Polygon Studios announced, Security bootcamp & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #168 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 20th of july 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so state full works has announced the eap 1559 supporter and patron nft so these nftes have been made with direct input from eip1559 contributors all proceeds will go directly to them in celebration of their work and the design is being done by my good friend kitty here so these nfts will be on sale tomorrow july 21st not sure on the exact time here um but yeah there's the date uh and essentially as i said like all the uh i guess uh proceeds raised from this nft will go to the people mentioned here and you know a bunch of others here

basically all the ones that made one five five nine happen and possible and worked on it and got it to to mainnet which is really really cool so i mean i don't know if you guys had seen this i think it was a couple months ago maybe where crypto cobain suggested this on twitter saying that there should be nfts or limited edition nfts around one five five nine then all the money should go to the supporters so it's cool to see this come to life i can't wait to get my hands on one or two or three or however many there are of these uh these sorts of things i think there's maybe two of them um i definitely really want to kind of make my mark in ethereum history here and i'm sure you all do as well so definitely keep an eye on the state

for works twitter account it'll probably um you know it may or may not be live by the time i've done tomorrow's refuel but yeah as i said it is going live july 21st uh if i had to assume i would probably say um you know in the in the us maybe it'd be around midday or something like that but i'm not sure i'm sure they'll announce a time uh when it's all ready to go so another kind of i guess weaker day in the crypto markets today is in the 1700s again everyone is kind of like i guess uh coping on twitter i i it's always funny whenever i see the price go down really quickly and then i go on twitter and everyone's kind of putting out cope tweets and and hilarious tweets and you know today i put out a little tweet where i said uh

one thousand five hundred and fifty nine dollars by one five five nine may come true after all which is the kind of meme that formed around obviously aip1559 and the price of eighth now i don't know if this is going to happen or not i mean i don't really carry the way but what i kind of wanted to touch on a little bit was this notion of like shared pain or shared cope within the crypto ecosystem whenever the price goes down and i wrote a little bit more about this in the delegate newsletters today but i i kind of like give a high level summary here essentially it's just really funny to see as i said when the price goes down everyone jumps on twitter and starts kind of like coping together and you have like two very distinct communities you have the ogs who have been around for a while

who have been been around for like a cycle or two and have experienced the volatility and are all okay with that and then you have the newer investors who you can tell and you because they're like scared they're like frightened they're like looking for reassurances from the ogs and from traders and all this sort of stuff to make them you know feel better about themselves and their investments and make them feel better about not having sold or whatever or anything like that um you know i obviously like everyone starts out like that i mean i was like that back in the in the earlier days before i you know i guess survived the last crypto bear market and things like that um and it's just like the fact that we have that kind of i guess bonding within the crypto community i think is very

important not just important from i guess community building perspective but also important to kind of keep people i guess involved and like stay within the ecosystem and to i guess reassure them because at the end of the day reassuring someone of something or just feeding them kind of some kind of like i guess opium or whatever isn't necessarily a bad thing i think that at the end of the day we all want someone to tell us that everything's going to be okay right and you know even if we know that they they they don't know exactly what they're talking about and they can't guarantee us that everything's going to be okay still being able to learn from those who have experienced these things and lived through them is always a positive um and i don't want to focus kind of like too much on this

but i think generally uh if you're around now and you're maybe newer to the ecosystem i just focus on the technology at times like these and generally i mean i encourage people to focus on the technology at all times and try not to stare at the price all the time but it's hard i mean i say that and i stare at the price every day not stare at it but i check the price every day and obviously i still feel the um the emotions when there's volatility in the markets and things like that but focusing on it when you've literally got no control over it it's counter-intuitive right like whereas with technology with the technology side of the fundamental side of it you do have control of it you can get involved with a crypto project you can work for a crypto project you can um do educational content you

can contribute value in in tons of different ways uh whereas at the markets unless you're like a big fund that is is trading with like hundreds of millions of dollars or you know maybe tens of millions depending on what coin you're trading you really have no direct impact on what the market's going to do um and even then you don't really have a much of an impact either like generally there's not really one person or group that can control the markets there are whales of course and things like that but generally like you know regular people are not going to be able to affect the market in any which way directly with their money but the way that you actually do over the longer term affect the markets is by educating i actually think a lot of us that educated um and stayed the course with

ethereum during 2018 and 2019 is a big reason why ethereum is still kind of like around today and still has such big legitimacy and it's not just us educators it's the the builders and the developers and everything like that they are the i guess backstop of the long-term value where the short-term value gets sucked out of um side of the air out of the air because of the fact that the speculators are gone uh and the traders are gone and you know the retail investors are gone and all those sorts of things and then you're left with the the fundamentalists uh the the developers um the educators the builders all that sort of stuff so yeah just a little bit of a comment on that i think at this point in time you know it's people are like okay are we in a long-term bear market are we not

and everyone's asking these questions and i know people are looking for reassurances i can't offer you any kind of like reinsurances i can't tell you when we're going to start going up again or if we're going to continue going down i honestly do not know and anyone who says that they know um is lying they don't know no one knows um but what i can tell you is that just based on like everything that i see uh both i guess what i cover on the refuel and what i see in the background there has been no slowdown of development within this ethereum ecosystem their builders are still building as fast as they are they are teams are still raising money and and hiring i mean the hiring is going crazy right now um and and you know there's still plenty of this stuff kind of happening so

when you look at the price and i discussed this yesterday and you look at the fundamentals and you see that massive disconnect don't be fooled into thinking that it's going to have any bearing on the short to medium term but it definitely has a massive bearing over the long term and i believe that if you really do care about this technology and you want to be more involved in this ecosystem and you're more of a kind of like a person that that is patient and a longer-term investor well i mean leaving at this point in time is probably the worst thing you could do so stick around have fun um stop staring at charts i mean i've been trying to teach myself just to stop looking at the price every day but it's incredibly hard especially if you go on twitter and you can kind of tell the mood of the

market depending on what the tweets are because if the market's crashing you'll see cope tweets if the market's going up you'll see like um people saying like i told you so and then we're going back up and then you'll see people like bagging the bulls saying oh you know if the balls are happy over a two percent move up even though we just dropped like 50 so you know i know it's very very hard to get away from market action but trying to detach yourself from that is i think incredibly healthy especially if you find yourself just spending too much time looking at it and getting down about it because it just it does cause your motivation for things i think at the end of the day all right so super fears put out a couple of tweets that i wanted to cover today um but the first one he said was do you

want ethereum to become a more valuable and secure ecosystem if so you should promote the development of open source tools that enable staking with a graphical user interface or gui using any client this is what people are begging for and it benefits all of us forget about tools developed for third party profit now to put this in i guess simpler terms essentially what i was talking about i think i was talking about this on the refill the other day i've been talking about this with a lot of different people lately it's essentially this um client centralization that we're seeing within eth2 where the prism client essentially accounts for i think 75 or 80 of the the network right now when we have three other perfectly good clients and uh to choose from those being lighthouse tekku and nimbus lighthouse is at second place

teku's third place and nimbus is fourth place um and i think the the reason i guess there's a few different reasons for that obviously prism is the most well-known um there's the most awareness around that they are have been around for a very long time um and then people just latched on to them and they've got like real a really great client and they've got a really nice um graphical user interface that's kind of like built into it and things like that but their client i mean i wouldn't say is like leaps and bounds better than every other client out there there's no reason why you shouldn't be using other clients and i would actually encourage you that if you're using prism to switch to one of the other clients because you'd be helping network decentralization but at the end of the day all the

clients should be on par in terms of like ease of use to set up or kind of having a graphical user interface because if they aren't then people are just going to go with the path of least resistance which is right now prism uh you know we can see that obviously playing out in the network kind of metrics so um yeah i'm i'm glad superfiz is raising more awareness about this and for those who don't know superfiz is very very heavily involved in the staking side of ethereum he's part of the 8th stake of discord he pretty much runs all of that i think or at least he's is a pretty he's a core contributor to that so he definitely knows um more about this than i do and if he's calling for this i mean i would listen for sure and i mean i've been kind of

like uh discussing this as well on the refuel but it's good to see that there's more of a push here and then he had a second tweet where he says that he is proposing a challenge for the ethereum build all community or the developer community by december 1st 2021 distributed a desktop-based staking ui that can run all four genesis clients and switch between them easily not necessarily quickly though let's backward plan this and get it done um sam can you pm um so i guess like essentially he's putting a call to action out there that he wants someone to come up with a very nice little app you can run on windows or linux or mac os or whatever where you can have access to all of the four clients that i just mentioned and you can quickly um i guess um not sorry not quickly switch between them

but like easily switch between them if you want to uh and have like a whole monitoring dashboard and things like that and that's critical i mean we need someone to build that so if that sounds like something you want to do the funny thing is that you can get funding for this because you just have to apply for a grant either at the ethereum foundation or somewhere else and there's plenty of grant programs out there and you'll get funding for it if this is something you want to build so i mean if you're interested in this uh you can definitely pm superfizz here to get more color around this and and maybe get some help on this i don't think it would be a one-person job i think it's definitely something for for a team to handle um but it's definitely very important uh because we

don't want uh as i mean as much as i love the prylabs team as much as i love the prism client we don't want them being eighty percent of the network forever we want it to be a more even split like i'd be happy with like a uh i guess like a even at a 50 prism like uh and then like 50 the other clients if that's what we had to do but uh 80 or 75 80 percent being one client doesn't even matter if it's a prism or another client is not the ideal healthy scenario and i guess like i should explain why i mean the major reason is because if there's a major bug in prism and that causes all the prism nodes to go offline well that's 80 of the network gone gone you know just gone uh sorry not no he's validated

that's eighty percent of the validator is gone which means that the chain would halt because it's there's not enough to finalize um and it could lead to like slashing and people going offline everything like that um and losing rewards and stuff like that and and the chain holding is is not good obviously so um i mean i shouldn't say chain holding i should say it's not not finalizing which is we want it to be finalizing for a bunch of different reasons i won't go into now but essentially it's not healthy at all so if you're running prism right now i encourage you to switch over if you can if it's you know if it's not a massive hassle for you to do so and if you're staking through a provider who's using prism i would encourage you to basically email them or talk to them and

be like hey you know you should change from prism to something else because of these reasons that i just outlined basically it's not healthy for the network so yeah great i'm very grateful to superfiz for kind of raising awareness around this i think it's a very important issue and i think that we need more eyeballs on it so a new flashbots research post was put out today um which basically covers mav and eip1559 so this was written by i think alejo i think that's how you say um his name here um and kristoff here uh where they share reflections on how mav and the new fee mechanism with 1559 interact in the post they discussed minor economics and how they changed after

the london fork the coexistence of several different auction mechanisms in ethereum and flashbots ethics and they've also got a talk happening at fcc here which you can kind of tune into as well um from the flashbots crew there so i mean i highly recommend going and checking out this blog post giving it a read kind of going over it um and seeing what they're discussing here because this is obviously going to become very important post one five five nine they've got a bunch of fancy math and calculations in here but for the most part it's it it's pretty easy to understand at least it was for me maybe i i maybe it's not going to be easy to understand for you if you don't have the relevant context but i've covered flashbots and mev enough on the refuel that i think by now a lot of you will understand at least

what it is and you can dive into this kind of post and and kind of read through here um but generally if you actually want to learn more about mev there was a um a resource kind of put out here by troy today called awesome mev resources which basically have links to different kind of um articles podcasts research posts all these sorts of things that you can check out to learn more about mev in general so definitely go check this out if you want to learn more and then you can kind of read this mav and aip1559 post to learn more about uh mav in a in a one five five nine world so am the maker dow growth team here announced that the dye token bridge on optimism uh has been launched so i

covered this die token bridge a while ago um on the refuel i think when it was first announced and i discussed how this was a way to get around the seven day withdrawal period with optimism where you could basically have a bridge between optimism and ethereum net that had liquidity providers sitting in the middle um and you can kind of like bridge or die that way now i think i remember i i mean from memory i think that's how it worked they kind of like break it down here in this image where essentially you'd be able to mint f die no i think this worked a little bit differently where you could basically mint like a uh an f die representation of your kind of die and then um and then get that on layer one while your layer two withdrawal was pending and stuff like that um but i don't think

that this is i actually don't think i think the wording is a little bit confusing here but i don't think that um uh the the this kind of like relay is what's been uh deployed just yet i think what has been deployed is basically just a token bridge from uh uh from mainnet die to optimistic ethereum diet which you can access at gateway.optimism.io rather than i guess um the one week uh kind of like withdrawal delay bridge which is going to come a little bit later i think that's uh that's what's going on here now if i go to the foreign post maybe i'll be able to find out a little bit more here quickly um yeah no i think this is just about them launching die on optimism rather than launching uh the kind of like with the immediate withdrawals feature which i'm assuming is going to

come later uh i'm just reading through this year uh yeah i think this i think is definitely going to come later when they launched that kind of like f-dive bridge there but still cool to see uh they make a team jumping on optimism here i'm sure they're gonna be doing the same for arbitrary and other layer two solutions as well and great to see kind of the support coming from from maker down here so lido's referral program has been launched so you can now earn rewards for spreading the benefits of staking eth with lido now you can go read the details of this it'll be linked in the youtube description you can basically earn ldo tokens for referring people but what i wanted to discuss not so much about this specific referral program but just referral programs within crypto in general there's not enough of

them right like when you think about it referral programs are basically made for crypto at the end of the day because you can do very simple payments and very easy payments to people's ethereum addresses for doing referrals and i mean from the web 2 world referrals work really really well it's a really great way to bootstrap growth and to get more people using your app and things like that and i'm surprised we haven't seen more of it within within the crypto ecosystem and especially within d5 now i think that's because everyone became obsessed with liquidity mining programs because that was a much faster way to get uh i guess like users and liquidity into your system but it was fleeting like if you look at a lot of the liquidity mining programs that happen with a lot of the new defy apps uh basically a lot of liquidity came

really quickly and then once the rewards kind of ran out of the token price dumped which it inevitably did for most of these projects um the liquidity left so i think that referral programs uh uh uh enable you to kind of like get more of those longer lasting users than something like liquidity mining but i think that is the main reason why we haven't seen more of these programs launched it's simply because the liquidity mining was a was a short cut it was easier to to bootstrap liquidity through that um and bootstrap users through that but again it wasn't a long-term thing so i'm sure we'll see more of the kind of like top defy apps tap into this especially as we get more of a bridge into the web 2 kind of like um i guess normally world of things where we have these wallets

sitting on top of something like rv or or compound or whatever or uni swap and then you have these apps say okay well here's a referral program to use all these apps and and you know you can earn some tokens blah blah blah i mean there's the possibilities are endless here with these kind of programs but i'm i just yeah i just think that we should be seeing more of these and if you're um you know you should encourage your favorite project that you're following to do a referral program or suggest one in one of their governance forums because at the end of the day i think the bank for your buck of a referral program is better than liquidity mining especially over the long term and i think that it's a really easy way to get people that maybe even aren't even in crypto into it in

into these kind of apps and if you if you look at kind of something like paypal is a clear example here they had a um uh i don't know if it was a referral program but they had a initiative really early on in paypal's life where they basically gave i think it was ten dollars to every new user that signed up and that got them a lot of users because there was three ten dollars to be made right i mean and we've seen this play out with liquidity mining where it's like okay and air drops as well it's like okay well you know come get your um i guess like your your airdrop and and all's on good but the problem with air drops is the fact that you don't have to do anything to get the air drop a lot of the um the uh air drops that you get you get

airdropped a token for either using the app once or using a bunch of other apps or and you just claim it and you sell it and you don't really come back and use the app or anything like that whereas i think with something like what paypal did i think you had to use the money within their platform and they got more people to sign up and kind of like they had them on their books and things like that and they collected their emails i guess you can't really do that with with web3 and ethereum and stuff like that but still i i think referral programs is just like a no-brainer and i hope to see more of it in the crypto space going forward so the polygon ecosystem has announced the launch of a new initiative called polygon studios which is a brand new arm

for blockchain gaming and blockchain gaming and nft ecosystems uh they aim to serve as a bridge between the web 2 and web 3 world now if you go to the site there's not much kind of like on there just yet there's a if it wants to load there's a form where you can put your email in to stay up to date but they've got a bunch of partners that have already onboarded and these are big partners they have atari and anamonica brands uh they have um openc obviously uh is these the crypto marketplace uh they have decentraland the sandbox a bunch of other ones here and i i just think this is really cool because polygon has actually been really cool um or at least the pos chain has been a really cool kind of place for nfts and crypto gaming to proliferate because in my view i

actually think side trains are best on purpose for gaming within crypto because and and maybe even nfts because these a lot of the nfts and gaming stuff they're not high value things we you need them you know you want them to be able to interact with the rest of the crypto ecosystem but it's not like you need the ultra decentralized and ultra secure ethereum chain um to to kind of like i guess um be your bedrock for all this sort of stuff especially if you need massive sorts of scale here now i know that there are different parts being taken here immutable x is a layer two on ethereum that's built on zk roll ups that's taking this path of inheriting ethereum security for nfts and i think that's great and i think that's it's solely needed and i i love that but the actual games themselves if you

want to have them decentralized or have them at least kind of decentralize as much of the game play as possible then i think having them on a side chain makes the most amount of sense and having that side chain commit its state to ethereum kind of like what polygon does uh makes it just i mean it still secures it and it still lets you kind of like recreate the state if something happens uh and you know we've seen games do this already like um not on polygon but uh dark forest was an x die and i think they're probably moving across the polygon um but they were on um down ex die and there's more of these blockchain games kind of popping out where everything's on chain where it can be truly kind of like uh on chain without any kind of like centralized servers in the background

running the game and just having the nfts on chain so i think that nfts uh being secured by layer two is really fascinating really cool but the actual games themselves um can be done on side chains and i think that's actually perfectly fine so i'm glad to see polygon kind of like spinning up a um a studio that's going to be funding this uh and there's a bit more information in the tweet thread here about what they're kind of aiming for but i think this is really cool to see it makes a total uh a ton of sense sorry for the polygon ecosystem so i wanted to hire this blog post from block native uh which is called eighth gas 101 introduction to ethereum gas for traders and builders now i'll disclose you here i'm an advisor to block native but i've spoken about them before and about what

products they offer and about how they're basically the masters of the ethereum mempool they offer a bunch of different mental monitoring products as well as different uh gas kind of like monitoring estimating um products like that all that sort of good stuff there but essentially what they do in this blog post is exactly what the title says they give an introduction to gas and then go over how it kind of like benefit traders and builders so if you fall into either of those categories you should definitely check out this blog post but if you just generally want more knowledge about how the gas market kind of works and how it kind of works for different types of people within the ecosystem you should go give this a read as well so just wanted to give a quick shout out to that post there so another thing that just came across

uh my radar only about like half an hour ago i completely missed this was basically this boot camp for smart contract security auditoring that is being uh kind of like put together by securium here so it's funded by the ethereum foundation's ecosystem support program um and sponsored by partnerships with consensus audits sigma prime which develop develops the lighthouse ethereum 2 client and trail of bits which is a very famous auditing firm within a smart contract auditing firm within ethereum so you can apply i think there's a hundred spots available for this so if you're interested in smart contract security order or auditing you want to get involved there then this bootcamp is for you now let me tell you that if you are interested in this sort of stuff um

and you know you've been looking for i guess a way in this is probably one of the best ways into it and on top of that smart contract auditing pays very very well so if that's something you're also interested in which i'm sure you are then you should definitely check this out it's not for everyone of course it is definitely um not a not an easy thing to do and if you want to become like one of the best auditors it's definitely uh something that requires a lot of um a lot of education and patience and and kind of like iteration but i think doing this kind of this boot camp will actually help you along with that journey and allow you to kind of bootstrap your your kind of like um security auditing skills so the applications are kind of like open until uh first of august i believe um

and this first kind of like epic will run from october to december 2021. so you can apply this form here of course it'll be linked in the youtube youtube description and it kind of gives some details here about why you should apply um as i said you can learn smart contract auditing you can leap from web 2 to web3 you can switch if you're a developer to security um you can scale with your own security and grow a vibrant community so as i said it's a three month boot camp camp it's free limited to 100 selected participants its focus is on ethereum smart contract security order auditing and you know all the topics that go along with that and this is how it's kind of like structured the learn phase uh readings visio video reading videos uh quizzes assignments and more 10 to 20 hours per week minimum so this

obviously is not something that's just a casual thing you will need to you will need to commit that kind of time uh timeline there and then the audit phase in december will evaluate the projects and you'll have interviews with sponsored partners as well uh and anyone can apply here i mean there's no kind of strict criteria over this or anything like that uh so yeah definitely go apply if this seems like something that um you know you you might be interested in i think this is maybe the first boot camp i've seen around security auditing on ethereum i'm not sure if there's been other ones but this is definitely the biggest one that i've seen and the fact that it's being supported by such great teams is it means it's going to be awesome i reckon because you're going to have uh i guess like um people from all over

these kind of teams helping uh making sure that you get the right information making sure that they answer kind of like all your questions in a uh in a very good way in a very um speedy and kind of like accurate way which i think is more important than anything really so yeah definitely go check this out if you haven't already all right so last up here i've got a quick shout out for prior labs uh they are still hiring for security and quality assurance kind of engineers here so if you're interested in uh building the future of ethereum you can dm terence here on twitter or you can go to the prismaticlabs.com careers webpage here to view their open positions so they're actually still hiring for other open positions including a front-end software engineer a go security engineer and a software

development engineer in in test as well so you can click on these and read what it's all about and kind of like what the requirements are and things like that honestly if i was a developer i would be this is definitely one of the teams that would be at the top of my list for ones that i want to work for i couldn't think of anything better than working on ethereum 2.0 kind of like client software um and and doing all that sorts of stuff and everything that entails because you really are building the future of ethereum and you're on the kind of cutting edge here so uh yeah i mean if that was me i would definitely be applying for it but anyway i'm gonna leave it at that for today's episode give you guys back a little bit of time so thank you everyone for listening and

watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone