Polygon governance, Starknet appchains and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #627 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily refuel where we cap the latest news in the theme maker system I'm your host and this is Anna and it's the 20th of July 2023 alright everyone let's get into it uh just before we jump into the news today actually I do need to give you all a heads up that most likely next week on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday there will be no refuel this is because I'm attending a conference in Sydney so I will not be uh obviously at home to be to be able to record a refuel I will have my laptop with me and if I have time I will try to record one on at least one of those days but yeah just a heads up now that there probably won't be a Refuel on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday but I'll be back on the Friday

next week in order to kind of recap those three days now the conference is actually not really a I guess traditional crypto conference it's called the digital asset conference being held in Sydney it's more for I guess like people to come together from different walks of life not just the crypto ecosystem but the Trad fire ecosystem Regulators for them all to come together and basically learn from each other so I am going because I really want to educate The Regulators and try to fight people in Australia about crypto and I think that I can get uh maybe not get through to them maybe that's the wrong way of saying it but I think I can like educate them to the point where they can have a more favorable view of crypto because for anyone who's you know Among Us who's

talked to people outside of the crypto ecosystem generally their view of it is not very favorable or if they or a lot of the times they don't even have a view right because a lot of the times they might have the view of okay yeah I know I heard about Bitcoin on the news I heard about this on the news I heard about FTX right but they won't actually have a strong opinion but those of uh that do have an opinion on the crypto industry it's usually not great because they don't really know much about it right now I obviously do a lot of Education through the daily grade to try and rectify that and try and help people along with that but it's going to be exciting for me to go next week and to basically talk to people who aren't in you know exactly in the industry but

like regulators for example going to be responsible for regulating this industry within Australia tradify you know Bankers things like that that want to integrate with crypto I think they're going to need to know where to start basically and hopefully I can put them on the right path and and you know start them on the ethereum path so to speak rather than going uh some other direction but but yeah just um don't be surprised if there's no Refuel on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday of next week because I'll be there for three days uh but yeah if you are in Sydney feel free to hit me up I should have some free time to um basically go for a coffee or go for lunch or go for food whatever it is uh while I'm there I'll be around the city I think the conference is taking place at the crown uh in in Sydney there

so yeah if you're around hit me up I'd love to to catch up and talk all things ethereum anyway moving on from that to the news of the day so nevermind today announced a partnership with eigenlayer so this is a article on the Block you can read but basically the partnership entails working together collaborating together to build uh different kind of tools I guess for or eigenlay off on ethereum and other chains out there now what this might look like is nevermind might build software for eigenlayer such as software for like the eigen data availability layer um kind of like a product there and people could use the nethermine software to run that instead of eigenlayer themselves building it all together so basically bringing a sort of client diversity I guess to eigenlayer which is

pretty cool uh but yeah I mean I've seen eigenlayer partner with a lot of different companies within the ecosystem lately and they're definitely doing a lot of Business Development that's for sure which is obviously great to see there there's a lot of hype behind them I remember when I first talked about talked about eigenlayer on the refill I believe it was like one of the first um times that I saw them publicly or that they had been speaking about themselves publicly and they've come so far since then and for them to be partnering with powerhouses like never mind really makes me bullish on the future of of eigenlayer and of course never mind now I should disclose here that I am an investor in eigenlayer uh but yeah I mean you guys all about it at this point so you can read the block article for a bit more details on this

uh but yeah I guess like great to see this partnership uh coming in to interview uh so so early in eigen layers life all right let me here has shared a dune analytics dashboard that covers all of the topics that hit your timeline including token vaults account abstraction proxies and more so basically it's a dashboard to track all of the ERC standards so you can see here the different ERC standards on the dashboard if I if I load up a dashboard here and scroll down a little bit a little bit you've got the erc20 standard obviously the normal fungible token standard 721 one of the nft standards here uh 1155 multi-token some of these you've heard of before uh and basically they're all just in this nice little

table here which shows the ERC with a link to the EIP the the type that it is you know is it a token or something else how many contracts there are uh deployed how many contracts we deployed in the last 30 days an example contract and and and more so this is pretty cool this is actually a different kind of dashboard on doing analytics than what I've seen in the past this is definitely going Beyond just tracking the normal stuff that you might see tracked such as like tvl and fees paid on different l2s and stuff like that stuff that I've showed before this is basically tracking uh the arc standards which is very very cool and there's not just a list of the standards that is being tracked here there's also a chart that shows you know the contracts deployed over time and as

you can see here the contracts deployed is you know is that uh is at like all-time highs basically over the last few months then you can see uh if you keep scrolling down you can see contracts deployed by type on this chart so uh erc20 tokens 721 tokens uh 777 and and and so on and so forth there's a lot of info on this dashboard so yeah I just wanted to highlight this for you guys you can go check it out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below and kudos to lme for putting this together all right gitcoin has announced get coin grants rounds 18 which is taking place from August 15th to August 29th 18. man I still remember the first Bitcoin grants around and how small it was and how basically unknown it was at the time

it was really just the hardcore ethereum community that really knew what it was about and really participated in it uh but we're at Grants rounds 18 now and the the special thing about this round is that it is going to be uh is going to be um taking place on optimism uh or the new public goods networks you can see here reply from Ben West here who says all rounds will be on either optimism or the new public goods Network and obviously I think a big pain point for Bitcoin grants in the past has been the fact that on ethereum L1 and this hasn't really been a huge pain point for recent rounds more so for uh rounds maybe like I guess before round 10 where essentially you would have to go on ethereum L1 guest and and donate on

ethereum L1 gas fees were really high and the way it kind of worked was that each one of these um I guess like rounds or each one of these donations that you would make was an unchain L1 transaction and the the cost quickly uh eclipsed the the donation amounts they say you were donating five Die For example to a project it would cost you more than that to donate in gas fees so obviously Bitcoin started integrating with layer twos uh to rectify that and now they're going to be doing it it seems doing these get clean grants rounds exclusively on optimism or the new public goods Network and I talked about their public goods Network last week the new L2 that's come out of the git coin ecosystem so great to see that there but yeah you can go uh mark this down on your calendars August 15th 29th for git

coin grants around 18. all right polygon Labs has announced or shared details of the final uh pillar of the polygon 2.0 roadmap here so this is the governance framework so polycon 2.0 proposes a new governance framework built in collaboration with the community the framework focuses on three main governance aspects the three pillars of future development and growth of the polygon ecosystem so these three governance pillars are the result of months-long collaboration with the community across the polygon ecosystem and they are protocol governance system smart contracts governance and Community treasury governance you can see here a picture basically showcasing this here so protocol governance facilitate the

decentralized maintenance and development of the polygon Tech stack system smart contracts governance facilitates the upgrades of protocol components that are implemented as smart contracts and Community treasury governance facilitates ecosystem and public goods funding supporting development and growth of the polygon ecosystem I think this is really cool because governance is a whole thing right governance affects pretty much like every project out there and there's been this meme for a long time that these tokens that governance uh that projects have are like useless governance tokens that really it doesn't really matter uh you know uh what it doesn't really matter what these uh tokens do for governance it it kind of is useless because there's not really much governance going on and for a lot of projects that is true but I think

what polygon is trying to do here is that they're trying to split this governance up into three core pillars as I described and make it so that governance isn't actually useless you actually have a say over the protocol governance over smart contracts governance and Community treasury governance which are each distinct things especially when it comes to the treasury right because the treasury is for these projects are usually quite large and you want to have a governance process in place that basically ensures that the treasury doesn't just turn into something that gets raided by people with the most uh polygon tokens or Matic tokens for example so yeah I mean if you want to read more details about this you can there are blog posts Linked In in it is Twitter thread here which I'll of course Link in the YouTube description below uh

for you to check out there but yeah that is the final I guess like roadmap item detailed from the polygon 2.0 roadmap now they have to execute on this right I mean I've been talking about the polygon 2.0 ramaph roadmap for the last month or so and there are a lot of exciting things with it but it's up to polygon to execute on everything now and honestly I have a lot of faith in polygon to execute here they've been executing for years uh very well they've grown one of the biggest ecosystems in crypto and I've been I've been proud to be an advisor to them throughout that whole period there so yeah excited for the future of polygon governance yeah and you can check this out we'll link it in the YouTube description below all right speaking of governance optimism published a post called the

future of optimism governance which is a comprehensive overview of optimism governance how it works now and how its two-house system can evolve to support the collective for years to come now there is a Twitter thread and blog post you can check out for yourself yeah but optimism I I think in terms of like Innovations at the Forefront of governance optimism is probably the one that's been doing at the longest and in the I guess like most forward-thinking way they haven't just been doing governance as a meme or as a way to potentially Drive value to the op token or anything like that they've been looking at governance from a radically new approach and and the biggest thing is this kind of like two house governance system that they've

had in place for for quite a while now and uh their their primary goals of optimism's governance system as they detailed here are capture resistance and resource allocation which as I've talked about before is probably the two most important things right resisting governance capture is definitely the most important thing because if your governance system is captured then there's no point in having that governance system to begin with because it basically becomes useless because then it just becomes a rule by the people that captured the governance right and then resource allocation is just as important as as capture resistance because as I mentioned before in a lot of these projects the resources AKA aka the treasury gets raided and people just basically steal money from

the project for all intents and purposes so with capture resistance what they're doing is that they're using these two house model they've got the token house governances governs protocol upgrades and sequence a selection and then the citizens house can govern the ongoing selection of citizens and each house can check and balance the others decisions together they mitigate the danger of capture to either house and it kind of modeled off of real world governance systems like in the US how you have the three branches of government the government you have like the house um the the Senate and uh the the judicial branch uh and then there are various tracks and balances within those things it's kind of trying to model off that because that is a model that has kind of worked for various Democratic systems around the world so can we translate

that into crypto and make it work with token holder uh governance it remains to be seen if it's going to work long term but that is basically the gist of what optimism is trying to do here but if you want more details on all of that you can read this blog post that optimism published called the future of optimism governance it covers all of this as it stands today and as well as the future I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right speaking of optimism uh there was an article that the block shared here um basically saying coinbase's base uh is going to be adhering to optimism's new open neutrality framework so optimism have not published this open neutrality a framework yet I believe they're publishing it next week but Jesse the lead uh developer or

the lead of the base project at coinbase has said that bass is going to be adhering to this open neutrality uh framework as it's the centralization guidelines uh which is pretty cool to see that that they've already stated here that they're going to be following along with it but there's not really much more details on this as I say because it hasn't been released yet but essentially what I assume that this framework is going to try and do for the op stack is basically say that all projects building on the op stack should be uh you know incredibly neutral should be giving back as much as they take from the op stack should be building things that um they have a plan to decentralize that are credibly neutral that are censorship resistant and that basically

embody the values of not only ethereum but also the optimism ecosystem as a whole as well so just great to see that I just figured it was worth pointing out because there has been a lot of criticisms I think of bass especially around the fact that it's tied to coinbase and people think okay well if it's tied to coinbase what motivation does bass have to decentralize and be credibly neutral and be censorship resistant well at the end of the day they have every motivation to do that and I believe that for quite a while and I'll quickly explain why regulatory is a huge reason why bass uh why coinbase would not want bass to be centralized would want bass to be decentralized so that it can maintain censorship resistance it can be credibly neutral and it can be a place for not only coinbase customers to go to but but

everyone within crypto to go to and get value out of and to use without uh I guess like fear of being censored or anything like that by coinbase and that is a huge regulatory burden off of coinbase's shoulders uh by making the the base Network um into basically like any other L2 out there so that's one reason another reason is basically having an arms uh I guess arms length or more than an arm's length Detachment of Bass from coinbase yes coinbase hires developers that uh work on base and obviously are built bass to this to to this date but it's kind of like what happened with the ethereum foundation where they were really the sole developers of the ethereum protocol for a long time then there were other

developers that came along like consensus and parody split out of it as well like the fun fact is that everything that just basically started from the ethereum foundation then it all split off Joe Lubin went on to found consensus Gavin wood went on to found parody and they built the parity client and developed ethereum stuff and then other teams joined here and there and they're part of different ecosystems like you know as I mentioned before never mind uh that's an independent team that basically develops a client for ethereum there's prilabs I'm just naming random things here there's Sigma Prime the develop the lighthouse client there are all these independent uh kind of teams now working on the in protocol all these independent researchers working on the ethereum protocol and that's I think what the um op stack wants to become and

what coinbase can contribute to with bass and can make bass into an ecosystem like that there but anyway I'll cover optimism's open neutrality framework when it gets published next week all right espresso systems has announced that today uh their second major milestone in building their espresso sequencer the doppio Milestone so basically uh this Milestone is a a new test net I believe here um uh yeah the doppio is is basically a new test net release here and you can see details of this in the Twitter thread uh I've talked about espresso systems quite a while quite a lot recently especially around their shared sequencer technology that they're building that teams can plug and play or

L2 teams can plug and play into uh in order to basically uh uh decentralized out their sequences test net one was codenamed Americano it was their first demonstration of what they had built which is something called Hotshot which is a fast finality consensus protocol designed to reach the same scale as ethereum's validator sets and they will use restaking to enable with your invalidators to participate in the protocol and then they have their second uh test net here which is doppiero now it seems they're naming their test Nets after different types of coffee which I love because because I'm all about coffee but you can go check out more details about this I'll link it in the YouTube description below and the second espresso related announcement is that their espresso sequencer test net is now integrated with the polygon ZK evm stack

so roll Ops built Roll-Ups built with the polygon ZK AVM stack can leverage the integration to process transactions with the espresso sequencer so a lot of movements happening in the sequence of space lately and great to see espresso systems at the Forefront here of that all right a big announcement out of the starknet ecosystem uh yesterday so stocknet announced that they have uh that they are building or they introduced something called starknet app chains which I guess is on brand for uh stockware or Stark net because a lot of the other l2s are doing this as well uh basically creating a framework for people to build their own L2 app chains now we've seen announcements about this

recently from polygon and ZK sync and as well as um the arbitrum uh arbitrum uh uh one uh and building the arbitrim any trust change which have been out for for quite a while now as well as the op stack pretty much everyone is doing the app chain thing now you can see here stock net says that stock net is emerging as one of the most performant Innovative scaling platforms out there the most brilliant and Innovative apps and tools are all there so it seems like they are trying to capture that market of people who want to be building their own app change as l2s and instead of just build building it as a evm uh people can now build it as a stark net app chain which as you guys know is not an evm chain it is built using their own

uh kind of virtual machine here as well as their own Pro gaming language called Cairo so yeah cool to see stockware joining on this race I I kind of It kind of like begs the question about what success is going to look like for a lot of these different app chains like I've said plenty of times before I'm repeating myself for like the millionth time but I've said plenty of times before that I expect there to be a lot of app chains out there but now the question Becomes of okay like who is going to capture most of the app chain market share um uh for developers you know I developers gonna choose to go with polygon are they going to choose to go with Stark net are they going to choose to go with ZK sync or op stack so far op stack has captured a lot of um the Mind

share in that in that realm uh but I think that's just simply because they're probably the the furthest along when it comes to enabling people to easily deploy their own app chains but really it remains to be seen which ones are going to be used the most to build up chains and which app change is actually going to be the most successful and I don't think we're gonna have an answer to that for many years to come it's probably going to take at least five years to have any kind of answer to that I believe uh if not more and it's not just going to be a static thing there could be a very successful app chain that spins up and then um you know maybe in five years time it's uh it's a ghost town maybe people have moved on from it this definitely happens uh a lot in the

L1 space I don't think it's going to be different for l2s but as you guys know I'd rather see l2s than l1s right and then there was this also this New Concept that I came across recently of these um I think it's got a flash roll up or something like that where essentially you would spin up a roll-up uh or an app chain essentially for a particular use case and then spin it down once that use case is done so for example you could spin up a roll-up to do like an nft mint and then once the mint is done you spin down the roll up and then the and then the rollout basically just becomes ephemeral doesn't exist after the nft mint so there is so much happening in the L2 space and I think that the main theme of ethcc from what from what I've seen has been l2s

and it definitely feels like we're getting to the point where the L2 stuff is becoming overheated and as I said a few months ago I expect us to have a proper L2 summer and that's where things will get completely overheated that's where things will Peak and then l2s will probably go into this long uh well I wouldn't say bear marker but this long consolidation phase where a lot of the l2s will probably uh fade into a relevancy and then over the longer term we'll see which ones stick around and which ones become the dominant ones it's just the way things work right it's just the way these Cycles work but I definitely am more confident than ever in a potential L2 summer happening towards the end of this year if not early next year given everything that

I'm seeing playing out in the L2 space given that I'm seeing a lot of the Traders now focus on l2s and the L2 tokens and speculating on them and given that I believe believe that the General market is going to shift more towards PVE than PVP over the next six to 12 months especially the next 12 months and what I mean by that is that right now the market is PVP and what that means is player versus player where everyone's just playing against the same people right it's the same people in crypto right now the same people trying to trade the markets and that's why you see the crab market chop happening all the time but when it becomes PVE or player versus environment it means that a lot of new money is coming in and basically it's uh it's no longer just uh the same

people that were in crypto for the last few years playing against each other now those people are playing against the environment so to speak or the new people and it becomes a lot easier to make money in that environment because the new people are just indiscriminately buying things for whatever reason right and there's a lot of new money coming in it's not just the same money sloshing around and that's what we saw happen in D5 summer that's what we saw happen in 2021 that's what I think we'll see happen for layer 2 Summer and the next bull market so keep an eye on that but it's going to be an interesting next 12 to 18 months at least I believe all right speaking of L2 staying on the L2 topic here arbitrim has introduced phase one of the arbitrim foundation grants now the full details are at uh uh

at this blog post here and you can go to arbitrim dot Foundation grants to check out more info about this but basically the foundation grounds aren't ongoing initiative and will operate in distinct phases with phase one they're going to be targeting decentralized applications and infrastructure for arbitrim Nova and arbitrim1 and current phase categories are listed here um in this post which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh but essentially this is a way for the arbitrim community to distribute Hub tokens as grants out of the treasury I believe two different projects building within the arbitrim ecosystem to encourage growth and business development and and all that good stuff there we've seen this from a bunch of different projects or already doing this but this is really the best use of a

treasury right when it comes to Distributing treasury funds you don't want to see it rated by kind of useless people that just are getting paid to do nothing you want to see the funds distributed to the various projects within the ecosystem you want to say it distributed to people actually working on on arbitrim and arbitrim projects and you want to see the money be well spent and if you are an art token holder and you've delegated your ARB to uh you know one of the delegates out there they'll be voting on your behalf for this but if you want to read all about this and learn learn more you can check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below now I talked about Athena yesterday and this new project that I backed his new stablecoin project so I'm not going to

go into uh more detail about uh them because I don't need to they had published a blog post today titled introducing Athena Labs at describing basically what they're building so if you're still confused about what Athena Labs is what Athena is and how it's all going to work and what exactly they're building then this blog post is for you it's basically your quick little uh read to get up to speed on the project altogether now I'm not gonna um explain the project again because I explained it yesterday so if you're interested in what that's all about you can check out yesterday's video for my explanation then I should disclose again that I am an investor in Athena Labs here very excited about what they're building uh but but yeah you can go check that out

I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right I got a few minutes here I want to discuss something that's been on my mind over the last maybe a couple of weeks especially uh and it's got to with l2s of course um and and it's it's kind of like in the same topic as I was discussing before about the l2s and how we have so many l2s now and so much activity happening in that space I do want to just quickly caution people against this an L2 is is cool and all right and it's better in my mind L2 is a cooler and more useful and and just better overall than l1s but I think it's worth keeping in mind that not all l2s are created equal if you go to l2beat.com you can

clearly see this right some have multi-sigs some have training wheels on them still some are you know don't have any training wheels some don't have fraud proof some do some uh you know are more expensive than others all this stuff right they're not created equal so when looking at the L2 space and looking at l2s to use what you need to understand if that if you go and use arbitrim1 for example and you're aware of the fact that arbitrine one has fraud proofs has a decentralized governance process has time locks on their contracts to upgrade them and things like that but then you go to another L2 that's maybe brand new you need to assume that that brand new L2 if especially if it's not listed on l2b is completely centralized right AI

centralized to the point where there's probably just like a multi-sig held by the team securing the whole thing now the reason why I bring this up is because as I said before the L2 space is growing exponentially there are so many l2s coming online but not ol2s are created equal just like not all l1's are created equal and you need to be very aware of where you're putting your money for me for for example I would not trust significant amounts of money on anything that is 100 completely centralized it doesn't matter if it's an L2 or a centralized exchange or anything like that and I'm very aware of just because it's an L2 doesn't mean that it's a it automatically inherits ethereum security and ethereum's decentralization it has to be constructed in a way for it to

inherit ethereum security and decentralization it can't just do it out of the box right and I've gone through this before on the refill plenty of times but I want to warn you guys because as I said I do expect there to be an L2 summer and because it's going to be so easy to spin up l2s what you're going to see is you're going to see opportunistic people come along spin up an L2 using you know one of these kind of like uh development Stacks whether it be op stack or something else have it be completely centralized have a completely centralized sequence so that they run and then some of them will rug some of them will uh be exploited some of them will just shut down and there will be no escape hatch for you so if you are bridging funds to these things just be

completely aware that you are taking on large risk in doing so because if an L2 summer happens there will be lucrative opportunities to make money on these things but there will also be a ton of risk involved so just keep that in mind and make sure that you're not taking on too much risk that you're not putting all of your funds into something uh it does it obviously doesn't feel good to lose money but if you put all your funds onto one of these l2s that come up and the L2 just goes away and there's no way for you to get your funds back because for example they're storing their data elsewhere and then the funds are just Frozen because the data is no longer available and all your funds are stuck I mean that is going to be the worst feeling right especially just be before

the bull market gets started because I saw a lot of people blow themselves up in D5 summer for various different reasons and they blew up their eighth positions they lost a lot of eighth and then the eighth bull market happened where each skyrocketed from like three to four hundred dollars to like 4K plus that's like a 10x right and I saw people coping the whole time they had been holding through the whole bear Market through the crab market stacking eth they lost it from taking on too much risk and they had to watch eath Skyrocket I'm telling you guys right now that is the worst feeling in crypto that will make you severely upset and depressed and that will probably make you not want to look at crypto anymore so I don't want that happening to any of you guys so just to keep in mind that

you need to monitor your risk doesn't matter if it's an L2 or not doesn't matter what it is be aware of what you're interacting with always on chain uh so yeah just a little bit of advice there but on that note I'm going to end it there 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 newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone