Obol launches Athena, Scroll pre-alpha zkEVM & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #409 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where he cut the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cesano and says the 19th of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so the protocol guild is now being invested out 5 a 500 eighth contribution from nounsdale towards the pilot program so this eighth will vest for one year directly to 116 protocol contributors this is really cool i've talked about the protocol guild a lot on the refill before about how it's kind of this experiment in kind of raising eth from different treasuries throughout i guess like the ethereum ecosystem and redirecting the eth raised to uh i guess like protocol contributors core developers public goods on on ethereum so you can see here it's a collective of 110 ethereum core protocol contributors

but i think that's gone up to 116. so this is basically uh getting kind of like eth to the people that build the network essentially right or kind of like help to build the network so very very cool to to see that this has started kind of vesting out here and this joins i guess all the others that are vesting out uh you can kind of like see a screenshot here of the others that are vesting out so there's uni ldo ens uh and they're kind of like ethia from downs down some other vesting out to these protocol contributors and it's not a poultry sum it's worth a lot right like if you can kind of like look at the um the funds here across the different tokens you have 3.5 million dollars worth of uni 2.8 million dollars worth of lido 2.1 million dollars worth of ens

and about eight almost eight hundred thousand dollars worth of eth here so very very cool to see this very cool to see that the core protocol contributors are getting rewarded for their work like this has obviously been a kind of like issue within the ethereum ecosystem for a little while uh like how do we fund public goods sustainably and especially especially how to like we fund core developers because this is this common thing that gets brought up where it's like okay well people don't have incentive to work on the ethereum core protocol because they know that they're not going to get kind of like a large allocation of eth uh as kind of like a bonus or something like that because obviously the eighth market cap is much bigger there is no kind of like uh pre-sales or no private rounds to come and like like with a new

new layer one and when you join i mean you could join the ethereum foundation you probably have some eth getting kind of vested out to you there from a bonus structure or something like that i'm not entirely sure but generally it's just much harder to get your hands on some ethio or some kind of like money for for your work so it obviously would pay more to go work for another layer one and the you know this this does happen like people do go work for other layer ones because it's just kind of more worth their while money wise but i i think that you know just looking at that problem and thinking that it's not you know not something that should be solved is obviously a not the right way to go about it so that's where things like bitcoin came in just public goods in general came into

the picture and obviously the protocol guild now has come in and basically said well no we need to make sure that we can fund the kind of like future of ethereum called protocol development and and and just anyone who contributes to the core protocol and just anyone who contributes to public goods on ethereum more generally and they they should be able should be rewarded for the value that they're driving to the network because when you really think about it you know we all talk about how big of a catalyst the merge is for the price of eath well think about all the people that are working on the merge working to make it a reality and i would wager that like a decent amount of them have uh very little eth because they just came in much later they weren't able to purchase much because maybe they didn't have much

money to begin with and uh they're contributing in a really really positive way but they aren't really seeing the i guess like rewards for that contribution just because there is no kind of like central entity besides maybe the ethereum foundation that has the eth to kind of like uh a spare here and atheism foundation does a lot don't get me wrong they give a lot of kind of like money away through grants programs and things like that um but in terms of getting it to core protocol developers or protocol contributors in general the protocol guild kind of stepped up and said you know let's do this kind of pilot program let's see how it goes and let's see if we can continue because at the end of the day getting a small percentage of the treasuries on ethereum is a really great way to go about it

because these treasuries and these tokens and these products really live or die on ethereum based on all the work that's been done up until that point the work that's been done in the future to improve the protocol and to kind of like make sure the protocol doesn't just basically fall over um through all the core development work that's been done so very cool to see this i'm glad that the contributors are getting rewarded just as they should all right so an announcement out of oba labs today so they have announced the onboarding to their first public test net for at-home validators and known as athena so the athena test net is kind of like now live and if you're an at-home validator and you want to contribute um or participate in this public testing that you can there's a whole thread about this and a blog post of course

so uh for just a quick recap of what obel network is trying to do they're trying to enable uh something called distributed validator technology so what they're building out right now is a distributed validator middleware client uh and kind of have been running devnets and obviously now a test net for this so basically what dvt or distributor distributed validator technology allows everyone to do is it allows one ethereum validator to run across multiple machines in theory all these machines could be controlled by a single entity however we aspire to use dvt amongst groups where a combination of operators collaborate to run ethereum validators the oval network aims to foster trust minimize staking in groups to enable people to create test run and coordinate distributed validators with that in mind this and the future test network required groups

of humans to collaborate together to run nodes and then it kind of goes through the different phases of how this is all going to work which you can check out i'll link it in youtube description below now this goes to what i was saying yesterday about how we def obviously need more competition and more kind of like players in the ethereum staking ecosystem and and just ways for people to stake without that 32 week requirements uh and opal is one of the things that will be able to kind of like enable that enable people to stay in groups you know this technology can be used by uh kind of like other services such as uh rocker pool and lido and things like that as well which is very very cool kind of like stacks on top of it as it is a middleware client so you can kind of run

there you know another example of a middleware client that basically runs on anything or middleware protocol that runs on anything is chain link right it's like an oracle service um not it's not just an oracle service but obviously most of the users is kind of like in the oracles today and that sits kind of like in the middle and just powers so much of of of d5 out there so that's a good way to think about it but yeah for those of you who've been paying attention to this project you should definitely check out this thread and maybe even get involved with the public test net if you're an at-home validator to kind of uh you know help them along with their testing here there's the thread and the blog post obviously which i'll be linking in the youtube description below for you to check out

all right an announcement or a big announcement out of scroll today and i'll read out the announcement first then i want to give some more thoughts here but basically the announcement reads after over a year of building our zk evm based zk roll up in close collaboration with the privacy scaling group at the ethereum foundation we are releasing the pre-alpha version of scroll for external testers and this thread goes through kind of like what you'll be able to do with this um but before i dive into the details here i just want to kind of like note the scaling walls are getting more and more heated by the day especially when it comes to zkevm stuff i've talked about zkvm at length in a recent refill so i won't rehash what i said there but guys like zkvm definitely seems like a holy grail thing and it seems like there's so

many teams working on it now and so many teams wanting to get a production ready zka vm out that we're going to get it much sooner than we otherwise would have which is obviously really really bullish i'm super excited for that but in terms of scrolls implementation here uh they're you know they're trying to invite as many testers as possible while they drive towards kind of like their public release you can sign up if you want to be an early tester at signup.scroll.io and you know what is it what is included in this pre-alpha alpha test net well they continue by saying this initial release will be run on a private poa fork of ethereum the testnet l1 operated by scroll on top of this private chain we will run a test net scroll l2 supporting the following features users will be able to play with a few key demo

apps such as a uni swap fork with a familiar web interface such as metamask very very cool our users will be able to view the state of the scroll test net via block explorers obviously awesome to have that from the get go scroll will run a node that supports unlimited read operations eg getting the state of accounts and user-initiated transactions involving interactions with the pre-deployed demo apps eg transfers at esa 20 tokens or swaps of tokens number four rollers will generate and aggregate validity proofs for part of the zkavm circuits to ensure a stable release in the next test net phase we'll be ramping up this set of zk evm circuits five bridging assets between these testnet l1 and l2s will be enabled to a smart contract bridge though arbitrary message passing will not be supported in this release scrolls

pre-alpha test net will be the first chance for early users and developers to interact with our infrastructure and experience dap workflows on a scroll this is a pretty big release for a pre-alpha test net i would say like you usually don't see things like block explorers being released with something that is considered pre-alpha like pre pre-alpha is pretty funny because it i mean obviously it goes like you know alpha beta and then kind of uh kind of like a main net production a pre-alpha means this is kind of like the you know very still very very early stages here but if this is what early stages looks like for squall i'm excited to see what their you know alpha and beta looks like because they have a lot of features here from the get-go that i haven't seen from other pre-alpha or even alpha deployments of of similar similar kind

of like technologies here so i'm very very excited for this i definitely kind of like signed up i want to get my hands on this when i can um but yeah as i was saying like the zkvm stuff i i definitely expect to see much more movement here especially like i mean i think tomorrow yeah tomorrow at about 1 p.m paris time is polygon's announcement so i'm curious to see what what kind of like comes out of that but it's heating up very very quickly guys like i think that by the end of this year we could possibly see a zka vm ready for you know maybe maybe it's in alpha or beta still but we could see a zk vm deployed to main net ethereum where developers can actually start building on top of it and users can basically use it maybe in a limited

fashion but still like that would be huge like to give some context people didn't expect a full-blown zkvm to actually be live until maybe 2023 maybe more likely 2024 if we can get it by the end of 2022 that is a huge leap in kind of like scalability here which i think is just absolutely awesome right i think it's a an awesome achievement if we can get that done and it speaks to the level of kind of i guess builders we have building layer technologies they really are some of the best builders in this ecosystem anyway i'm going to leave it at that for now but definitely check this out if you haven't yet you can go to signup.scroll.io to sign up for the pre-alpha test net all right so spruce put out an update today saying eip 4361 uh signing with

ethereum has now moved from draft to review as an erp this is a huge step in moving signing with ethereum ford as a widely adopted standard now uh with the eip kind of like standards here these do need to kind of like go into a hard fork so there's two different stand i mean there's two different ways to kind of like get something adopted on kind of like the standard side or kind of like the i guess like protocol side of things there's the ercs which is kind of like an ethereum request for comments which i mean you're all familiar with the rc20 and the ercs for nfts they don't require hard forks to be implemented into the network they're basically just a standard that people can follow when developing like a token for example uh and anyone can come up with their own standards so it doesn't

require a hard fork but an eip does like an eip requires a kind of like inclusion in a hard fork with you know that'll obviously be in a future hard fork and it's inclusion in a hard fork depends on how much utility it's actually going to add to the network and how much overhead it's going to add to i guess like core developers to build it out and you know there are always eips that just don't make it in because it's just too much work to be done it just keeps getting pushed back because there's just more interesting stuff and more pressing stuff that needs to be included uh but yeah aip kind of 4361 the signing with ethereum eip i think is one that is definitely very very important and you can kind of go read the whole specification here it does get quite

technical but you can read it for yourself and and kind of like how how it would improve things um but yeah we'll see when this gets included i mean you guys know that there's going to be a hard fork after the merge called shanghai we don't know what's going to be included with shanghai yet i would bet that withdrawals for the beacon chain are definitely going to be in that hard fork but it remains to be seen if the core developers decide that they want to do withdrawals in its own standalone hard fork and then all the other kind of like erps that want to go into the network or at least a lot of them such as proto dank sharding to be in another hard fork shortly after that and maybe three months after that or something like that i can see that happening because stuffing everything

into the same hard fork or network upgrade i mean it does bo this kind of like put more complexity into one thing which means that we could be increasing the attack service and the security concerns so it may be maybe worth just kind of like enabling withdrawals for the beacon chain four staked eighth right four rewards uh and its own standalone fork and then three ish months later we do the kind of like proto dank sharding and we do maybe erp you know signing with ethereum here and a bunch of others out there that have been trying to get into the network but it's always hard to know exactly where it's going to go it just it really does depend on resources and kind of like complexity at the end of the day like core developers have to build out this stuff they have to test

it they have to make sure it's all secure and the more of these things you stuff into one network upgrade the more chance there is for something to go wrong uh you know post that upgrade so you definitely want to keep the complexity down to a minimum especially for a theorem for a network like ethereum where it's huge right has so many people using it it's not like we can move fast anymore and obviously we don't move fast within the ethereum layer one ecosystem and that's why you know getting eips into the network is very very difficult takes forever i mean erp-1559 the most popular erp erp in ethereum's history which also you know fundamentally changed the way ethereum's free market worked but that still took like two and a half years from an initial draft or initial specification to going into the the network on mainnet

so that should give you a bit of context around how long these things can take and why you know people shouldn't really rely on these things to happen in a speedy manner now hopefully we can kind of like speed that up as time goes on hopefully it doesn't take that long because i think during that period it was obviously the bear market there was kind of like less people working on stuff but as the ethereum network grows it just naturally becomes a slower process to get upgrades in because the core developers and researchers want to be able to take a more measured approach to things make sure that they're you know they're not putting any major bugs into the network or they're not adding any unnecessary complexity and there are definitely like a higher there is a hierarchy of things at the end of the

day that were going in like there are things that definitely need to go in such as proto dang sharding like we need scale for layer twos obviously we need to kind of like we need sharding like it's simple as that uh it's definitely overdue at this stage so that is the and beacon chain withdrawals is pretty much the top priority post merge as well so there are things that take priority here for obvious reasons but then you know depending on kind of like how much improvement it can bring how much people kind of like want it and how much overall i guess complexity adds to the network that also plays into things so we'll see how that goes but yeah good to see this moving from the kind of like draft to review stage now for those of you who don't know what the eip kind of like stage

looks like uh there are a bunch of stages it has to go through like the whole governance process all the kind of like different erp uh stages on on github and things like that like it's a whole thing like you should go to ethereum.org i'm pretty sure they have a guide to this i can't remember all the stages of the top my head but i'm pretty sure they have like an explanation of how this all works it's but it's not like someone can propose an eip and then they say okay i want it in this hard flock and it just happens no like that that's not the process at all like it's it's it's a very long ideas uh kind of like prose process that is um is definitely something that is not for the faint of heart that's for sure but yeah you can go to ethereum.org and i think

they've got a section on that there all right so a couple of synthetic updates from the weekend so this one is a thread what is synthetics v3 and why is it important let's get into it and then they start by off by saying synthetics v3 aims to accomplish what synthetic set out to do many years ago transforming the protocol into a permissionless derivatives platform how will synthetics get to v3 a thread so you can check out this thread i won't go through everything basically this is really really great there's a lot of reading here for you guys to do but if you're a bullish on synthetics like i am definitely worth checking out here as i've said before on the refill i think synthetics is finally able being you know been able over the last few months or last six months at least to realize

their vision uh a lot more because of the fact that they're able to scale by optimism they're getting a lot more usage i'm sure you've all seen it you know they're generating a lot of fear of venue which is obviously a really really great sign to see and they have a strong community backing them as well and a long-term community like these people that have been part of the synthetic community have stuck around for a long time and whenever i see that i get more bullish on a project now i don't own any snx tokens currently and this is obviously not me trying to to pump any bags or anything like that but there are so many shitty projects in crypto so many so much short-term value extraction happening and i feel like when i see a project that has been around for a long time that has a really

dedicated community that is still building uh that is kind of like building products that people actually want to use i feel like it's worth kind of highlighting those products rather than just skimming over and being like oh i don't want to say anything because i don't want to be pumping anything up so it's got nothing to do with the snx token so to do with the fact that we need to be more i guess like conscious of these builders and kind of praise them for it like the funniest thing the grand irony is that the the kind of like terror ecosystem and dokuan and terraform labs and whatever they got all this praise all this praise right and the people kind of and there were a lot of people who got a lot of from that community such as the maker community uh you know the

terror community said we're going to kill die you know usc is going to overtake it blah blah blah and then terror collapses and that's obviously great of vindication for these other teams that were kind of like copying from the the luna army or whatever they were called the lunatics but the problem is is that we shouldn't just wait for something to collapse we have something to die we should still constantly be kind of like telling these people hey like what you're building is really really cool uh and kind of like supporting them and being part of their communities because at the end of the day these people are people guys like devs and builders they're people and they have to put up with a lot of like it's not easy building in d5 building in crypto building just in you know in ethereum generally it is actually quite hard it

takes a lot of grit to do it takes a lot of grit to stick to the same thing as well like kane from synthetics has copped a bit of before i remember him and suzu going at it which is hilarious now because synthetics got um kane got the last laugh yeah but i remember kane copping a bit of about kind of like you know selling some snx tokens buying some some sydney side property and all these sorts of other stuff whatever i have no opinion on that but the thing is is that kane is still building guys like he's still building he's still down in the trenches he's still part of the synthetics ecosystem and he's also building a bunch of other things as well it's not like he's just rode off into the sunset with the money he made and decided to kind of like exit

this ecosystem that's not what he did at all so the fact that he's still there still building after so so long is obviously a very positive sign as well i would think but he's not the only one obviously he has a team that kind of like works with him there's a lot of people that have worked on synthetics over the years as well and there is that community there too so i'm super excited for synthetics v3 and kind of like the path towards getting there i know and i've also been excited to see them kind of gain some actual traction on optimism over the last six months and it seems to be sustainable traction because we know that uh you know these layer twos are obviously where we're gonna scale they get better with time they're nowhere near what they can kind of scale to so that's obviously very exciting

it's not going to be a problem or i guess scale isn't going to be a problem for synthetics going forward so that's the first update there there's also a second update here that the susd bridge is now live so the most used stable coin on optimism just got a lot better users can now move susd to and from optimism to the ethereum net both directions have been switched on so very cool to see this some more interoperability between ethereum mainnet and optimism for the susd token which i haven't verified this but if what synthetics is saying is true that s usd is the most used stablecoin on optimism that is a pretty good or i guess like pretty um impressive achievement there because that means it would be more used than die and usdt and usdc which are definitely you know

much more used on mainnet than susd but i think that's just the function of the fact that synthetics on the ethereum mainnet suffered a lot because of the scaling issues but now on optimism they are succeeding a lot more so i'd love to see that uh but you can go check out both of these updates i'll link them in the youtube description below alright so a new release here from the gnosis guild so they've released something called blogs for daos which is called tabula so it's born out of an impromptu gnosis guild hackathon so dows and multisigs in any ethereum based account can now own publications together that's really cool i think that is something that doesn't exist within the kind of i guess like web 3 ecosystem right now so i guess the the tl dr here is that you can imagine a dow being the

kind of like top level owner of a publication so for example you could assign permissions to people within the dow and they could kind of like own this entire publication uh such as like a i mean you can't do this on medium or mirror or kind of like substance or any of those platforms but you can imagine those same platforms built on something like tabula here or taboola i think that i think you say it as tabula here that you can basically connect your wallet to just sign in with ethereum and if you're part of the dow you'll be able to kind of i guess like um you know be the top level account of that publication so that's very very cool this is definitely web 3 stuff it's not default or anything like that and this is the sort of stuff that i want to see

more of because it kind of i guess uses the existing i guess like what's the word i'm looking for existing infrastructure primitives functionality within crypto within ethereum and takes it to the next level and and kind of i guess like introduces a feature set that hasn't been available is not available uh uh at this point in time so this is very cool and the fact that it came out of a impromptu little nurse's guild hackathon here is also very very cool so you can read this thread for more details on this and check out the website i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so i mentioned i think last week on the refill that doonatalytics now supports arbitrum data so they put out a thread uh yesterday showcasing the top 10 arbitrary dashboards so far so you can kind of like scroll through

these yourself to check out all of them but just to give you i guess like a taste of what there is there's an arbitrary overview dashboard from super uh what's this from spring zang here uh there's an ave dashboard from six degree lab gmx dashboard uh odyssey dashboard and i mean just ten dashboards right like as i said at the start so you can check them all out but i do want to kind of like just showcase the albertum overview here because obviously that is going to give us a top level overview of what arbitrary looks like you can see total transactions total accounts total contracts you know transaction count monthly obviously they had the odyssey events so that kind of like spiked up there but they had to pause that so it's come down and you can see here uh transactions weekly showcase the

same thing active users active users weekly monthly you know all the kind of stats here there's so many stats i'm not going to read them all out you can go check that check it out i'll link it in the description but very very cool to see this i love keeping track of these metrics guys like i'm always looking at metrics i used to actually another i think about it i think i stopped making these videos quite a while ago now but there was a daily grace series that i did called the daily grade data pump where i looked at all these metrics and i basically went through them all but the reason why i stopped that series was the fact that there was just too much data to go through i didn't feel like i could adequately cover it cover all of it and adequately kind of like pull the alpha

out of it given the fact that there's just so much kind of like data out there now there is one tool that i see a lot of people talking about a lot of people using called danson um in addition to doing analytics which you know i mean there's nancy do analytics there's the block has the data platform there's coin metrics there's um there's uh glass node there's so many of these platforms i just can't keep up with it just just too many and too many dashboards on these platforms so i recommend just for yourselves going through these sorts of things you can just go to dunes website or nansen or anything like that and go through the data yourself and kind of see what you actually want to pay attention to rather than someone reading it to you um i believe there might be some youtube

