MyCrypto joins MetaMask, Cat Herders update and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #306 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony says hunter and today's the second of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it actually just a quick note before we get into it i know there were some quiet parts of yesterday's episode i think it has to do with my microphone randomly cutting out and i tried to kind of like diagnose the issue today and it also happened today i was recording the ether podcast with eric and it kept happening it was super annoying i had to end up recording off my laptop but i think maybe i fixed it i don't know and unless i'm looking at the obs uh kind of recording software here and looking at my microphone i'm not picking up me talking i'm not going to tell if i

cut out or not so if i cut out again apologies i'm going to try again to fix it tomorrow if it hasn't been fixed by now it just happens randomly so it's really hard for me to test if it's been fixed or not i think it has something to do with the power um my microphone was plugged into a usb hub it wasn't a power usb hub but that's how it wasn't like you know i guess like a week ago so i don't know what happened since then anyway i'm not going to bore you with the details there just in case it happens again you know why it's just my microphone cutting out without me realizing and then it comes back like a few seconds later so yeah apologies for that but anyway on to the news so well on to a tweet that i put

out today first so i put out this tweet today where i said bitcoin is talking about ethereum's monetary policy again the eighth btc ratio must be going up now i put this out because i don't know for some reason the bitcoin has decided today was the day they would talk about ethereum's monetary policy again and of course they don't have anything good to say about ethereum's monetary policy they always go on about how it can change it's not credibly neutral uh you know it's like the fiat system blah blah right we've all heard these talking points before now i saw this and then i went and looked at the eighth btc chart and it's been going up the last week right um it's kind of like bounced back very nicely from the lows and it seems to be on an uptrend and i just kind of look at

that i'm like okay well every time that happens the bitcoin has come out of the woodwork and there's a lot of cope about it right they're kind of like there's a lot of kind of anger about it there's a lot of people being like how could this happen you know to them to the bitcoin maximalist is a quote-unquote worthless [ __ ] coin right so how can this thing be out performing bitcoin and it's ironic because there's so many things that outperform bitcoin but just for the sake of what i'm talking about here would just stick with eth um and it was just funny how like i kind of saw that now this was the topic of today's newsletter as well today but my point of kind of kind of here is that there's a lot of tribes in crypto i mean we all know right there's a lot of

tribes in you know in and outside of crypto but like specifically in crypto because we're so close to it we can see all the tribes forming there's a bitcoin tribe there's an ethereum tribe there's a solana tribe there's an avalanche tribe there's a blah blah blah tribe right and there's so much kind of like hypocrisy between the tribes it's hilarious right the amount of people who have um kind of like [ __ ] all over ethereum for months now about the high gas fees for years now about the high gas fees are the same people who preach let's you know we're all in this together let's all kind of like work together let's not be maximalist blah blah and it's just kind of like well okay if you actually believe that then why are you always [ __ ] all over ethereum there's ways to be construct

constructive about ethereum you know constructive criticism about the high gas fees would be well okay the high gas fees on layer one are causing users to go elsewhere because the layer two ecosystem um isn't you know where we want it to be yet i mean to me it's pretty much where you know it's pretty much at a really good place right now but just generally that's like the constructive feedback the non-constructive feedback is ethe l1 or kind of ethereum is so expensive to use it's the [ __ ] chain it's only for whales i'm gonna go use this i don't care about decentralization who cares about that blah blah blah like that's not constructive that's basically just maximalism talking or tribalism talking travelers and maximalism pretty much the same thing um funny enough but you know this is obviously played out for you know since the dawn of humanity this

tribalism but i think in crypto it's uh it's very kind of like um pronounced because of two factors anonymity which you know anyone can spin up a twitter account you don't have to attach your real name or identity to it and you can go and kind of like spread all the [ __ ] you want and really there's no kind of recourse to that especially for an anonymous if your account gets banned you start another one do it all over again and second is the keyboard warrior phenomenon where people feel a lot more comfortable you know saying certain things via a keyboard than they would in real life like for example there's a lot of people who throw insults out like they're nothing online but in real life they'd be hard-pressed to do that it's a very very different um and to the to the same

person it's a very very different dynamic but um those are two kind of things they confound on each other and then you have all the stuff in crypto the economic incentive the religiousness the just general maximalism all that sort of stuff and it all comes together so i guess like my overall point is that you've got to be really careful of the fall into these things you know some people may argue that i fall into it and that i'm like an ethmaxy and that i i don't care about other chains cause i never talk about them but at the end of the day like i'm sorry i don't have the time to talk about other chains or to kind of like look into other chains and frankly most of them don't interest me like i've said it before and i'll say it again most of them take too many

shortcuts for my liking they're not doing what ethereum is trying to do i think ethereum is cool and special i try to keep up with the ethereum ecosystem it takes all my time already so i'm not going to go and spend time in other ecosystems does that make me a maximalist i don't think so does that make make me a bit tribal yeah sure i'm tribal everything over ethereum i get really upset when people are spreading crap about ethereum um you know even if there's an element of truth to it it depends how it's being spread like as i said with the gas phase it's a constructive way to give feedback and there's a non-constructive way and obviously a lot of people take the non-constructive way if they're trying to pump something else if you're trying to pump another chain up then you're going to basically make ethereum look

really bad and put it through in really bad light because it's better for the chain that you're trying to promote so from that perspective i mean it makes sense right it's just all incentives at the end of the day but it's also just really shitty to be around like you remember a few months ago guys like i put out that tweet where i said i can't get involved in the twitter fights anymore on the twitter debates because it's just i mean it's too much it takes a mental toll and it also is kind of a waste of time there's no nuanced debate that can be had on twitter ever like i mean i remember vitalik did an experiment where he basically i think there was a i think it was udi and vitalik did kind of like a back and forth and there was no replies allowed

so no one could kind of like [ __ ] post or reply on it they could quote tweet it and stuff like that but it actually ended up being pretty constructive as a debate but the thing is it requires the two people debating maybe it's more than two people to be constructive to begin with you can't have a a debate with someone who literally doesn't want to uh kind of like move their opinion or anything he's not open to changing their opinion on anything and he's not open to actually listening to the points you're bringing up and there's a lot of people out there like this especially you know in the bitcoin maximalist camp they are very very uh religious about bitcoin like the and and you know even if you say anything kind of positive about another chain it just it doesn't register with with

them um you know it doesn't register at all and they think that you're kind of like spinning [ __ ] they think you're a scammer all that all that sort of stuff and you know perfect example of this actually was recently where peter mccormack who's very uh obviously well known in the bitcoin community for years he's been trashing ethereum and specifically around things like not being able to run a full node uh the fact that an ethereum four node is not equivalent to a bitcoin full node you have to run an archive node which is wrong and he'd been saying this for many many years and all of us in the ethereum community had been correcting him and constantly correcting him over this and constantly trying to educate him on this and he didn't listen to it he didn't care what we had to say he never agreed

with us and then i think a couple months ago kobe crypto cobain you guys know who kobe is he said the exact same thing to peter in a twitter thread that we had been saying for years and peter said oh okay well that makes sense so it's just it's really insane to me because the reason why peter listened to kobe and he didn't listen to the you know me and the other ethereans is because peter perceives me and the other ethereums as ethereum maxis he perceives us as bad actors as people who you know uh kind of like occasionally trash talk bitcoin so we're not worth listening to and anything we say is not the truth whereas kobe is positioned himself as more of a neutral party he doesn't really belong to any kind of like one crypto tribe um you know it's kind of like funny how

he's managed to actually do that it's pretty impressive but i think that's why he kind of listened to him because it's like a neutral third party so if you're having a debate and it's just like two people this is why you always need a convenient mediator in a debate because it just makes it go i it go a lot smoother um but even then like if the mediator is [ __ ] and just lets the debate kind of like uh unravel and go go for itself it can just be a really poor debate and it's not limited to crypto again it happens everywhere i'm sure you know i i watched a lot of the u.s presidential debates um between trump and biden i don't know why i mean i watched the highlights i didn't watch the whole thing but it was just like it was i mean it was really bad like on

on both sides it was just horrible like they didn't listen to each other the the kind of like mediator or the moderator um you know i guess i did a decent job but still like it felt like they were letting them play out for ratings because those things get a lot of um a lot of ratings so there's a monetary incentive there it just becomes disastrous the way i like to debate is if i know the person is open-minded and i know that they're kind of like uh not going to just call me a maximalist i'm not just going to kind of like uh come at me aggressively then i'm happy to debate but there are certain people that i don't think is ever worth constructively debating or certain types of people and there's plenty of them in crypto so anyway i'm going to leave it that at

that for now just a little bit of a little bit of a kind of like rant there but you obviously you guys see this play out as much as i do and i think it's just always important to kind of like take a step back and kind of i guess take stock about it because the worst thing you can do is fall into this extreme tribalism extreme maximalism and um you know not explore new ideas not be open to new ideas and think that everything that you already know is the way it should be so so yeah anyway moving on to the biggest news of the last 24 hours is that my crypto is joining metamask so in other words metamask is acquiring the my crypto uh i guess like application and team now my crypto has a has a pretty long history i mean they spun out of my ether

wallet a while ago and you know my ether while it was actually the first ethereum wallet i used i believe um at least first on kind of like the desktop i think there was a random mobile wallet that i used in 2017 before i discovered that it was a custodial mobile wallet and i was like ah no i'm not going to use this and then i kind of like changed and i think my ether wallet was what i kind of um i kind of uh as my first one there and then my crypto spun out of it uh taylor monahan leading uh the the team there and i started using my crypto a lot uh and you know it's it's it it's always been reliable for me i mean i think everyone's either used my ether wallet or my my crypto at this point obviously

everyone's used metamask but this is kind of really cool the fact that then they're joining the metamask team metamask family here as a kind of like uh aqua hire again and you know some people kind of like brought up some concerns about this saying you know there's less competition in the wallet space now i don't think so there are so many wallets uh uh web 3 wild ethereum while it's out there right now that i don't think it's actually um a bad thing i think what's happening here is that metamask and my crypto get to join forces and become much better uh together than they were apart because there are problems obviously with with metamask a lot of problems with metamask and i think um i'm not sure how much of that stems from the minimized team itself versus consensus as an organization maybe holding them back for

whatever reason uh it could be either all because as you guys know menomask is part of consensus they're not their own company whereas my crypto was an independent organization was not part of anything else now they've been acquired by metamask and the team is there they may be able to to do some more stuff here they may be able to to do some better stuff to make metamask a much better wallet than what it is obviously it's missing a lot of features the metamask um desktop browser extension here there are other wallets out there on other chains that are actually uh you know other browser extension wallets that are really cool like um solanus phantom is actually pretty cool like i'll give him credit for that it's a pretty cool wallet uh and they said they were gonna support ethereum eventually but i doubt that's coming for a while i feel like um

it being the premier wallet on solana it's kind of like not in their best interest to support ethereum um anytime soon maybe they i mean maybe they'll prove me wrong but yeah i think um we should just work on vastly improving metamask especially because metamask and the my crypto crypto team are ethereum aligned whereas i believe the phantom team is more of a kind of like solano ecosystem play and and they're more aligned with solana which is totally fine but i i i don't want to give up on what we already have like metamask is is awesome for what it is it can be a lot better so i'm hoping that this acquisition makes metamask a much better a much better wallet i think it will um i think the my crypto app is still going to be around i think there was a question asked uh yeah so there's a

question asked from the left terrace here who said will the local my crypto wallet continue to be developed uh and then taylor answered yes it's all it's also being reward reworked uh so double yes and then the second question actually was pretty interesting my crypto uses an open source license but metamask is a proprietary one will your license change and as you guys will be aware metamask is behind a proprietary license where if you have more than ten thousand people using it i believe this is the license terms you have to pay metamask uh to use it um and then taylor's response to this question was there will be a fight to the death so i'll keep you i'll keep you posted dan finlay who is kind of like one of the founders of metamask or uh said we've got some plans to move the metamask license uh uh more

open again as well likely bsl which is a business license or something while we explore other options uh and then lift her says bsl obviously is not um is not open source i mean the class says here it kind of like is open source and i mean there's a bit of back and forth i'm not going to go through all that but it's not like the traditional kind of like super open source license that we all kind of uh uh know and love from from crypto generally but yeah i mean it seems like there's going to be some changes around with with metamask and i think that's kind of like welcome welcome changes there i really hope to see the um the wallet get better i mean i still use them you can see it in my browser here i still use it all the time

for a pass through for my kind of like hardware wallets for connecting mobile wallets and stuff like that um i love using it it's reliable like you know once they fix the hardware wallet integration um it hasn't kind of like stuffed up for me since then with the ledger um i you know the funny thing is i use my lattice as well but i have like both i use ledger and lettuce um but uh since they kind of like fixed the integration with ledger there it's just been a smooth experience so we're hoping to see uh some kind of like positive benefits come out of this aqua higher here so another ethereum cat herders update for january 2022 is out now you guys have will probably be familiar with this i've brought them up pretty much every month that they do these updates but the

ethereum cat herders isn't is a kind of like organization that does updates on core ethereum protocol development and research it covers basically everything if you want to know anything about ethereum core development you need to check out their their their kind of like updates here so this update is uh covers january it covers things like the kill and test net uh the girly shadow fork the consulting test net of course on shanghai eips uh insights into different aips and a bunch more uh you can go give this a ready to be in the blog post obviously it's a long i'm sorry to be in the youtube description obviously it's a long blog post here so i'm not going to go through everything but it has links to so much you could spend a good week kind of just like going through all this stuff like going

into the links going to the links that are that are from there and it it can be really fun as well so i mean i only recommend this to people who are interested in core development the technical stuff uh some of it may be boring to you if you're not interested in that sort of stuff but there's so much going on in ethereum called protocol land uh and this is corporate this isn't um so much layer two stuff this is like layer one core protocol work across both eth1 and eth2 or as they're known as execution layer and consensus layer stuff here so definitely go check this out it'll be linked in the blog post uh in the youtube description below so an update out of the ef ecosystem support program so this is the update of their latest grantee roundup from december 2021 featuring a l2 beat and

the gas ol gas minimization toolkit from the costa group so this is just kind of like two projects and update here on what they've been doing uh obviously you guys know l2 beats and all the all the good stuff that they're doing all the good work that they're doing i've been talking about them a lot for a few months now um so yeah this is just an update from the ef here i just wanted to highlight this it's a small update it will obviously be linked in the youtube description but you should definitely go check it out so some ens stats from january of this year that brantley put out so 67 000 new dot ether registrations on ethe l1 l2 is coming soon oh l2 coming soon for ens guys four million dollars in protocol revenue which all goes to the dow forty thousand

new ether counts with at least one ans name total is now 291 thousand 56 new integrations total of 479 uh 66 sorry 99 of open c volume for domain so obviously ens continues its monumental lead in the domain space there's a lot of people still registering their dot eth names i see a bunch of kind of like celebrities from um every now and again registering their.eth names and kind of wrapping them on twitter which is really really awesome but uh but yeah it's just cool to see that the growth is still there um and i'm curious to see what their l2 integration looks like as well like i would really love to be able to kind of like do ans stuff on l2 because the costs are going to going to be kind of like a bit lower than on our one obviously and

registering e s name depending on what the gas price is can actually be quite expensive so it makes sense for them to obviously do an ll-2 integration here so very nice to see this growth from ens uh definitely give brantley a follow by the way he tweets a lot about ans if you're interested in ens brantley's probably the top fellow here you know besides the official ens domains twitter account as as well so another bridge has been introduced uh the last 24 hours uh called a scale leak which is a cross-chain bridge that's cheaper by using snarks and more transparent about security security using optimistic relaying and fraud proof so you can test it out right now by sending an nft from polygon mainnet to this address here you can use opencs ui to do it now obviously this is highly

experimental and not anything that you should be doing with kind of like any real sorts of value here but this is really cool this is i think this is an independent developer i don't know how to say their name is it way j or something like that i don't know exactly how to sound how to say it but it's not a team or anything it's an independent developer kind of building this um but uh this is this is awesome so once uh he explains how it works here he or she once the bridge receives 16 nfts or after two days have elapsed it'll move them to arbitrary one you where you'll receive the wrapped nft the steps needed to relate them back to polygon will come in a separate post uh there's a bunch more details here uh but yeah i mean this is just really cool it's another

kind of like a bridge here specifically focused on nft stuff as well which i haven't really seen much of nft is actually much harder to bridge and you know i actually saw a question recently about why nfts are still on ethereum and why other entertainer systems haven't really taken off i think because it's so hard to move the nft ecosystem from one chain to another because of the fact that they're non-fungible fungible tokens are really easy to move across chain because they're just all the same thing right like i've talked about how the bridges give you ious and all that sort of stuff but it's much easier to move that kind of like liquidity across because of it being fungible whereas whether it's non-fungible moving a profile picture collection across to another chain like the whole collection across uh would not work right moving the nft uh one and ftl twitter takes

from that collection to another chain i mean you could wrap it or something like that but like it kind of does it kind of it makes it just really difficult for apps to integrate with it to track it for like open c to integrate with it stuff like that and then um you know you might be buying the wrapped version of it instead of the real version of it and you take on bridge risk and all these sorts of stuff so from there i think it's the fungibility or the non-fungibility aspect here that makes the nft system on ethereum so sticky but also i mean ethereum is like the culture hub really i mean even if it's on l1 it's still the culture hub and nfts are obviously very popular on ethereum l1 uh and you know there's projects on l2 spinning up as well so i

thought that was just something really interesting that i've that i've noticed recently as well so starkware put out some stats recently of their starknet alpha so there's 10 000 smart contracts with 60 000 account contracts and 70 000 contracts deployed on stock net alpha on the girly test net over the past 10 weeks here so just two and a half months that's really cool i mean that's a lot right 70 000 contracts i'll be curious to see what contracts they are obviously they're not all going to be contracts that are part of like full-blown applications they could be certain contracts for for different things i mean tokens are contracts as well so it could just be random tokens people kind of like testing things out seeing what's going on there but i uh yeah i thought this was really cool to see the traction that they're having here because as you

guys know starknet is not an evm compatible or even equivalent network stocknet is has that they have the transpiler the um the warp transpiler from the nethermine team that i've spoken about before but if you want to develop natively on starknet you need to use their own language or starkware's own language cairo with along with starkx it's you don't use solidity and evm so i like seeing traction and ecosystems that are non-evm to see just like how much demand there is for that the only other big non-avm ecosystem i can think of is is solana um which uses kind of like rust in their own kind of like solana virtual machine there and then there's also i think terra as well but terra is he's terra's a bit different they're

trying to do like a stablecoin ecosystem thing not just like a generalized platform um at least from that's from what i've seen i'm probably going to have some terra people yell at me for saying that maybe maybe i'm i'm behind there but um in terms of kind of like layer twos it really is just like starkware right now plus i think the polygon teams and zk sync has uh has some stuff that they're doing right now as well like that's not evm but i don't think much of that is out just yet in the same way stark net is so yeah cool to see this traction on stark net here so ed felton from off chain labs the team behind arbitram put out a a great thread today about all the innovations that arbitram has kind of come up with over the years now for those of you who

don't know arbitrary's actually been working or off chain labs has been working on layer 2 interactive fraud proof systems optimistic roll-up systems before they were called optimistic roll-ups since 2014 so this pre-dates ethereum mainnet because ethereum went live uh mid 2015. so they've been working on this for a while and there's a lot of innovations that have come out of it so you in this thread ed goes through all the innovations well not all of them but a lot of them especially around fraud proofs and you should give this thread a read by the way it's actually really good it's not a long thread but it's actually really good to see like just how much innovation has come out of the off chain labs team over the years and how long they've been at it for i mean 2014 is a long time ago now guys that's like seven

years ago or even more than that depending uh what of what part of 2014. but let's say it's about seven years now as a and as i said it pre-dates ethereum so that's basically all of ethereum's life and then some um i'm not sure i think this video here that he's linking to is um i i can't remember what date or month that was kind of like in in 2014 but it might even predate kind of like uh ethereum's ico which which happened in mid 2014 i believe so so yeah just a cool little thread here that i highly recommend you guys uh go and give a read so a new project announced itself today called man i don't even know how to pronounce this coipa cooper um i don't know maybe they've got how to pronounce it in the in the blog post here i don't

actually think so i'm just gonna say cooper for now so cuper finance describes itself as a new public protocol for indices and baskets aiming to make the benefits of portfolio diversification available to all so the protocol is is a set of rules governing how four key participants interact the index publishers the asset issuers the basket rebalances and the holders um and then they go on to kind of like describe what makes cooper unique here so just a quick kind of like mental model for you guys this is pretty similar to set protocol uh if you know if you're familiar with set protocol as you guys know i'm involved with set protocol in terms of like just creating like infrastructure to build these i guess asset management products on top of and sort of things like that so that's a

kind of mental model to have there but the way cooper is doing it they're kind of like going for governance minimization so you can see here the protocol is permissionless i mean set it permissionless as well but but after it's been deployed there is no upgradable contracts um there is minimum viable governance so governance can only tune three auction parameters and can raise its split of streaming fees up to a maximum of twenty percent uh and uses ethereum mainnet as a settlement layer here so that is i guess like a key difference there where it's very very governance minimized and they're going to be launching this as part of a a soft launch so the contracts have not been obviously tested yet or anything like that um and you know please evaluate the risks of being a participant before participating uh the contracts uh i think uh were audited

from with code for arena and a private review of a final mitigations blah blah so there's about much more info in here and if you want to join the team as well you can apply to get involved there but i think this is cool i mean like as much i mean it's kind of like i mean obviously i'm sort of i'm still an advisor to set protocol and i think they're doing a lot of amazing work but competition is always good competition breeds innovation it is not something that uh i i think i i would be kind of like disappointed if they were like set protocol was the only asset management protocol on on ethereum and they kind of like had a monopoly on it i like seeing competition because it pushes every team to be better and it pushes every team not to stagnate because if you have like

a monopoly you tend to stagnate we see this all the time in various industries that have monopolies they stagnate and they stagnate really really bad so from that perspective you definitely want uh one competition here but yeah i thought this was well this was interesting you can go check out more information at the site as well at quite beh dot dot finance um the app's already uh kind of kind of live here i think if i wanted to connect my wallet to it uh minimize it just popped up then uh you know you know you can propose a new index and things like that you can kind of like manage your basket into contract address it's still early right this is not something that's uh that's for the faint of heart it's obviously something that um yeah that you kind of like need to know uh your way around and

there's docks as well if you want to read these as well so there's an faq there's government stocks i mean there's kind of light right now but as i said this was just announced it is is very new so definitely go check this out if you're interested in in this it'll be linked in youtube description all right finally we have another announcement out of devconnect so devconnect is scheduled to take place in amsterdam between the 18th and 25th of april 2022 so in this post they've detailed all the events that are happening so far there is so much going on guys like holy crap i am getting so excited like i looked later to amsterdam economics d5 day uh staking gathering uh with easter i mean and it's all being hosted by different groups as well like eight

stakers hosting staking day l2 beat is hosting the layer two staff eth er economics is being hosted by the robust incentives group who work at the ethereum foundation and have done a lot of great work about eip1559 and other ethereum economic related things and i mean there's so many more events here so definitely recommend giving this a read i am so pumped for this i've started looking into like what the i guess go is for getting to amsterdam from australia and i saw on the on the list on the netherlands website that australia is still considered a high risk uh travel zone and so is like the united states and canada and you know a lot of the other popular places in the world i'm hoping that changes by the time april rolls around because if it doesn't really the only people who will be able

to go to this conference will be people that are based in europe so i'm hoping it changes i think it will i mean april's still you know a couple months away i guess more than a couple months away now until april 18th but uh this would be their that would be the only thing that bad me from going to this conference the the covered restrictions if the if there aren't those restrictions i'm definitely going to be there i i've never been to amsterdam i've heard only good things about it um i heard that it's actually similar to melbourne and it's multiculturalism and obviously i love melbourne you know i've lived here my whole life but uh very very excited for the events in general too i'm planning to go to so many of these uh you know as many of these as i can and i hope to meet a lot of you

there as well like i've saw a few of you have already said that you're going to be going as well it's shaping up to be an absolutely amazing conference so on that note i'm going to end it there so thank 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