because what they do is obviously they pull the funds together and they allow all the smaller stakers to come together and spin up more validators because you have to have that 328 to spin up a validator obviously but i don't think the dollars is the bottleneck here i think it's just ease of staking for people i think that there are people out there who don't want to stake with a centralized provider but they don't have 32 eth so now they're choosing rocketpool which is awesome so

taking this all into account and then if in a post kind of like withdrawal enabled world i think rockapool can get to like the 10 mark here as a as kind of like a part of the ethereum network we obviously don't want them to be like the 50 mark because then it's like a central point of failure but like around 10 to 20 would be really cool and it'd be even cooler if there was another decentralized staking pool service as well like i think rocketpool's the only one like lido or lido however you say it is currently centralized but they do want to decentralize out but you know we don't know what's going to happen there maybe they become a contender as well but i do think that rockapoor is is very very far ahead here and enabling a lot of other people to to stake their earth today without

having to wait so i'm super excited they finally reached one percent and will finally i should say reached one percent so fast in three months here i congrats to them on on that and yeah no sleep till 10 uh and i think they can get to that i really do think they can get to that maybe not anytime soon just because it is an uphill battle especially before withdrawals are enabled but uh i'm optimistic in the next maybe a couple of years we can get there we'll have to see we'll have to see what happens there and actually in just another update about rocker pool you can now uh get rocketpool's r8 staking token on l2 via argent so it's even more affordable to stake now all you have to do is trade your eighth for our eighth on um arjun which goes through zk sync and you'll start staking

uh right away which is super super awesome obviously now unfortunately there are some tax consequences here from going from 8th to re depending where you are i personally don't think it should be a taxable event because you're trading a like for like asset but that's not tax advice and that's just my personal belief you have to check with your accountant before you do it i actually recommend checking with your accountant before you did it just in case something can kind of happen there um but yeah if you don't care about any of that and if you're happy just kind of like arguing that it's a like for like trade well then yeah you can do this on argent uh using zk sync which is obviously really awesome all right so an update out of zig zag exchange here which is a order book decks that's been live on zk sync for a

while they're now live in an alpha version on girly's test net on starknet so the first balancer amm on starknet allows anyone to list pairs while creating pools with custom token combinations in a permissionless manner uh the new ui is coming soon but you can go test it at mammoth.zigzag.exchange so these guys are shipping pretty quickly actually they're obviously shipped and to zk sync and have a great exchange on there but now they're shipping a balance seems like a balancer style amm on on stock net that allows anyone to list pairs with while creating pools with custom token combinations in a permissionless manner so really cool to see this cool to see the stock net ecosystem growing as usual right like i've been talking about that for quite a while

and i've said how before how i think that the stock net ecosystem going is good for everyone even if they're not evm compatible because it's always good to see uh some kind of like fresh stuff coming to market rather than just like the same old evm stuff that we've seen which is i mean i've said before it's fine but uh i i love innovation i love seeing new things coming to to market and zigzag's just been killing it on the shipping front here so if you want to go test this out you can i'll link this in the youtube description for you to do so all right so a bit of an update from aztec network today so this update was first shared by josef here who said new sneak peek of the new zk.money ui built with aztec networks sdk it's private by default uh 10 to 30 times gas savings l1

liquidity social recovery uh and it's coming soon and then aztec quote tweeted this by saying you know you can deposit funds you can automatically earn with element uh lido element finance i should say lighter and other and more and send all withdrawal privately to any address now i've spoken about how aztec is building privacy preserving infrastructure before and a lot of the stuff that they're doing is really really cool around being able to kind of like tap into l1 liquidity from l2 and do it in a private way and obviously you can save on gas by doing this as well it's not going to be as cheap as something like an optimism or an arbitrary just because private transactions are inherently more expensive than the uh the non-private ones but i mean privacy i mean okay it'll get cheaper over time

for sure but i think at this stage like privacy it's more expensive because it's more computationally expensive to run these things or computationally intensive to run these things but i think like everything's just going to be private by default and it's going to be very cheap to do this as well but this is how we get there we build up these prototypes we build up these primitives we build out these this infrastructure and then we kind of like cut costs over time so very very cool um i guess a new ui and everything from zk.money here sorry from aztec here for zk.money it's not live yet but but it is coming soon so i'm i'm very much looking forward to that all right so north swap here from the optimism team had a really great uh twitter thread about optimistic robs versus zk rob so it's a relatively uh i

guess like short thread only 19 tweets but again this just speaks to what i've been saying i guess over the last few months about people going too much to like the zk roll up side and thinking that they're like the holy grail of ethereum scalability when in reality there's pros and cons to optimistic roll-ups and zk roll ups and they both fit into their own areas about what they're good at i've discussed it before norslop discusses it in his thread here and i think the general consensus from what i know is that and i've said this before but like optimistic roll-ups no they work today they're really awesome today their costs are coming down uh they're kind of like very easy to reason about and people can use them and all that good stuff

zk roll ups zk evm stuff blah blah blah you know all the stuff that i've spoken about before that is still a ways away yes some of it's live today some some of it's really cool like stark net but it is not you know it is not here today it is not ready today there are still a lot of things that um need to be done to build it out to improve it it's still quite expensive to actually be a i guess like a sequencer a verifier or a validator um in those networks and that's why they're going to be more difficult to decentralize than an optimistic roll-up and as i said they both have their pros and cons uh but long-term i think the general consensus is that zk rollups can be the the big winner but in saying that long term could be one year could be

five years like we don't know at this stage there's too much happening too much evolving i'd rather use what works today and optimistic rollups they aren't that expensive guys like and it's not even just about expensive it's also about kind of like the withdrawal delay well we already got around that you can use the br the um the other bridges or the kind of i guess cross chain exchanges like connexton hop to get in and out of these things yes there's a bit more risk added on top but the thing is is that like the you know the risk that you take on is is is is the convenience thing and to be honest at the end of the day on optimism and arbitrary they're getting more and more apps on there that you won't even really need to ever withdraw back to to l1 ethereum and eventually

you won't even be able to afford to withdraw back to l1 ethereum for small things like if you just want to go back there and do something small there'd be no point and it'd be too expensive um so really you just kind of like withdraw straight from the l2 to a centralized exchange as they add more bridges as well there uh but i think i don't think that's like a major drawback but uh definitely go give norswapp's thread a read here kind of articulates this a lot better than i can obviously because he works at optimism um he he knows his when it comes to this sort of stuff but i really just want to change the narrative i really want people to just stop thinking that it's just like optimistic role-ups obsolete let's ignore them we're not going to use them and let's just go all

in on zk roll ups i don't think that's a healthy approach i've never thought that's the healthy approach i think the healthier approach is to support whatever works whatever's good and then let the users and the developers decide where they want to uh spend their time on because at the end of the day it's really the developers that are building the the products that users are kind of like interacting with and wherever they want to deploy let them deploy to you know they're not being forced to deploy anywhere they're making the conscious choice to do that and the users are also making the conscious choice about what chain they want to go to what l2 they want to go to so let that happen that is the free market at work there all right final update here is just a couple of things from l2b so last week

they released two updates on how they calculate tvl that drastic drastically improves the metrics that they provide the prices now come from directly from coingecko's api and there is no more need to manually specify tokens for each project as they are automatically detected they also expanded the list of tokens that they track further increasing the accuracy of their reporting they still limit themselves to coin gecko's top 300 to prevent tvl manipulation using low market cap coins really cool i always love seeing things like this obviously we want to make sure that we're tracking these things accurately uh i have discussed before about how i think tvr is kind of a flawed metric at this point but it has its uses it can paint nice narratives but it can also show that things are increasing in usage especially if you

denominate the tvl in not usd but in kind of like eighth or some other token um i think that works as well but yeah cool to see this update from l2b here but i think that's going to be it 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