youtubers out there that look at this kind of like data and they try to get like trading insights from it i don't actually think you can get trading insights from a lot of that data i think for me i just look at it as a curiosity thing to say okay how is this thing growing you know is it actually being sustainable you know how many users has it got how many transactions you know what's the fees like sort of those sorts of things i'm not looking at these sorts of stuff and being like okay well i can see this is growing so i'm going to make a bet here you know an investment bet you could for sure use it for that but my investment bets usually are not based on these sorts of things they're based on on i mean they are and they aren't

like i definitely look at protocol usage and stuff like that obviously because that that kind of is how you see product market fit but i've explained before how there is a very kind of like egregious thing that happens in crypto where something can look like it has product market fit for a very long time it's you know during a bull market and then it just die off and it becomes like a really bad investment like you maybe you're invested in it thinking this is awesome this growth's going to continue it's all going to be well and good and then it just doesn't and the protocol dies and you've just kind of like you know lost money on your investment so i look at obviously the on-chain stuff obviously the protocol metrics and stuff like that but i also look at a bunch of other things

and the same thing i look at every investment you know team what's a team like what's the actual product like okay the product is popular now but is it sustainable right and what's the team like can they actually build this thing you know why are they kind of like builders that will build through a brutal bear market like stuff like that like i'm not going to go through all the things i look at but it's a lot more than just unchained stuff you can't rely on entrance stuff for everything and especially for the more established things like there was a lot of people going on about like bitcoin on chain metrics back when bitcoin was at like 30 40 50k and then it kind of like came down from there very very hard and it's just funny how like you know people they kind of capitulated on that and they're

like oh okay well you know now the on-chain data is kind of like saying that it's a screaming by here and and but i was like okay well you were saying was a screaming by at this level too like you just it's it's it's impossible to just look at on chain data and kind of like get an actual investing insight from it that is is good for the long term i think you have to take everything holistically if it was that easy if you could just look at the on-chain data and get a long-term investment out of it then everyone would do it and then the alpha would funny enough go away if everyone was doing it right but i anyway i'm going to leave it at that you can check out these dashboards i'll link them in the description below and speaking of arbitrary the

transactionstreet.com website here now has arbitrary live so you can basically visualize what the arbitrary transactions are where they're coming from kind of like what gas they're paying the transactions a second that's happening on the network all that good stuff by going to txstreet.com v slash sorry so you can kind of like launch it here i mean you probably see it on my screen yeah you can see kind of like on the uh on the left hand side here kind of like what's happening i think this uh this is kind of like ethereum there and that's main arbitram on the right hand side so if you click up here you can see the different networks and and toggle the views behind it so if i just want to see kind of like the arbitrary street i can you can kind of like see all the people

are queuing up and things like that uh on arbitrary side on the left and then the ethereum side on the right so this is a cool way to visualize transactions i'm sure some of you have seen this before um but definitely go check it out if you haven't yet i'll link in the description below all right finally here we have a major announcement out of lydo today they are launching st on layer two so lighter stickers will soon be able to use their stiff assets in d5 on layer two um they seem to be going to support like every layer two network uh i think they're going to be basically like every layer to network you see maybe listed on l2b is what they want to support and any others in the future that come online they're going to want to support those as well so very

cool to see this obviously this is something that is going to be able to expand the stake ethereum staking ecosystem through lido and be able to expand kind of like the users that will be able to access this sort of stuff obviously uh trying to kind of like get exposure to st on mainnet has been uh cumbersome because it's been expensive but with this improvement coming you'll be able to access it on any number of layer twos on on a theorem which is very very cool to see so you can read their blog post for more details about this uh and they're i think they've got a little thread here as well if you want to and they're also going to be starting a new kind of like series called l2's days which uh which i think like when i say it out loud i get it like l2 tuesday is

right um but el tuesday's like just seeing it written out here is just a weird thing to me until i actually said it out loud i'm like why is it called l tuesdays and then i'm like oh wait l2 tuesdays l tuesdays okay i get it now like but just reading like it without kind of like saying it out loud i was kind of like confused by it but anyway that's a pointless thing i don't even know why i was talking about that but anyway they got this new series called el tuesdays happening every tuesday where they talk to different like layer 2 teams in the um ethereum ecosystem so be sure to kind of like get set a reminder for those it's going to be happening on twitter spaces you can go check that out i'll link it in youtube description but on that note i'm going

to stop rambling that's it for today 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 newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone