Scaling Ethereum, More merge updates & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #226 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cesano and today's the 8th of october 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so uh something that brantley i put out today on twitter he put a put an interesting tweet thread out here that i just wanted to go over today uh he basically starts this tweet off with something noobs need to understand is that ethereum is actually delivering on the priest 2016 promises of bitcoin uh then he goes on to say programmable money smart contracts nfts etc all these concepts were widely discussed in bitcoin circles for years with a few attempts but little progress that's why vitalik made ethereum to try another way to do it and it has succeeded obviously right um the this idea that bitcoin is

just digital gold in quotes got going circa 2016 relatively late during the block size limit wars previous to that bitcoin was programmable money with all the ideas that are now actually happening with ethereum the pre-2016 bitcoin community arguably has more in common today with ethereum than bitcoin so a little bit of i guess like a fun story here i was actually into bitcoin in 2013 that was my first kind of like foray into crypto i think it was maybe april 2013 or something like that around that time i remember uh you know shortly after i got into it um silk road got shut down and then kind of like uh the bubble started and we went up to like over a thousand dollars bitcoin back then then it crashed uh uh due to the mt gox drama um but back then the community was very

very different to what it is today the bitcoin community there was no talk about digital gold or anything like that there was no you know crazy maxis on twitter and stuff like that there was there was none of that it was literally pretty much like the ethereum community today there was open discussions of all these really cool ideas of really cool things that you could do with bitcoin and what you could do with smart contracts all these sorts of stuff um and you know there were obvious there were a few forks and stuff that were kind of trying to do things that couldn't be done on bitcoin but like people said okay well you know let's just try them on these forks and then once the technology proves itself out we'll just kind of like put it into bitcoin and then i got out of bitcoin like 2014

once the market crashed i just you know left the crypto ecosystem stupid mistake on my part but i did and then when i came back in early 2017 and i discovered ethereum the bitcoin community was very different to what i remembered it as i didn't find myself aligning with with kind of most of that community um you know bitcoin maxis were kind of pretty much a thing at that point and it was just like super super weird for me and i saw ethereum and i'm like holy like this is amazing like ethereum is doing all this really cool stuff with smart contracts and all these kind of ideas about like decentralized social media and stuff like that uh obviously a lot of it was early but they were openly being discussed near the community was incredibly inviting and then throughout 2017 you had uh i

guess like the block size was right they started in 2016 i think as well but the block size was basically uh this kind of like warring factions within the bitcoin community where um you know one faction wanted bigger blocks so they wanted to kind of um remove the one megabyte hard kind of um cap on the blocks make it at least two megabytes and i think up to four ideally to basically scale bitcoin's base layer and then was the other camp you said no no well we have we have to keep it at one megabyte we're gonna scale via lightning network and layer twos and all this sort of stuff and those kind of came split off when the bitcoin uh cash fork happened right and the funny thing is is that the bitcoin cash people a lot of them i see in the ethereum community today bitcoin

cash is obviously fizzled out there's not really anything going on there but i think that's because they basically just the people kind of like migrated to ethereum that community migrated to ethereum because they kind of like shared the same set of values and they shared the same kind of views at the at the end of the day there so um yeah i mean i just when bradley when i saw this tweet from brantley today i was like this just had my kind of like drug my memory and you know i remember going back to old bitcoin talk forum posts like really early ones like i'm talking like even 2011 2012 where even satoshi was talking about things that ethereum is doing today and it's just amazing to me how i guess like the big you know what the bitcoin community turned into which is essentially i mean

i don't even know what the bitcoin community really like holistically is these days there seems to be a bunch of you know different warring factions between them there's obviously the bitcoin maximalist but then there's the people who say oh the maximus don't represent bitcoin then you've got like the kind of like more i guess like libertarian bitcoiners who are not necessarily maximalist but like very hardcore bitcoin um and you know they say oh nothing can you serve bitcoin nothing's better than bitcoin but they don't think that every other project's a scam and you know then you have people in there that are still trying to fight the good fight and trying to kind of i guess like bring more features to bitcoin and build more stuff on bitcoin well and you know they're also involved in the ethereum community as well from what i've noticed

but you know all the innovation all the kind of like experimentation all the really cool things are happening on ethereum i mean i don't have to tell you guys you guys follow along with the refuel every day you know exactly what's happening but it's just amazing kind of like how communities can shift and that's that's actually been one of my biggest fears for ethereum over the years is like can we keep the community uh you know as good as it was when i first got into it like can we keep a decentralized community that just keeps growing over time are open you know decentralized kind of like um you know retain the same values and ethos and mission i think we have to this point which has actually surprised me because as communities get larger they become harder to scale um and i'm going to talk about that in a sec and you know

at that point you kind of have like sub-communities that form but and there are already are sub-communities within ethereum obviously you have like people that are really interested in d5 or people that are really just interested in nfts and yeah and then you have people who are just like really interested in ethereum itself and each of these cams may or may not care about ethereum's core values or mission or ethos but i think that uh the overwhelming majority of ethereums basically care about what at least what i think is the most important thing with ethereum is how open it is um if you're being open permissionless you know decentralized allowing anyone to build whatever they want on it allowing anyone to use it in any which way they want and no one no one kind of like imposes kind of like any technical limitations on

that i think that is kind of like the core of what what ethereum is and because of that you have all these communities blossoming but i know plenty of people who like d5 but hate nfts and vice versa which you know might seem bizarre but that's just the way it kind of plays out there and i know plenty of people that um that don't necessarily agree with the way ethereum is scaling they think that theorem should scale at the base layer instead of via layer twos they're not big communities they're small communities and they have good arguments and bad arguments too at least subjectively in my opinion but still it's you know the community is never going to be like all kind of like a hive mind for example in any kind of like form there is never going to be a hundred percent agreeance on things people are going to

be fi you know fighting debating all this sort of stuff i mean look at even eip1559 i still see people talking about it today trying to get i guess like flood it and say oh five five nine was the reason gas prices went up when it has been you know irrefutably proven that it's that wasn't the reason but people will still go on about it and that's fine people can keep saying that but for me i just look at the hard facts and i look at the truth behind things but i don't think you know generally when you're trying to scale a community i don't think you're going to be able to keep everyone like in sync to be honest right we can keep the blockchain in sync we keep nodes in sync and in consensus but uh doing that with humans is is pretty much impossible so uh but yeah i

guess like thanks to brantley for triggering my my kind of like brain today with this it was an interesting kind of thing to think about and obviously you know i shared it with you guys on the refuel uh uh and yeah i'm just really glad ethereum is in the position that it is in today with regards to kind of like its use cases all right so this is a tweet that i put out yesterday and i also wrote uh yesterday's newsletter about it where i said ethereum is a mega city and ether is its native currency uh it scales vertically with layer twos it's scales horizontally with sharding it scales socially with decentralization and bringing this all together scales ethereum's mega city to the world and beyond now by beyond i mean to space like ethereum will be in space eventually right uh i think there is

already an ethereum node running in space uh or at least in the um the atmosphere uh with uh with what is that a space chain or something like that i think you can google it and find find some more information on that but what i wanted to focus on here because i've already talked about scaling a lot lately is scaling socially with decentralization and because i was obviously just talking about how communities get bigger it becomes very hard to scale them and to keep them in sync and all those sorts of things but on the flip side of it i think that ethereum scales at social layout so basically the people layout the layer zero that we talk about uh that i talk about sometimes on the refuel and you know you'll hear uh bankless talk about it a lot but basically that that kind of

like final layer that is i guess like the bedrock of uh this entire ecosystem or the entire ethereum ecosystem because if the technical stuff fails us we have to fall back to the social layer like if there is a a critical bug within the um within the ethereum kind of chain and clients fill out a consensus which we've seen happen before the social air kicks in and kind of like repairs the damage now how do you scale that right how do you scale kind of like the social layer to millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of people uh and i i argue that you do that with decentralization because if you don't have decentralization and you're trying to scale a social layer what ends up happening is that you have a top-down approach where the centralized entities at the top whether that be kind of like

a one person a group of people or kind of like a company or something will set the ethos mission goals and everything for everyone else you know underneath kind of like the top there whereas ethereum is the opposite of that ethereum is a bottoms up approach it doesn't uh it doesn't kind of like impose any laws on people doesn't impose any kind of restrictions doesn't tell people what they should or shouldn't do it forms it's kind of like uh ethos and its mission uh as a collective as a kind of like social collective and that by by doing so uh it leads itself to decentralization because there is no dictator at the top saying that okay well to be involved in this community you have to do this this and this it's the other way around where everyone says okay well i want to be involved in this

community but i want to do it my way there's no one telling him exactly how to do it and ethereum allows you to do that because ethereum is an expressive and permissionless platform so when you take that kind of view i think it really shows the strength of ethereum's kind of like social scalability which i think is the most important thing technical scalability as i mentioned yesterday two you need two things for decentralization technical and social decentralization you can't have uh just one and expect your ch your kind of like network to to grow to kind of like uh essentially uh grow to like worldwide scale because you can be technically decentralized but then if there's no social layout when something goes wrong technically well who you're gonna fall back to well you fall back to this decentralized social layer at the end of the day right so you know it might just

be like a foundation that has all the core devs within it um and you know i explained this yesterday so i won't rehash it now but i think it's just something that is just not discussed enough the fact that ethereum social layer at least right now is so good that we could actually defend against these sorts of things you know we have a have a kind of like culture of uh running full nodes and and monitoring the network and making sure that we build things right like we instead of kind of like um uh sacrificing decentralization at the base layer to achieve scale uh technical scale we will scale vertically with layer twos and horizontally with shouting involved while retaining decentralization and security and one thing i forgot to mention in this tweet actually is how ethereum scales its culture and it scales its culture via nfts nfts are cultural

objects they come in many different flavors and forms anyone can create an nft anyone can attribute value to an nft any community can form around any nft like it doesn't matter it's all subjective but that's how we scale ethereum's culture to the world because we basically say well you know if you want to get to know ethereum culture if you want to be involved with ethereum culture well these are our cultural items right our cultural totems uh as as kind of like i think david hoffman refers to these things as uh and these things come in the form of like a crypto punk riot or a verdenza or an art block or something like that that is ethereum's culture it kind of expressing itself and there's plenty of other nfts out there i'm just naming a few of them of course and you know if if you have

your favorite nft well you just show someone that you go okay this is like my favorite nft because of this this and this you know i have mine on display behind me on on the mural thing here uh right now it's displaying uh kitty's kind of like block explorer piece and i have the erp-1559 and ft i have a bunch of other ones that are ethereum law and i love those kind of nfts so that's and i've you know people who have come over to my house i've showed them this i've been like you know this is basically a kind of like what this is and what this means and stuff like that and they think it's cool right that's kind of like how we scale ethereum's culture to the world so yeah that's just one thing that i missed here but still i think it's like pretty

interesting to think about these things because scaling is not just a technical side it's also the social side and definitely something that needs more discussion but i'm going to leave it at that because there's some merge updates to get through now i think this is the last deal the second last day of the merge interoperability event but ben edgington kind of like screenshotted the milestone tracker here uh and milestone four seems to be going really well if you remember that milestone four is the uh i think many to many kind of like test nets oh it's even updated again so these are all the clients that are able to kind of like do the merge and kind of stay in sync with each other and milestone four is the many to many interrupts so two or more uh eth1 and e2 clients interoperating with each other and then m5 milestone

five will probably get some updates on tomorrow and that's the all to all persistent devnets so ready uh execution lane consensus layer eth1 and eth2 layer clients will be staying in sync and doing the merge together so i mean there's a bunch of other merge screenshots here which i'll link in the youtube description uh and and also adrian sutton put together a video demo uh so ethereum merge local test net demo it's about a 10 minute video and he goes through and explains exactly what's happening in it which i thought was really really cool and there's a few other screenshots here beso basu and lighthouse have uh have kind of like done the merge and staying in sync you have uh uh what is it geth plus teku and baesu plus teku doing it as well so uh again like eth1 and these two clients or execution lane consensus

layer clients uh sasha's uh put out an update of baseu and lodestar running together in m4 uh and i mean and then adrian put out another tweet where he said now we're getting serious geth taku besu teku geth lighthouse and basu lighthouse all running the full merge transition and staying in sync and finalizing the chain validators shed evenly across all four this is actually pretty insane and they give you some context here they're not just doing the merge transition they're staying in sync and also finalizing the chain which is exactly what we want to see because in proof of stake with the beacon chain we have finalization every 12 minutes and justification happens every six minutes uh every epoch or epic you need two epics just to get the train finalized so

the fact that this is happening is really really cool and then you have the validators shed evenly across all four as well so the funny thing is i've talked about kind of like client diversity before if only we had validated shared evenly across all the clients on mainnet that would be really cool and be a really really awesome healthy network obviously on these devnets you can do this very easily you don't have to rely on on on anything it's just like totally centralized of course but yeah i mean as adrian said we're getting serious now and we're gonna see what happens with milestone five either probably tomorrow or the day after and then after that uh i've been discussing i've been saying like the test nets are coming and things like that i'm not sure how when the test nets are going to come it could come

like at least month it could come next month and i don't know how they're going to how long they're going to last like we could have a three-month test there we could have a six-month test net with it just depends on what the core researchers researchers and engineers want to see like do they want to see this thing uh running smoothly for three months before attempting it on main net i er on the side of let's take longer to do it let's make sure everyone feels comfortable about it because i mean the merge on main as i've discussed before it is the biggest upgrade in ethereum's history it is you know it's kind of like a very unique thing where no network of ethereum scale has done this before there have been other networks that have changed their consensus mechanisms um i actually think cardeno cardano did it back in the day

uh a few years ago when they were like very very small i mean in terms of like economic activity they're still kind of like small the actual network but ethereum itself i mean it's a 400 plus billion dollar network uh it is um it it and that's just the eighth one network then you have the 18 network which has like a bunch of eight securing uh the beacon chain the tens of billion dollars worth you have all this economic activity economic activity happening you have all of these uh stakeholders within the ecosystem as well all these things connecting into it bridging in and out of it this can't go wrong like i i can't emphasize enough how like i don't know i mean i think we could recover from something going wrong here like if for some reason we had to roll it back but i can't emphasize enough how

disastrous that would be and how many different stakeholders would get affected by this people may lose money if this goes wrong like seriously it's a nightmare scenario if something screws rpr and maybe i'm maybe i'm being too kind of like uh a harsh about that um but like i don't know i've run through this scenario in my head many times because people keep asking me it's okay you know if this actually breaks and if something goes wrong you know what's the worst case scenario well the worst case scenario is the fact that uh like everything breaks uh and i don't think that you know i don't necessarily think that will happen because i think uh leading up to the merge what's gonna end up happening is that things like exchanges are gonna pause the positive withdrawals just like they do for normal hard forks uh the

bridges may have made may pause things if they're centralized bridges and stuff like that the layer twos may pause things there's gonna be a you know a bit of centralization there but there's gonna be a lot of bridges and and layer twos and other things that can't actually be paused and we'll just keep continuing on and you know it's just i don't know like i really do think that the risks of this happening are very very low like a catastrophic event but the problem becomes is that if it does happen then we need to have a plan in place for how we recover from it and i don't think there's a plan yet i think there's bits and bobs in different places but in terms of like a concrete plan i don't think it exists just yet but it will of course um but in saying that we

obviously just want it to go smoothly and that's it we don't want anything else kind of like breaking there and maybe i'm wrong in saying that everything will break if this goes wrong um i'm not you know 100 across the technicals and what could go wrong what what can't go wrong all that sorts of stuff but you know just taking a kind of like high level view here if there's a bug where the uh kind of like the blocks can't get processed well then the ethereum chain basically halts and it just stays in place now what does that mean for the rest of the ecosystem well it it's not very good depending on how long it's down for because what ends up happening is that let's say the eighth price deviates 20 percent let's say the price dumps 20 while the network's down well then once the network comes back up

there's going to be all these d5 positions that may have to be liquidated right based on i guess like the old price and and you know they may not get liquidated and there's going to be a lot of stuff going on with amm pools there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong and i you know i talked about this when celina went offline for 18 hours how they kind of like were saved by the fact that the price stayed around that they said around the same kind of like price it was when it went down and when it went back up but if in each case yeah it'd be interesting to see what happens there but uh yeah we'll have to keep monitoring this i'll keep you guys updated if if i do see any documents covering like what's the worst case scenario and like what do we do in this

scenario but i think that we want to obviously avoid that at all costs and i actually think that the chan the risk of that happening is extremely low but yeah great to see more updates around the merge here this will all be linked to the youtube description you can go check it out for yourself so optimism have their new website live now i think i discussed this a few weeks ago that they were teasing that they were going live with a new website so you can now use it to browse the adapts that are live the bridges and tooling supported within the optimistic ethereum ecosystem so you can see on your screen here the new website it looks awesome i love this website like i mean this is like a really really clean site you can see here the bridge is front and center deposit now so it'll

take you to the bridge pay the gateway page which is their bridge page it gives you some quick stats here then you can see which apps are supported right now you need swap synthetics lyra rubicon quinta and one inch are currently supported uh i think uh maybe there's more supported yeah oh okay that's that's those are kind of like the star apps and then you have like the tooling and stuff like that like metamask and coinbase wallet and the bridges and all that sort of stuff and zapper support yeah yeah that makes sense definitely there um this is obviously going to just keep growing over time and you scroll down you can kind of like see an introduction how it works documentation frequently asked questions and and kind of like uh more information about optimism a twitter feed all that good stuff there so really really cool

to see this website uh refreshed and live i mean i love this because you know as techies people team people kind of like sometimes think well you know we're tech focused we don't need to have like a really nice flashy website when in reality i mean it doesn't have to be flashy but you want to have like a modern website where people kind of go there and they can trust that you got you know you kind of know what you're doing i remember you know a few weeks ago when arbitram launched their their bridge site it was like super basic didn't have any styling to it really at all people kind of looked at it and like oh this looks like a scam site like it looks like it looks dodgy and that is just kind of like the subjective trust that people kind of put

on these things so uh and obviously it wasn't dodgy like uh it was it was all fine but once arbitrary updated there they were bridge website it looked a lot better and people stopped complaining about it of course so i just yeah same goes for like any kind of like i guess crypto based tool you know you definitely want the website to look good and it doesn't mean that like it's trustworthy just because the website looks good but it does add an extra layer of trust for the legit projects that maybe otherwise wouldn't be there so yeah cool to see this update from optimism here so mihaylo the co-founder of polygon put out a really exciting tweet where he said i'm on a regular weekly call with our zk teams with zero knowledge teams thrilled to see all the great people who are with us now and all the exciting

stuff that are in the works can't wait to share more soon i mean the thing is is like i'm so excited for what all these teams are cooking right now like all these scaling teams because you may think that what they've deployed so far is like what we're kind of like gonna have for a little while i don't think so i think we're gonna you know see these kind of things evolve much faster than we expect and especially on the zero knowledge front which people thought was going to take years we saw the other day starkware announced that starknet's going live in november in alpha capacity on mainnet and then on top of that you have like polygon working on zk stuff zk sync of course with their zk porter and zk sync 2.0 i'm sure arbitrary and optimism are looking at this sort of stuff as well

and there's just so much i mean and scroll tech which is another team there's just so much research and development going into this sort of stuff so when i see tweets like this i get so excited because i mean as an advisor to polygon i know how hard these guys are working i know how close they are to these teams and how hard they're working on zero knowledge tech because even the polygon team knows that the pos chain that they have right now it has a lot of great adoption but it is not the end game they really want uh and believe that zk technology zero knowledge technology zk roll ups all that sort of stuff is kind of like the the current end game it could there could be something else in the future but that is what we need to work towards and that's

what they're doing they're working really hard towards and they're not just sitting on their hands saying okay well you know we have this pos chain it's cool it's growing uh let's just leave it at that we'll uh we'll kind of like take a break now no i mean honestly i haven't seen a team i mean there's a lot of teams that work hard but like the polygon team they've been going at it for years at this point i mean with automatic network and stuff like that like really it's just a great team and they work really really hard i'm not trying to show them too hard here but uh honestly like as i said i'm close to them because i'm an advisor i talk to them a lot they just work like all the time essentially because they really want to scale ethereum to the world and i mean i can't blame them

so do i i mean i do the same thing as them i mean i don't work for like a company or like i'm not a you know founder of a company or whatever um but i you spend all my time in the ethereum crypto ecosystem as well and i'm trying to educate all of you uh by spending time doing that so yeah just an exciting tweet from from mahalo here that i kind of like just wanted to give some extra color to so adrian furia hopefully i said that your last name right there fairia i think adriano uh put out a tweet kind of like referencing this article where a german company has announced they'll be using ethereum to facilitate automobile financing the system will also handle payment modalities calculations fees and all important credit scoring ethereum is the backbone of a new era of finance is

what he kind of like tweeted this out with as i said the other day we're going to see more and more of these corporates and enterprises adopting ethereum this is no surprise to me at this point i saw this i was like yep just another check mark on ethereum's kind of enterprise adoption here uh there there's gonna be much more of these coming out uh much more of these um not just doing kind of like i guess uh trials or experimentation but actual kind of like full end-to-end products and experiences and kind of like uh production kind of um uh uh kind of things with ethereum now i don't know if they're using kind of like layer two i doubt so i doubt it i think they'll be using layer one here maybe they don't care too much about the fees but i think you know as time goes on more

and more of these enterprises will start to look into layer two i mean they're very new to the ecosystem a lot of them so imagine trying to explain to them oh well yes you can use ethereum but then you can use these other things that kind of like are built on ethereum but fees are cheaper like and you know maybe you don't even use the layer 2 terminology right like you just basically said to them all you can use arbitrarily and they'll be like what's arbitrary well you know you still get ethereum um security uh but like you get cheaper fees sort of things so i'm sure those conversations happen but you know we really have to think of ways to explain it probably more simply because it kind of like can get complicated pretty quickly i don't even know if i'd be able to explain it very

simply for people because i tend to get ahead of myself and just like ramble on for hours about these things like imagine like i'm just imagining myself explaining ethereum and it's late to ecosystem to uh kind of like a a completely new person i would probably inundate them with things like i remember doing it actually once a few months ago i was describing the difference between proof of work and proof of stake to someone and then i caught myself by the end of the conversation talking about like the triple harvening and how i think that like the ninety percent reduction in each issuance is going to lead to eighth going to this this price and such and such and and then i just and then i rambled on about like deflationary ethan ultrasound money it was actually quite funny and then i i just looked at the person they were

interested in what i was saying but i looked at them and i'm just like oh my god like this person knows absolutely nothing about ethereum and i just gave them like the whole kind of like bull case and they probably don't have any under understanding of what i'm talking about outside of the words that i'm kind of like telling them so yeah i'm not sure how i would explain explain these things in simple terms and the refuel or the daily way generally is more of like for the advanced ethereum it's not really for beginners um even though i tried to keep things as simple as possible but uh yeah anyway that's another change in see i just go off on these tangents right um i'm going to leave it at that for now i'm going to go through the rest of these upgrade updates really quickly

another thing that i've been seeing lately and i've discussed this on the refill before but the total value locked or tbr metric has become the very very definition of of good heart's law and what good heart's law is it's basically this law where when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure the total value locked as uh metric or measurement has become a target everyone wants to have their tvl go up in value right you want to see hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars of tvl because it can be used as a very nice and and kind of like convenient marketing tool or narrative tool where you can say especially all these l1's right now they do liquidity mining programs and they say oh my god this l1 has 5 billion dollars of tvl and this l1 has x and x

amount of tvl but this l1's valuation is this and this one's this that means this one is going to go up in price so it's just all like being used to pay a narrative for different tokens and that's fine whatever like i mean i you know i i remember ethereums when tvl was kind of like being used as a measure of defy growth we were using it in similar way because we wanted to paint ethereum as like a as like a legit platform as like a growing platform and we were hoping that would translate into the eighth price going up but that was i mean that was back when tvl was just like just started to come onto the scene where it actually was a good measure of things these days it is a terrible measure because you have liquidity mining um and you have a lot you have a

lot of liquidity mining and we can see how quickly liquidity can kind of like move between different chains whether they be l2s or l1s so the better metric and i wrote about this in one of my newsletters that you can find in the comments section here called temporary value locked the better metrics to track are things like volume or trading volume for something like unisop for example or an amm uh loans originated fees being generated by the the protocol tvl is just like such a naive measurement and i also like uh uh the metric of unincentivized tvl so that is tvl or capital that is not being incentivized to be uh kind of like as part of um to be to be there essentially and the index cop actually uh popularized this

metric where essentially i think 90 percent plus of the tvl of in the of index products are not incentivized by any token kind of like liquidity mining programs so what that means is that people are actually buying the products or kind of like investing in the products because it has uh value to them it's product market fit they're not just doing it so they can earn some token rewards or do some farming and then just dump the tokens and earn some money there's nothing wrong with with people doing that but the point is is that we're trying to measure actual fundamental usage of these things and i just think tvl has become a complete garbage measurement of this sort of stuff i don't look at tvl anymore whenever i see people pumping up tbrs and measurement on twitter inevitably they're just trying to pump a token and

as i said that's fine i have no issue with that people are going to do that but just as like a new if you're a newer person to the ecosystem just be wary of that if someone is shilling you a new coin or a new ecosystem every few days and trying to paint narratives with tvl and stuff like that um just being just know that they're trading the momentum here they're trading the narrative they're not actually investing in these things long term so i think that's one thing yeah definitely new people should be aware of and you won't see me using tvl uh that much as a measurement of things for the l2s i kind of have been a little bit lately because we don't have any great measurement metrics around l2 other metrics around l2s just yet um but also like uh i i've kind of like talked about

optimism and arbitrary unisop volumes and things like that and they've been actually quite large right now but things get messy because like are those volumes high because there's other incentivizations going on on the same chain and there usually is so it kind of becomes hard there but as i said i don't think um the kurdish mining is bad i don't think that incentivizing uh incentivizing people to come there with their capital is bad what i think is bad is trying to measure kind of like fundamental growth and long-term sustainable growth by using the tbl metric that's just in my eyes not the way to do it um but yeah anyway moving on um cinna here from the ethereum i think foundation uh uh put out this kind of like post on mirai um describing this thing called zeitgeist so what zeitgeist is is basically a new

program where they're coming together with a small group of talented teams building new projects on ethereum and doing a collective sprint until the end of the year so if you're a builder you have until i think sunday to get in touch with uh with with um the team kind of behind this you can go to this kind of like link here a link to the youtube description um and you'll be kind of like working alongside a bunch of different developers to build out things that are going to kind of i guess like help out the ethereum ecosystem from october 18th to december 17th so about two months there so just wanted to give a shout out there if you're a developer definitely go check this out looks very interesting i think you know if you want to build things within ethereum at any kind of

layout whether it's apps or layer 1 stuff or layer 2 stuff tooling whatever i'm you know i think this could be interesting to you so definitely go check that out a quick shout out here i know gas now is shutting down soon or maybe has already shut down and i've given a shout out to block natives gas estimator extension before but if you're looking for a replacement this is this is great i mean the only thing i think block native is missing on their website which actually has the gas estimator and website form as well is the historical gas prices which is what gas now had and which allowed you to kind of look at them and say okay well i can put my transaction in on this date because it's like off-peak and i can get my transaction in for cheaper i'm sure they're probably working on

that or getting something like that but right now i mean what you see on your screen is basically what you'll see on the extension it'll give you kind of like the base fee which is on the bottom left here it'll give you kind of i guess like the max fee and the priority fee like suggested max fame priority fees and will give you a probability of getting into the next block for most of the time under one five five nine you don't have to worry about this sort of stuff but for people who are just trying to compete with things like nft drops and stuff like that this is an invaluable tool so definitely go check this out download it if you're using chrome i think they also support uh kind of like other browsers here maybe um brave as well or firefox i can't remember exactly

but they definitely support chrome i've got it installed as you can see on my screen here and lastly a really great uh kind of like um a tweet thread from a.b cothurp here where he kind of goes through uh all the kind of like ethereum projects that are hiring interns and apprentices uh plus offering mentorship so check out this thread you know the ethereum foundation is hiring though those kind of people nevermind uh ethernet dow trail of uh trailer trail of bits sorry uh there's securium uh and uh kind of like you can check out weekend ethereum news for job listings as well so i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check that out but i think that is going to be it for today 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 next week thanks everyone