Optimism Series B, Client diversity chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #338 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the other great refuel work up the latest news the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 18th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i saw this kind of like tweet from time magazine today with vitalik on the cover so vitalik has been featured in the latest edition of time magazine and the title on the front of uh i guess the cover here is the prince of crypto has concerns ethereum creator vitalik buterin fights to fix the world he created now the piece is actually quite good um i i've read the piece just before so it's kind of like fresh in my mind so there's a few things i wanted to talk about here so i guess what vitalik was mainly i guess uh concerned about what he has concerns about is the technology that

we're all kind of like using crypto blockchain technology all that sort of stuff being used for things that's not necessarily bad or evil but just don't kind of like push the world forward in a really you know a grand and scalable way and these are things that i've talked about before things like the ponzis the money games the you know the obscene wealth people make from these sorts of things instead of you know focusing on the actual world-changing applications and not just things like defy but things kind of like on chain identity new ways of kind of like coordinating new governance systems all that sort of stuff obviously that stuff you know is less interesting than people to most people than making money but i think from my reading vitalik's concerns are that

we have this amazing technology that can do all this sort of sort of stuff but we're really just focusing on using it to make money at you know or to kind of like come up with new ways to make uh to make money new ways to make different ponzis and money games and stuff like that and this can be used for good as well like you guys know about the concept of regenerative finance basically using these speculative degen things for good and you know kind of bringing that funding to to uh you know public goods funding and stuff like that bringing that money there um and you know we can also use those sorts of things to to to do things like um uh go put the money towards humanitarian efforts obviously uh ethereum and crypto in general had a really great uh i had a

really great um initiative to kind of donate to the ukrainian kind of war effort and i guess like the defense effort there where they i believe it was raised over 100 million dollars so obviously that a lot of that is speculative profits um that people have made and they're just kind of like uh donating that there so it can be used for good but i think right now you know the vast majority of this uh ecosystem is is being used to just kind of like make money right whether it's just participating in outright scams whether it's kind of like participating in ponzi or money games whether it's just speculating on tokens which is fine like i mean as i said i'm not saying this is a bad thing but i think vitalik's concerns are that you know we're wasting the technology that we have and i you know i share those

concerns i've written about this a lot in the newsletter i've talked about it a lot on the refuel you know and it's i mean it's easy for for some for people like vitalik and i to say these sorts of things i think vitalik's been quite consistent with his views but it's easy for people to already have the money to say these sorts of things and i totally understand that like i'm talking about this from a from a privileged position but i'm not saying that making money is bad or wanting to make money is bad or you know maybe your only goal in this ecosystem is to make money i'm not saying it's a bad thing but i think that we should you know find ways to essentially incentivize the i guess creation of tools that actually go beyond just making money because at the end of the

day guys like making money and you know making lots of money is just one small part of of life there are so many other things going on in life i mean you know it doesn't matter how much money you have if you're living under a kind of like oppressive regime and even if you're kind of like a millionaire if you're not an oligarch you know one of the kind of like top people in the inner circle you are still kind of like at the whims of of a shitty government right or you know i mean yes more money can buy you better health care uh but um but at the end of the day right there are certain things that money isn't going to be able to cure right no matter how much you throw at it uh but those are kind of i guess like esoteric

examples but an example that maybe relates to crypto more is it doesn't matter how much money you have if you're not putting you know if if kind of like we're building uh if we're not building better you know coordination mechanisms better kind of like systems that allow for uh the world to just kind of like get better over time to help more people to basically bring everyone up together not just the kind of like singular people making money in crypto then it's it's definitely a waste but i highly recommend reading the kind of like entire post here in on time i think it might be paywall for some people and it doesn't seem to be paywalled for me they they are they are bugging me to subscribe but i mean i don't really read time magazine but this uh this story was definitely a really good one you know it pills behind

the curtain a bit of italics life as well so if you're interested in that definitely go check this out but i think you know i could talk forever about these sorts of things that vitalik spoke about in here but um i i don't want to fill up to you know the whole episode today with just that uh but definitely give this a read and if you want to discuss this further you can in the discord channel that's a pretty good place to discuss it so yeah just ping me on there we can talk about it further there all right so some client diversity i guess metrics and movements happening here so one thing from freddy who is the ethereum ecosystem lead at block damon uh basically in a tweet he said regarding ethereum client diversity i created some financial scenario modeling of risks benefits obviously with

simplifications and only looking at large client level failures but wanted to make the unlikely but possible disasters explicit so you can kind of see here the kind of i guess like financial modeling that freddie has done now as i've just as i've discussed before depending on what client you run in the event of a kind of an attack or a bug if you're running a super majority client you get punished a lot more than running a minority client in terms of kind of like the amount of eight that you stand to lose due to slashing or something else uh or kind of like something similar to that but in this kind of i guess uh spreadsheet freddie goes over the different scenarios of of what can happen and you know the penalties that can happen here so i thought this is really cool um i think

you know there's there are definitely assumptions made here and kind of uh i i guess it's not going to be like 100 totally accurate but it's good that we start kind of like thinking about these sorts of things and we start modeling them out because i mean i've been harping on about client diversity for a while but i think that client diversity goes beyond just like the attack scenario that i was kind of like um well not just the attack scenario but like the scenarios that i spoke about in the in the past and it really does uh i guess like it doesn't pay to run the super majority client in the event of one of these attacks on one of these bugs so definitely uh just another kind of like thing to keep in mind here but uh yeah go check out this spreadsheet from freddy i'll link it in

youtube description and the second thing i got to do with client diversity is this new website called rated dot network i haven't seen this before i don't know if it's totally new but essentially what it does is it basically ranks uh the different kind of i guess uh staking services and pools and things like that and their client uh distribution what that kind of looks like on the the beacon chain here so you can see here that uh essentially in uh i believe in pink or in i guess like a that's a hot pink there is a is prism in in in dark blue or i guess like a purple his lighthouse in a aqua or turquoise is teku and then nimbus is in the orange here so obviously a lot of a lot of hot pink uh there right a lot of uh staking service

providers using uh prism and using majority prism uh i've showed this before as part of another website where they broke down kind of like this distribution here of clients but i mean coinbase is still over 80 prism that's pretty bad krakens have a 90 prism you know that's that's terrible uh bitfinex and hobby are at 95 percent i mean ankar is 97 like this is pretty bad guys and not to focus on the bad i mean you know there are some good things here like f2 paul was using 100 lighthouse steak fish is using 96 percent lighthouse um i mean that's better because lighthouse isn't the majority client but really all these pools and service providers they shouldn't be using um

a kind of like any one client as like a majority for them i i think the ideal distribution is maybe something like what rockable has where they have like uh you know prism at ten percent here light asset forty four percent take away thirty seven percent and nimbus at nine percent i would prefer to see that all 25 25 25 25 obviously we're probably not going to ever get to that but i mean i've just i've kind of like talked about how rocketpool was killing it in the client diversity game before um and they really are compared to their peers but uh you know it's it's it's not enough to have kind of like you know 100 teku or 100 lighthouse or whatever just because it's not the super majority you're better off at least having kind of like a 50 50 split or you know 30 30

20 20. uh that's what i would like to see but i mean this is me just kind of like dreaming of an ideal world i honestly don't think we're going to get to that world i think that you know as long as we have no one client as part of these uh service providers kind of like having more than a i mean at a kind of like worst more than a 60 share ideally less than a 50 share i think we're in a pretty good place but you know that's going to take time you know it's going to take time to for the exchanges like coinbase and kraken to get off prison um you know they may not even get off prison they may just kind of like stop on spinning up new prism clients and just spin up other clients and people stake with them so it's

probably going to take a bit uh you know a lot longer there but still i think it's getting better i think client diversity is getting better slowly over time but it's going to be a bit of an uphill battle and actually there's there's more than one page here there's two pages here and you can see a breakdown of other other kind of um exchange service providers here as well but definitely go check out this website uh it'll be linked in the youtube description below all right so a massive announcement out of optimism today they have raised another funding round here a series b at a 150 million dollar raise at a 1 billion oh sorry 1.6 billion dollar valuation now i'll disclose you how i participated in this round as an angel investor as i've said to you guys if i get the opportunity to participate in a

round of a ethereum scalability solution i am definitely participating like there's it's a no-brainer to me just i want to support these teams i want to be on board with them i want to i want to see you know help them in any way that i can because at the end of the day this is ethereum's future so um you know in this blog post they kind of like announce the raise and they they say what they're going to be essentially putting the money towards you know all the same stuff that they've been kind of like doing with um you know onboarding more people hiring more people funding more kind of like scalability research things like that and the valuation was actually 1.65 billion sorry um and you know raised 150 million here uh and i've highlighted how they've been you know been growing the

team recently and all the kind of like contributions that they've made to ethereum core development as well so it's just going to be more of the same i think from optimism which is totally fine and good like more of the same is really good because they've been doing an excellent work for for a while now but this is just awesome to see i mean it's awesome to see not only ethereum scalability teams getting you know getting the funding but also uh getting it so so quickly as well because i i can imagine that this round was probably oversubscribed and they were probably kind of like i guess investors clawing to get a kind of kind of slice of this and i i'm sure optimism will probably eventually do a siri you know series c or if they do a token or whatever and this isn't me

having like any kind of insider information or anything like that no i mean i think people get the wrong idea about angel investors for pretty much all of the projects that i'm an angel investor in like i i think i think pretty much 100 of them i never get any kind of like you know quote unquote insider information or any special privileged information and nor do i ask for it because i don't i don't want that i want to be able to kind of like just participate as a kind of like a public person as well there so i don't know if they're going to do a series c or or or a token or anything like that but um you know i've said to you guys before that i think all the altitudes are gonna do tokens it's not not news um but it's always kind of like a mix-up

sorry a toss-up of whether they're gonna raise another round before doing a token not just optimism but other kind of like projects out there or they'll just go straight to token we'll have to see how that plays out 150 million dollars there's a lot of cheddar guys it's a lot of money that's going to definitely put a dent in optimism's building here uh and i'm curious to see you know how far they go with this money and now how many how many people they hire as well and who they hire because they have some rock stars on the team already and i'm i'm curious to see you know who else they kind of like add to the stack there all right so a couple of tweets here from pseudotheist and pauline now so sudo theos tweeted saying eip-4844 which is one of the ips that i've spoken about

lately would effectively reduce roll-up fees by up to 100 x even before dank sharding and in this thread they explore how this works and there's kind of like a nice little table here that shows it so essentially you can see here you know before eip uh 4844 for just sending eighth uh it would cost you i guess let's lose optimism and arbitration as an example 37 cents and 53 cents respectively shopping tokens is 54 and 74 cents respectively but then after 48 44 uh these drop dramatically it becomes like a sub 1 cent for both sending ethan swapping tokens and this is something that i've discussed on obviously on the refuel a lot recently about how these eips are coming in the shanghai update hopefully after the

merge and will just dramatically reduce optimistic roll-up fees here so uh this is really cool and i've explained how this kind of like works before i start to do with with data storage and stuff like that and this is before dang shotting you know once we get dunk shotting the fees are going to be basically negligible for these l2s i mean you won't even feel them anymore and you know people often say well if the fees are so kind of like low isn't that just going to mean that ethereum's fee revenue goes down and that um you know the burns going to go down no guys this goes back to what i've been saying for a while now there's going to be so much demand for ethereum layer 1 block space even with the cheap layer 2 fees it that it's just going to outpace the cheapness it doesn't matter

that it's cheap l1 is always going to be congested even if everything moves off l1 to l2 l2s are going to fill up that block space very very quickly um even with kind of like dank sharding and i think that's because i expect the tps to go up you know immensely i mean let me put it to you this way right now with you know 50 cent transaction fees on layer twos a lot of things still aren't economical to do micro transactions right aren't economical to do streaming payments may not even be totally economical to do especially in a microtransaction sense uh decentralized social media like all on chain and and and kind of like some of the nft stuff you know you know you know what i'm talking about right it's not really that economically feasible drop fees down to

a tenth of a cent but 20th of us 50th of a cent these these things start becoming very very economical and then they are going to induce that demand right by having the fees that that um that cheap which essentially means that it's going to make up for the i guess it's going to be kind of like a quantity of fees rather than kind of like a small number of transactions having a lot of um providing a lot of fear revenue it's going to be a large number of transactions providing a lot of small fee revenue but that adds up over time so it's kind of like inverting what we currently have today so very very cool to see some numbers put to it here from sudo theos and then paulina quote tweeted and said you know some clarifications uh uh for this enforcer theosis thread where they say l1 core

data can be up to 930 kilobytes per block 10 kilobytes is not the limit it may be 10 kilobytes now because that's all the demand there is now an eip4844 introduces a dedicated space for all updater though it can be any non-state sequential data and then there's a bunch of other kind of like things in this thread from polynomial as well this i mean you know it's it's funny like i'm finding it hard to keep up with this stuff lately to be honest this stuff is getting like super awesome like it's it's it's actually really crazy to see like how clued in polynomial uh people like paulina and pseudo theos are and i read these threads and i still learn something new from this every day so i that's why i love i think for me in this ecosystem from where i am right now if someone's able to teach me

something new at this point of like you know since i covered this space every day and since i i basically have been in this space for so long if someone is able to teach me something new and something super interesting that's really that that's all so new then uh you know i'm going to follow those people instantly and promote them and i've been talking about polynomial and pseudo theos a lot recently on the refuel and you they definitely both highly recommended follows you're going to learn so much from them from following them they they really are putting out so much great content and you know just look at these threads you know as i've been saying a lot lately the rest of the crypto ecosystem is at least at least six months behind the ethereum roadmap or kind of like what's happening in ethereum um but you know

this sort of stuff is kind of you know probably nine to 12 months away from happening at this stage right if it even happens in the shanghai update and people are really behind on this they have no idea this is coming right so just paying attention to this sort of stuff just realizing that it's coming i know it's kind of sometimes hard to deal with all the fight around you know ethereum has high gas phase oh l2 phase is still too high blah blah guys as i said before l2 phase are coming down over time once these upgrades go into l1 to enable these l2 faces to come down it's going to be so totally net totally negligible and people aren't going to know what to do with all the block space that we give them all the cheap fees that we give them so very

much looking forward to that and i guess thanks to polynomial and pseudo theory for putting together these threads today um and there's one other thing that i wanted to talk about with regards to ethereum's kind of longer-term roadmap and this is a thread that um i think this safespace name julian balet or ballet started here he's a is a geth core developer but basically this is a series of threads to highlight some of the changes that come with stateless ethereum and vertical trees um and today's going to talk about changes to the block format so this is technical of course and stateless ethereum and vocal trees is on the longer term ethereum roadmap it is not something that's going to happen overnight it's not something that's happening in the shanghai update or anything like that either but it is very important for ethereum it is going

to enable more scalability a healthy more sustainable ethereum chain and it's definitely very good to keep on top of this and as i said like you know people most people are six months behind ethereum a lot of people are one year behind ethereum this is probably at least two years from being implemented i would say so if you're paying attention to this today you really are at the absolute bleeding edge of ethereum development so i recommend paying attention to it realizing what's going on in the uh stateless ethereum and vocal trees uh kind of like arena there because that is also a massive boost with um scalability as well as a sustainability and um you know and kind of like ease of running a node going forward and into kind of like the far future as well which is what it's all about right so definitely give this thread a read

i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so another chapter or another first cut of the chapter of uh ben edrington's upgrading ethereum book has been done so this is on bls signatures and you've probably heard about bls signatures a lot recently um in the context of uh proof of stake in the context of you know layer two stuff all that kind of like stuff there well if you want a complete breakdown of what they are and how they work this is the chapter for you i actually like it just as an aside here this book from ben is incredible freaking incredible like it's not finished yet it's kind of like you know obviously still in in in development but like look at all the chapters he's he's got here that have been done so far this chapter's on

shuffling like this is this is not just kind of like a high level overview guys this is deep in the weeds technical stuff if you want to know everything there is to know about ethereum the ethereum beacon chain a theorem proof of stake um and kind of like all that sort of stuff and just like into the the deepest technical weeds you can go i mean this is what you read this is what you have to read i mean like look at this stuff this is crazy like it's all so um well documented as well i've read a few of these chapters like a lot of it obviously goes over my head because a lot of it is technical but i'm still getting a lot of useful stuff out of this and it's just incredible that ben is able to put this together he's one of the hardest working

people right he not only is putting this together but he does the what's new and eth2 newsletter he also works on the uh teku client uh uh the the big enchant client there he's just all across this i mean it's just it's just incredible like i always i guess respect really really respect people like this who are able to kind of like put together such high quality work and so effectively as well and so consistently i just had to kind of like gush a little bit there but you know that that kind of like chapter that i was talking about on bls signatures you should definitely go read if you are interested in uh kind of i guess um learning more about it and kind of like learning how it all works under the hood it is quite a lengthy rate here from what i can see but it will explain to

you how it all works why it was chosen you know how it helps the beacon chain you know why it's good all that sort of stuff there and um you know definitely go give this a read i'll link it in the youtube description for you so all right someone showed me this in the discord channel today something called orbis which is building itself as a web 3 social network and they put out a tweet i believe this was from three days ago where they said remember block scan chat from etherscan i covered this on the refill when it first came out we built the same thing but decentralized and encrypted with no transaction fees you can now dm any ethereum address or ens name with obese users will see your messages when they join um and then you can have like more this there's a bunch

of more details here now i remember when etherscan brought out their block uh scan chat i did say that well i'm pretty sure that i said that i wish that it was decentralized and i wish that it was open source well this is claiming to be decentralized it's built on the ceramic network and encrypted encrypted with lit protocol here it is using a bunch of other infrastructure in the background as well that we're all kind of like used to here and you can go visit this at orbis.club so this is really cool i mean i think decentralized messaging and kind of like using the blockchain to do a lot of different things rather than financial transactions doing kind of like the quote-unquote web 3 stuff is something something that we're going to see a lot more of going forward especially because nfts have taken off

as well and you can incorporate nfts with this sort of stuff very easily it's all composable it's all interoperable and uh doing it in decentralized ways no small feat guys i know that um status has been building a decentralized messenger for a very long time now uh since 2017 basically and it hasn't really taken off yet i think they were too early but as i said i think we're getting to a point now where this stuff matters more and more especially given the um i guess like the stuff happening in the background with censorship and you know government shutting down parts of the incident and blocking things like we really do need these decentralized tools more than ever because i think that as time goes on governments look i i think maybe not in our western bubble but i

think a lot of governance governments around the world are definitely going to get more oppressive as time goes on especially around the internet and trying to control the internet some of them will try to control crypto and fail but as long as we have these tools that work with you know with the internet i think uh this is how you kind of like protect yourself from that or at least arm yourself against that because at the end of the day these sorts of things are the you know modern weapons right like obviously as hunter gatherers we had physical weapons that's how we started you know we we crafted kind of like sticks and stones and things like that and we basically defended ourselves with that but in the modern era you know you still defend yourself physically with with weapons right but i mean most

people have no use for that and most people are protected by the police or or by kind of like their nation's army but then you know there are instances where that starts to break down and stuff like that but you know for most people most of the time in western nations you don't ever need the police i don't remember the last time i called the police i don't remember when i've ever needed the army obviously it's there to protect the nation but me as a person protecting my own personal safety um you know i have to i have to do this online too like there is a world where maybe the australian government says you know this app is banned this happens man they're actually been the australian government unfortunately has actually been pretty strict um against encryption and been trying to i guess like um not

kill maybe not kill encryption but like or encrypted messaging but try to put in back doors and get around it and that's why we need this sort of stuff more than ever i believe because you may think you're relatively safe with your western government but i think even the western governments are kind of like you know being much more aggressive than i thought they would be at at this stage but yeah cool to see this from from orbis club here you can kind of like see uh you know if you go to auburn stock club hey someone's talked about me and it's not a rotator that's right about it will we hear about it um featured on the daily wear refill tonight well yes guys you do you are i haven't connected my wallet uh to this yet i won't do it on live on the stream here but this is

pretty cool like i like this um uh this was the person adam dawson who shared it in the discord channel there well there you go i i covered it on the refuel for you and i i gave my kind of like view on why i think it's important but as i said there are plenty of these tools coming out plenty of them coming to market they're all going to be doing their own kind of like thing and trying to essentially uh kind of like put their own spin on it uh so we're gonna have to see how that all shakes out i'm very curious to see what the future of these kind of like protocols look like going going forward all right so finally we have an update here from quinta they announced today that their futures beta on optimism mainnet is finally here you can now

trade eighth btc and link per contracts with up to 10 times leverage completely on chain at v2 dot beta dot quanta dot io now this is built on synthetics using chain link oracles as well here this has been a long time coming i remember when clintus spun out of synthetics i was quite a while ago now but yeah it's finally live as i said just i think i said yesterday on the refuel and also wrote about it there is a d5 renaissance brewing guys like they have been building for so long there is the layer two stuff that is going to enable d-fight to go to the next level there are so many kind of like innovations happening not the quote-unquote d5 2.0 innovations that was just kind of like mostly ponzi stuff but actual innovations happening especially given that l2 enables new things to be able to be built

obviously lower fees will onboard new users during the kind of like next leg up and as i mentioned yesterday i actually feel like eth i don't want to jinx it but i really do feel like 8th is ready to run again especially coming up to the merge and that's going to bring in so many new people into the ethereum ecosystem and layer 2s are ready for them now guys like yes the fees aren't as cheap as they're gonna be but they're cheap they're much cheaper than main nets and uh they're getting cheaper over time as well and there's more of an ecosystem on there too i mean ave is now live on there right so pretty much most things that people want to do on ethereum layer one they can now do on optimism arbitrim or even the polygon pos chain and uh i think

that's going to be and especially being able to withdraw to these things from centralized exchanges i think that's going to be very very awesome to see how this plays out with a new wave of new users coming in and beginning to experience later to ethereum rather than having to be stuck on layer 1 ethereum and then we all hear them go on about the gas phase being kind of like high and how ethereum's a scam and kind of like bleeding and dry and all that sort of stuff right so i'm personally looking forward to that most uh going forward right and and kind of like over the next i guess six to 12 months or even just like the remainder of this year uh we're already like halfway through march guys it's actually quite insane um but uh but yeah so are very cool to see

this definitely go check out quinta if you haven't already uh you can go you know in the blog post here and go visit at v2.bait.quinta.io all right last few minutes of the refuel today just wanted to quickly remind you guys that i'm going to be at blockchain week next week i am flying up to sydney on the monday night so i'm going to try and re record the refuel on on the monday during the day under the newsletter and all that sort of stuff i'm going to be at the sydney event on tuesday all day i hope to see many of you there then i'm flying back to melbourne wednesday morning and i'll be at the melbourne event all day as well and i think tuesday wednesday i don't i'm pretty sure there's not going to be a refuel so i'm just warning you guys if

you don't see a refuel on tuesday or wednesday it's because of i've been at the conference i mean i'm going to the after parties too so there's like a near zero percent chance cause i'll try but i don't think it's gonna happen just just kind of like warning you there uh but monday definitely there will be one and of course on the remainder thursday friday as well i think thursday's episode i'm probably just gonna use that like at least probably half of that to cover everything from the tuesday and wednesday as well just you know to give you guys my view on it how i you know how everything went what you know what i kind of what i kind of learned and what i kind of gleaned from it uh but yeah as i said hope to see a lot of lots of you

guys there i know that tickets are like absolutely over so i think they're like five times oversold so unfortunately a lot of you won't be able to come to the physical events i hope you watch both of my talks i'm doing one with mehdi from sigma prime uh i'll be doing that in in sydney on tuesday morning you can find the full schedule on the blockchain week website and then wednesday to close out the day on melbourne i'm actually uh interviewing kane from synthetics and that's going to be cool as well so very much looking forward to all of that and uh yeah i think that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch

you all next week thanks everyone