Polygon zkEVM announced, Gitcoin Passport detailed - The Daily Gwei Refuel #410 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i cut the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host the anthony designer and says the 20th of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so polygons zk evm was just announced about i guess like an hour ago or something like that now at time of recording uh and this is a big announcement uh you can kind of like check out this little video they did in this thread i'll link it in the youtube description below but basically what it is today is that they've kind of like open sourced the code for the polygon zk vm it's still very early days here it's not uh evm uh kind of like equivalent yet it's not uh fully evm compatible yet but it is basically you know on its way to being that they're gonna have a permissionless

test net launching very very soon and they're aiming to get mainnet out by the end of 2022 which is quite insane now as i said like there are different kind of like levels of of zkvm and different levels of kind of like equivalence and and compatibility and things like that like equivalence is basically that uh so there are technical kind of like specifications here that it has to adhere to but equivalence is very difficult to achieve as opposed to compatibility uh because of the fact that you have to account for all the edge cases you have to account for basically everything and you have to be uh strict you have to basically um you know strictly adhere to the evm spec that's why there's evm compatibility which is what arbitrary currently has and with nitro it brings them even

closer to equivalence and then you have optimism which has kind of like equivalence uh and then there are kind of like benefits to to to each approach there but the i guess goal with a zk vm is really like i mean one of the initial goals probably not like the long-term goal one of the initial goals is really to give people or give developers the ability to kind of like port their evm applications to um to a zkvm from mainnet or from kind of like an optimistic rollup or something like that or build kind of like evm applications without having to change much at all like you definitely want to make it as compatible as possible and hopefully get towards that full equivalency eventually now none of that is kind of like live today but the code is open source for the polygon zkvm um

and as i said there'll be a permissionless test net for people to kind of like play around with uh very soon i think in the next couple months and then a main net hopefully by the end of 2022. so that's the big announcement that polygon has been teasing for the last i think few weeks uh it was there um and i watched the live stream here geordi balina from the hermes team the polygon hermes team kind of like walked through this and announced it and you can see here he kind of like announced that all the code is open source starting today which is a very very cool it's kind of like i guess a difference to some of the other kind of like zk teams out there um obviously especially starkware has been kind of like knocked about this before about how they have like licensing behind uh some

of the stuff that they do with their zk tech but when it comes to the zk polygon zkbm everything is open source even although it's not even live today so you can go to the github repository go through the code play around with it if you want clone it do whatever you want with it basically which obviously i think is very very cool so that was awesome to see as i said you can read this little thread here for more information about this uh but yeah that's basically what was announced today now this was obviously isn't the only major kind of like zk announcement that was happening today uh zk sync is also announcing something uh shortly i think in the next couple of hours from time of recording so you may see that announcement before you watch the roll up but it hasn't happened yet so i can't

cover it yet uh but that's another major announcement that has been teased as well uh probably something got to do with zk sync 2.0 i would assume uh considering that they've been working on that for quite a while i'll be a very very exciting time for the zk space right now i spoke about scrolls kind of pre-alpha test nets i think yesterday or the day before on the refuel so we've had basically well we will have had three major zk related announcements in the same week uh from so from three very very uh kind of like um uh highly respected and highly intelligent teams of scaling teams and highly uh kind of like efficient scaling teams which i which i really really love which brings me to the final thing i want to talk about uh this when it comes to scaling where i put up this tweet

where i said you know 2022 2023 are going to be absolutely insane for the ethereum scaling wars it's what i'm most excited about in ethereum besides the merge and you guys know this like the thing that excites me most besides the ethereum merge is obviously the scaling wars or kind of like the scaling improvements that are coming to ethereum both at layer one and layer two obviously at layer one we have proto dank sharding and the dang sharding effort in general which hopefully we can get the first iteration of early to mid next year uh but the layer twos themselves are basically now you know i mean i i did say that when optimism did their token i felt like that the wars had really kind of like begun the scaling was or the roll-up wars so to speak but i feel like they're just going to keep like

getting more fierce and more fierce because i mean when you really think about it the market opportunity for being kind of like the premier or one of the winning roll-ups is just absolutely mind-boggling mind-bogglingly massive right it's just crazy big and uh it's not just crazy big from kind of like a market perspective and from like a token valuation perspective potentially but it's also crazy big for these teams who want to build something that changes the world right like from a social kind of um perspective there as well so the scaling walls are going to keep heating up you know as these teams do more tokens obviously zk sync has announced they're doing a token stack aware has announced they're doing a token for stark net optimism's token is live matic token is obviously live um you have arbitrary which hasn't announced they're doing a

token yet but like i feel like they will uh and and something like scroll as well uh and there's like i think a couple of the smaller kind of like roll ups out there or layer twos out there as well uh immutable i mean even immutable x which is building built using star wars technology has a token too so the wars are going to get more and more fierce as time goes on especially as we have kind of like tokens for these things now uh but the wars don't have to be kind of like i guess violent and negative they can be very very positive because it means that all these teams are in competition with each other and they're kind of like incentivized to out compete you know the other kind of um the other kind of solutions out there so for example uh you know arbitrary their

odyssey event and obviously they hit kind of like the limits of their network because they're waiting for the nitro upgrade to go live well that could potentially be an opportunity for another chain to kind of like play off of i haven't seen any other the chains play off of that at this point in time but those sorts of things are definitely going to become more common i think uh and i think at the end of the day i i i think i've said this before on the refuel where i said that the technology to scale especially you know via a roll up will eventually become commoditized like block space would just become commoditized or at least ethereum block space will be and the strengths of these kind of like platforms will really be dictated by the business development and marketing at the end of the day and

you know you guys know i've said before that i think that polygon has probably the best business development in the uh in the kind of like ecosystem uh today but that doesn't have to always be the case these other teams can definitely ramp up i mean i think arbitram has done a phenomenal job on their business development side optimism is definitely catching uh catching up now as well they had a slow start but they're definitely catching up uh the other teams i mean scroll isn't live yet so they can't they're not really you know there's no point really doing any business development or marketing at this point in time um and polygon solutions right they only really have the pos chain which is where the majority of usage is uh but they're going to take all that experience they're going to take all that uh kind of like partnerships that

they've built up over time and port that to their zkvm uh kind of like implementations as well so there's just so much going on here guys like the wars are going to get so heated and as i said like we're going to get to a point where block space or ethereum block space is commoditized it's going to get so cheap as well with prototype sharding like the numbers that i've seen are just crazy the fact that we're going to collapse costs by 50 to 100 x for layer 2s is just going to be insane and then builders will be able to kind of like build whatever they want at the end of the day right they'll be able to kind of build on actual scalable infrastructure that we haven't had before i mean people always say oh it's always been the year of scaling for ethereum it's like yes it

has but they're different kind of like years i mean the early days we're literally just figuring out how and what to build and what is actually going to work we went from state channels like ryden to something like plasma to roll-ups now right and now we're you know within roll-ups we have different types of roll-ups we have optimistic roll-ups we have zk roll ups and then in in that we have different kind of like optimistic bulbs and different z care roll-ups you have zk roll-ups that aren't evm compatible or equivalent and you have ones that are you have optimistic wall ups that are basically the same and you have different solutions you have some that are kind of like fully private some that aren't and there's just like kind of like a world of opportunity here for teams to build out whatever technology they want and just

and just outsource their security and their infrastructure on the security and consensus side to to ethereum so we're gonna see more and more of these things come online and as i said before i think that the industry really has a lag of about six to twelve months when it comes to just kind of like funding and building the right things like you're probably seeing over the last couple of months there's been a bunch of layer new layer ones get announced i think a couple of them are named aptos and sui or or something like that or i don't know how to pronounce it you guys know my pronunciation of words is absolutely terrible but there's been those two and i think there's been another one that i just i'm forgetting right now um and but i think that the reason why these things are kind of like being

unveiled now and being shield now is because they probably came to ideation six to five months ago when the old layer one trade was really hot and now you know the people that are investing in these things have already committed to it people who are building these things they've already committed to it and maybe they realize that layer two's uh the future and they should have built layer two instead but they have to give the layer one player go i think so i think what's going to happen is we're still going to see these layer ones uh that kind of like we're ideated on six or twelve months ago but going forward in the next six to twelve months i think we're gonna see more and more layer twos come online uh because it's just you know for all the reasons i've outlined before it just

makes much more sense to spin up a layer two than it does a layer one um and there's also kind of like the app chain thing as well but i don't really think that's gonna take off i think the app chain stuff is definitely a niche i don't think like i i'm not bought into the thing that we're gonna have like thousands tens of thousands of different blockchains or with their own app you know app-specific blockchains i don't think that's going to be the case i think we're going to have you know some small set of like really big generalized platforms with maybe a long tail of app chains but most of them not really doing anything at the end of the day because we already have that within the industry right like we have like a long tail of alt layer ones that do nothing that have

like zero long term sustainable adoption um and we have a lot of them that were kind of like around in 2017 or 2018 that were huge back then or at least kind of like relatively big back then and it's just non-existent today so i don't really buy into that whole app chain kind of like thesis there and i don't think that and i think people who kind of like want it to happen or are trying to make it happen literally trying to force it into reality and they're not willing to accept that it's just not the right model or just not the model that's going to succeed obviously still early days but i really don't think that you know that long term anything can compete with mature rollups because they're just such a better a vastly better technology and a vastly better solution for so many

people out there but yeah anyway i'm looking forward to seeing how the scaling wars play out over the next couple years definitely think it's going to be fierce it's going to be fierce competition there is probably going to be some toxicity as there always is with this sort of with these sorts of things but i think it's going to be overall in it positive because competition breeds innovation it lets people kind of i guess like um develop things without kind of resting on their laurels as well and we're gonna see some big winners emerge uh that's for sure all right so an interesting tweet thread from crypto texan today i just wanted to highlight where he started out by saying here are eight misconceptions about the merge on ethereum that you should know now i'm not going to read the all eight of these out i have discussed each of

them on the refill before of course but this is a really great thread to send kind of like your friends or send anyone that's asking you anyone that you see that doesn't actually understand um kind of like what the merch is and has these bad narratives in their head so for example obviously the first bad narrative or misconception here that crypto text and highlights is people believing that the merge reduces gas fees you know i've described in the past of why that's not the case right that is probably the most prevalent one i think out there um but that's definitely kind of like not the case and then you know i'm just gonna pick a couple more from random here uh i kind of like one here about um you know staking apr tripling after the merge um it's not going to triple after the merge i've said before guys like i

think that you know at most it could go from you know maybe 50 to 100 percent after the merge depending on fee revenue and depending on mev that's kind of hard to calculate there's definitely a misconception that i've seen floating around um there's kind of like there's the popular ones and there's kind of like the ones that don't get brought up as much but are still worth kind of like talking about such as you know the merge resulting in downtime of the chain like that's just not going to happen a successful merge basically means the chain never stops running blocks never stopped being produced it's just one block is proof of work the next block is proof of stake and then proof of work is gone forever so i just wanted to highlight this thread i highly recommend giving it a read i always love kind of

people other than me obviously putting together this sort of stuff and you know there's just like a small handful of people that usually put together these things but having people that um that aren't those small handful putting together and kind of like spreading the word here is really really great so really appreciate crypto texan for putting out this thread i think it's great i'll link it in the youtube description below for you to check out all right so a fresh tweet from superfiz today which is basically a reminder that ethereum validators will not be able to use infuria after the merge uh for their kind of like execution layer obligation so if you are a solo validator solo staker you run any of that kind of infrastructure on your own then you need to set up your own full execution client as i've said before you know you can you can set up

geth but ideally you'll be setting up eragon base2 or nethermine which is the minority clients here uh because you won't be able to outsource this responsibility to inferior or alchemy after the merge so just another reminder out there like i want to keep reminding people of this especially if you're a solo val well i mean if you are a solo validator you don't have to worry about this if you're kind of like staking with a service provider or anything like that because they have to worry about that and make sure you remind them about that too just to be safe um but if you are a solo validator you need to do this and ideally you want to do it now don't wait two months until the merge happens and then do it because you know you there could be an issue with your setup that

could be kind of like a sync time may take longer than you anticipated uh and you don't want to kind of like be offline when the merge happens obviously so you definitely get that kind of like full node sync now it's very easy to do spin up any of these clients and you can do it on your staking kind of like pc i mean i've obviously already done mine very proud runner of never mind i don't run geth obviously i want to contribute to a client diversity here so i'm running nether mind works well i haven't had any issues with it uh so yeah if you are a kind of solo validator definitely make sure to spin up your own execution layer clients uh from using one of these pieces of software all right so uh speaking of i guess like staking here east taker is running a

kind of like uh webinar i think or a workshop on the merge and uh you know are you prepared for the merge as a solo staker so as i was just discussing there's a bunch of things that solo stickers need to do one of them is running an execution layer client for the merge but there are other things that you need to do as well and i've talked about the merge readiness checklist before and obviously i have talked uh about kind of like the things that that entails but if you're still unsure if you're still not kind of like confident with it then you can join this eatstaker merge prep validator workshop which is happening on friday july 29th at 11am edt uh and i think there's also going to be this this should also be recorded so you can probably watch this if you can't make that time but as it

said here this is a great opportunity for solo stakers to prepare for and ask questions about the merge and this is run by the eatstaker community you're not going to get people better than the easter egg community to ask these questions to really at the end of the day they are on top of everything when it comes to staking so you should definitely uh check out this workshop the full details can be found in this linked post here and i'll link this tweet in the youtube description below for you to kind of access that post all right so a couple of updates from arjun here today i'll tweet from argent here today so uh there's been a new update for argent x they've added fiat values for tokens and a more detailed transaction screen so if you have been using the argent x wallet on uh kind of like desktop

i guess like on the web browser well now you can see the dollar value of your holdings which is just a really great quality of life feature obviously uh you know seeing the amount of tokens you have is all well and good especially when it comes to like a stable coin obviously you can just quickly do the the um the dollar conversion in your head maybe not to your local currency if you're not in usd but you can do the usd conversion obviously instantly um but when it comes to like eth or another kind of like asset that is volatile that is not kind of uh easy to calculate well obviously you want that that detail to be there and then there's also detailed transactions uh on the kind of like second pane you can see here and send transaction some more uh information there so just a cool little update on

arjun x and the second tweet they put out uh which is another little update here uh they they kind of said vitalik once said the incident of money should not cost five cents per transaction we agree that's why we came up with a solution with your arjun zk sync account sending crypto to anyone anywhere in the world costs just two cents fast cheap and borderless the future of money this i mean i've talked about this at length before about how these interfaces that sit on top of layer twos and other and kind of like protocols and d5 protocols on ethereum uh what is going to kind of like be our window maybe most people's kind of like window and front door into the world of of crypto and arjun is like at the forefront of that their mobile wallet app is super easy to use super user friendly they're very

focused on ui ux um and you know they're always kind of like um improving it and obviously having ultra cheap transaction fees is a give is kind of like a must for the regular user when you really think about the people that are willing to pay the transaction fees on ethereum there are obviously a bunch of different groups but if you exclude you know the mev chasers you exclude uh the whales um and you kind of like exclude maybe the people who are not doing maybe not doing mav but doing kind of like related things to to that uh to kind of like take advantage of um of inefficiencies within the chain if you exclude all of that and just think of like the quote unquote normal people they're not going to be spending like 10 20 50 hundred dollars on fees

like nowhere near that guys like that is seriously if you're just people who are involved in the ecosystem and who are you know maybe making money by spending that much on fees like for example if you have an airdrop waiting for you and it's worth a thousand dollars and it cost you a hundred dollars to claim that air drop well then it obviously it makes sense for you to claim the air drop it's a it's a free 900 profit so from that perspective you know that's all fine and dandy frosty in the ecosystem but there are a lot of people who will never get these air drops because they just don't you know maybe they don't farm them they don't use the right applications or anything like that um and and these kind of people are just using this technology from a pure like normie standpoint for lack of a better

term where they're just coming in with basically no knowledge of the ecosystem and they're just trying to get some kind of value out of it such as maybe earning a yield on their stable coins or swa or kind of like buying some eighth with um with fiat using kind of like a wallet like this instead of using a centralized exchange that when you kind of like think about that that is where it really hits most kind of like users and that's why i think something like argent doesn't work on ethereum kind of like layer one at all like it's not something that is sustainable on there and that's why they they've been kind of like on the forefront of adopting these layer two solutions and you know even obviously two cents is not uh cheap enough and and definitely not the cheapest that we can get it like it's

cheap enough for i guess maybe the people in the in in first world maybe the middle class people but for people who who are living in maybe third world countries and people who are who are definitely kind of like um uh are kind of like not middle class right like below middle class or something like that that racks up very very quickly if they want to get involved with this technology and if we want this technology to actually improve those people's lives so we need to get the costs to basically pennies on the dollar and then basically free like free isn't actually free free would be subsidized by the platforms themselves and then make money elsewhere but uh for them to offer that then we need the kind of like ultimate kind of like fee to be essentially free when you when you think about it and we're going to do that with

kind of like sharding and a bunch of other things right to improve these layer 2 uh solutions for the fees to get really really cheap um but until that happens we probably won't get like the mass adoption i really do think that the only way we get true mass adoption and kind of like mass sustainable and and long adoption is by collapsing the fees to the point where it's actually economically viable for the platforms to just subsidize the fees for their users so the users don't ever see fees because at the end of the day like there are obviously fees attached to a lot of the traditional system and a lot of the things that we use in our everyday lives but most of them are not are not fees that are percentage based most of them are kind of like

a flat fees right when you really think about it so if you're doing kind of like a um if you're doing kind of like a a a sorry a um a buy on like a brokerage or something depending on who you go with it's probably you know i mean it can vary right but like it's like a flat fee for example that you pay or like uh for example a um a merchant fee on um on using kind of like f transactions in australia i think it's like 30 cents or something per transaction so it's not like a percentage-based thing it's kind of like a flat fee so when you like if you think about that um that's not the same when it comes to ethereum fees they vary wildly obviously the transactions that use more gas will cost more and all that sorts of stuff so just collapsing

all those costs down getting it to the point that these teams can subsidize these sorts of things just vastly improves the user experience and allows them to essentially have a seamless kind of like experience with all these sorts of tools and not be scared off and still inherit the security of ethereum of course that's that's obviously one of the most important things uh but yeah i think that's when we get like actual mass kind of like adoption but until then we're going to keep improving we're going to keep working on it we're going to keep iterating all these sorts of stuff and teams like arjun are definitely going to keep improving their solutions as well in order to onboard more and more people into the crypto ecosystem all right so speaking of mev the mav boost landing page has gone light it provides a one-stop shop for everything

you need to know about mev boost now i've spoken about mev boost before it's basically the implementation that you'll be using if you're running a solo validator uh in order to kind of like capture mev post merge now you can kind of see on this website it's got a short explanation of what mev boost is um what uh kind of like consensus clients it is currently compatible with uh what the node operators are ready so which ones are currently using it and a bunch of other things here as well as an faq so as i said before this is part of the merge readiness checklist if you are not running mev boost today or if you haven't kind of like looked into this and you run a solo validator it's probably well worth well worth your time to look into this simply because you'd be leaving money on the table if you

don't mev could potentially account for a rather large boost to your kind of like staking returns due to the fact that it is a rather large part of i guess like minor returns today but it's harder to quantify simply because it doesn't flow into the kind of like apr or anything like that it just kind of like flows to the to the miners and it's kind of like on a best guess estimate of like how much mev flows it like i'm not sure if it'll be like that much easier to calculate this stuff post merge but it should definitely be easier so and as i mentioned just there we're probably going to see big variances in the amount of eth people are making from staking or the amount of apr they're getting simply based on mev and and and kind of like also a fear from you too you know

there's going to be some validators funny enough that will probably set their fee recipient address to something that's not there kind of like um own address maybe it's a uh it's the protocol guild for example like i thought about this myself as well like do i want with some of my validators to set the fee recipient address and the mev recipient address to the protocol guild so you know i have all my like i have all these validators spun up i'll have like you know some of them going to me some of them go to protocol guild some of them going elsewhere you know you can do that that's the flexibility of it which is in my mind really really cool um but i'm curious to see how many people do that and what that kind of like landscape looks like as well uh but yeah maybe that's getting

a little bit off topic but you should definitely check out mev boost uh you can kind of go to this i'll link it in the youtube description below but the url is boost.flashbots.net if you want to check it out uh there as well all right finally here we have uh kevin owaki's tldr of his fcc talk which was the announcement of a kind of like bitcoin passport here which is the first decentralized protocol rolled out by git coin dow and it enables any dap to use git coin grant sybil resistance so you can go to get coin dot co slash pass passport to uh kind of like check this out and you can also read uh awoke's thread here for his tldr but essentially with bitcoin passport it is and they're calling it a transportable proof of personhood identity for the web 3 space

you can earn rewards by proving your personal on any integrated app leverages the same identity you already use on git coin grants and there's an open source sdk and alpha to integrate with apps today i've talked about decentralized identity and reputation systems before and about how whoever solves this whoever provides the right solution for this is kind of going to win big here because it is a holy grail kind of thing where it's like we need this we obviously need decentralized identity we need to be able to differentiate between like who's a bot who's kind of like a real person uh who's pretending to be a real person uh not necessarily a bot right who's pretending to be like say you have like three ain't on accounts and it's just one person um controlling that right but there's also the kind of like thing of

being giving identity to these anons you can create your own new identity based on your ethereum activity for example so uh you know just to pick out one random anon who everyone knows the gen spartan for example right like everyone knows who who jen spartan is on twitter but as far as i don't know no one actually knows who they are in real life they've managed to protect their identity uh uh pretty well but the thing is is that that shouldn't stop them from being able to have an on chain or on on you know on ethereum identity and they will be able to with something like bitcoin passport where they can use their accumulated uh kind of like on chain you know twitter reputation and kind of like pull that all together in order to have something like a git coin possible which i think is very very cool because at the

end of the day like just because it's an anon account doesn't mean that it's not a real person like i said yes obviously if someone can create and manage multiple anon accounts but for the sake of argument let's just say that you know there's obviously a real person in charge of the gen spartan or managing the the gen spartan persona an account and that person shouldn't be barred from things just because they're not kind of like doxed for example and there's not kind of like a human that you know who's behind the account so i think from that perspective uh we definitely need things like this and it also helps that things like this also help to kind of like weed out all of the i guess like bots and sybil kind of like attempts from other people out there so that you can't just kind of like keep

creating accounts and keep having the same influence and same power as someone who has proved their identity and prove to who they are through the bitcoin passport and build up this kind of like reputation over a longer period of time so i think that all that sort of stuff is very very cool but don't listen to me ramble on about it you should definitely check out this uh kind of like thread from from kevin here it definitely explains it i think at the end of the thread he also links to his talk on youtube which you should go check out if you don't want to read the thread and you and you and though if you want more context on things as well i think this is just the very beginning of kind of like this sort of stuff this proof of personal this decentralized

identity reputation and i think it's gonna going to be extremely important going forward especially for things like decentralized social media and web three things more you know generally and i think that it's also going to play a big part in thing in something like d5 as well because hopefully we can get to a point where we can do under collateralized lending where you can actually have the concept of credit come to defy um without having to do kyc or anything like that you have kind of like your bitcoin passport and that gives you a certain level of trust and you can have kind of like an uncollateralized uh lending as well which i think would be very very cool but anyway on that note 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 me a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone