StarkNet token, Polygon in Disney Accelerator & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #406 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel where i cut the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host standing in this assignment says the 14th of july 2022 alright everyone let's get into it so here it is the official announcement of the stock net token obviously i spoke about this the other day and how it was basically confirmed by suzu on twitter and all the drama surrounding that but now starkware has put out three separate blog posts basically confirming the token uh kind of like the distribution of it how it's going to work and everything like that uh i've went gone through all the blog posts i do want to kind of give my opinion on this kind of from a high level i have a lot of thoughts actually here and i talked about it a bit in the delegate discord

channel but i'm going to start by saying that i think i'm pretty disappointed here i'm disappointed for a number of reasons first reason is because the distribution is really bad like this is the distribution you can see it on my chart in front of me there is about 49 percent of the tokens going to stock where investors and core contributors stacker investors is 17 core contributors is 32.9 and then there is 51 i think going to the actual foundation and then it will be distributed to the kind of parties you see on the right of the pie chart here uh it doesn't seem to be anything on airdrops they did kind of like say that there'll be there'll probably be an airdrop later probably next year or something like that but uh yeah just overall this distribution

looks very centralized to me uh it doesn't really look like it lends itself to a protocol decentralizing it looks like it lends itself to the community actually getting upset over this distribution as well which is always bad for an early stage project in my opinion anyway but yeah that's the first thing that i take a pretty big issue with is that this token distribution doesn't look great uh at all i i mean honestly like basically 50 to insiders is is pretty crazy um especially for something like starknet which is trying to be like it's a layer too right it's not like an app or anything like that it's trying to be a generalized layer two platform for people to kind of like use build on like an optimism or an arbitrary or or a polygon or whatever it is right so from

that perspective having such a concentrated supply is really really bad in my eyes um and you know i've said this about alternative layer ones plenty of times they have pretty bad displays they have pretty bad distributions generally as well and i'm not going to forgive later twos for having bad distribution just because they're layer twos i'm going to just give my honest opinion here my honest opinion is that i'm just not a fan of of the distribution at all here uh the second thing uh a major thing that i'm not a fan of as well is that the stark net token while obviously being a governance token and a staking token is also going to be used for paying fees on stock net now i think they're going to have an option

for people to pay fees in eighth as well but it'll just be abstracted away um and you can pay eighth and then which is kind of like paying stock net tokens to the i think the validators or to the kind of like stakers and then obviously uh whatever layer one security fees that they kind of um incur will need to be paid in eighth like they can't get around that so just to clear up any confusion there just because the fee token on layer two would be the stock net token doesn't mean that stock net is getting out of paying ethereum eighth for ethereum layer one face that they can't get around that that's impossible no no one can get around that unless there was a change to the ethereum core protocol to allow that which there there isn't and there most likely will never

be so i'm not a fan of this because i think it's just like really bad for ux i i don't really understand the need to do this like i mean i understand why they think they should do this because it might kind of like drive more value to the token because it gives it more utility but i actually don't think so i don't think the like i i kind of like argued this point last week or earlier in the week on the refuel where i basically said that i don't think fear venue is like a main driver or the token being like a fee token is like a main driver of value for things i obviously think it's got a lot more to do with moneyness and story value and things like that uh so yeah i don't know how much value it would kind of

like drive to the token here i don't think we drive very much at all but it is definitely a big ux kind of like a pain i think uh not and also kind of like a pain potentially for validators or sequences or stakers or whatever they are because of the fact that if they're getting paid in stock tokens and then they still have to and the network starts to pay ethereum layer one in eighth well then they have to kind of account for that and there's there's obviously um currency risk there as well because things can come move under you um obviously the stark token would would be more volatile than something like eighth and there's all those kind of like second order effects there so that's the second thing that i do not like uh i kind of like about about this and those are basically the two major

things there um overall like i i think it's good that kind of like stock net is trying to decentralize trying to uh kind of like give ownership over to the community as much as i don't think they're going to be able to achieve that with their current distribution um but this also kind of like leads me to think that the way they've i mean i've always like to be honest i've always felt this a little bit about stockwear since basically maybe not day one but really early on it kind of feels like they're piggybacking off ethereum and they want to spin out to be their own layer one eventually so you could imagine something like stock net becoming its own layer one where the stark token is obviously like any other layer one token obviously i don't think that's a good idea but i can see it happening with

something like stalker they haven't really signaled that they're that ethereum aligned um and they've kind of like done questionable things in the past like i've said remember when i covered their raises and i said i don't understand why they allowed three hours capital uh into the raise and alameda into the race just didn't make much sense to me and like look what happened by letting three hours capital in so they've just been very i don't know not as ethereum aligned as i would like them to to be and that's just kind of like my personal view on things maybe i'm wrong here but just from everything that i've seen i i kind of like don't think i am unfortunately but the good news is that stockwear has competitors right they're not their only layer two team out there and they're still adding a lot of value regardless they've built some

really really great tech that's being leveraged by some of the best applications or best kind of like ecosystems in in crypto right now uh obviously immutable x is built using starkware's tech and dydx as well but i guess like dydx is uh is kind of like i'm not leaving just yet but they're obviously doing their cosmos chain as well um and there's also diversify and a bunch of other things that are kind of built there so i don't want to i don't want this to be sound like me being like bearish on stock net or starquest technology i'm definitely not they have really really great technology but i am very bearish on this token distribution and i'm very bearish on on their prospects of even decentralizing this thing like compare it to or contrast it with something like optimism like i i think optimism's token

distribution obviously could have probably been better than what it was but i don't think it's that bad i think it's actually pretty decent um and also on top of the token distribution they have like an entire kind of framework around governance and how they kind of like have these two houses the token house and the and the um i kind of the the name of the other house but they have like these two governing houses that kind of like the attempt is basically to mirror the existing systems in the real world to have things like checks checks on power and balances of power and and stuff like that so there's this whole massive framework around it where it feels like this decentralization proposal for stark net just yeah it's kind of like feels like a bit of an afterthought here it doesn't feel like it's been thought through very very

quickly it feels like um they definitely kind of like just want to do this to i guess obviously get the token out there and stuff like that but yeah i'm just not very very not very excited about this you guys should definitely read all the blog posts yourself they're not long uh kind of like see what you think about it but from what i saw on twitter and what i saw on the discord channel people aren't a big fan of uh of this token distribution at all it just it does not lend itself to uh building a good community and decentralization in my eyes anyway but we'll see maybe they prove me wrong maybe they never become a layer one they stick they stick as an ethereum layer too and they become really really big and stuck and it becomes awesome like i hope so but

the fact that they're having like stock net tokens as a payment token the fact that their token distribution is horrid the fact that decentralization of the network seems like an afterthought to them um and the fact that they have really restrictive licensing as well it's that's a major reason why dydx actually is building a cosmos chains because starquest tech is very very restrictive with their licensing hopefully that changes over time as well but yeah i don't know i've just i i've kind of like i as as excited as i am for star quest technology and as bullish as i am on their tech just everything else around it just i don't know it doesn't really gel well with me i don't really i'm not i don't really feel like they're going in the right direction but that's just my personal opinion as i said you

guys can read this maybe let me know your thoughts in the discord channel or even in the youtube comments if you'd like there but yeah overall poor token distribution don't like the fact that they're forcing users or they're going to potentially force users to have to use the stock token to to pay fees it's just like really bad for ux um and just kind of like everything else that's happened as well with just uh lately with them just doesn't really inspire much confidence but anyway there's a stock net token you may or may not get an airdrop uh i don't know when that's gonna be maybe next year doesn't look like it's going to be a big one so i'm it remains to be seen like how what happens here because obviously stock net and starkware is very very popular right now they have a lot of

good um products people use people have been looking forward to their token but like does the bad token design bad uh kind of distribution and just overall you know kind of lackluster decentralization path for starkwear does that kill off the community that they have right now and if it does does that even matter for their long-term prospects i don't know like it's just it's too early to tell but in my eyes from what i've seen from other projects it doesn't really make uh much sense to to to do this because if you're killing off your early community or if you're kind of like making them upset or i guess like making them less bullish on your project and that's not really good right but anyway i'm gonna leave it at that because i think i've bashed him enough here but i think to me it's just

honest criticism i didn't know that i'm not trying to bash them i'm not trying to to to on them or anything like that but i am trying to offer honest criticism of something that i honestly saw and and i felt sad over this like honestly like i i'm you guys know i've been covering starcraft for ages on the channel i've been really bullish on them i'm just so sad that they've gone down this path uh of of kind of like just a really bad token distribution and doing really uh weird things like having it as the the fee token and stuff like that like i'm just really sad and disappointed i'm not like angry or anything like that it's just kind of like i expected more i expected better and i hoped for more maybe i shouldn't get my hopes up these days i don't know but anyway as i said they

have competition so maybe the competition will force them to rethink things uh but we'll have to see what happens uh there all right so uh so today the celsius saga has not come to an end but basically come to the end of the line of where celsius was going to go so they announced today that celsius has filed voluntarily uh for chapter 11 protection and announced that the company initiated a financial restructuring and they have this whole thread uh here i mean it's not a huge thread like a thread here that basically says that the fight filed for bankruptcy now i think celsius is on chain while it has about a billion dollars worth of crypto in it but i don't think they're going to be able to pay back uh their customers uh definitely

not 100 i don't know how much money they're gonna be able to give back to their customers but they're definitely not going to make them whole which is unfortunate because a lot of people use celsius a lot of people believed in celsius a lot of people held the token stuff like that uh and they got and burned uh this is this is basically trad fire guys this is what happens in trad fire people just get burned and uh their people don't get made whole and then obviously regulations come in and they hope it doesn't happen again but it does happen again and yeah it's just a really shitty situation and i quoted this and i said you know remember when celsius's ceo was telling everyone it was going to be okay stop listening to and trusting centralized entities it never ends well and then i

continued by saying i've never been more bullish on the trustless defoco system that we're building out on ethereum it's needed now more than ever and i went over this i think last week in my little d5 bullish rant there so i'm not going to rehash those thoughts here but i think generally d5 is just so misunderstood still i think people think that defy is like all the ponzi's that we've seen it's got nothing to do with that in my eyes uh it's it's mostly almost entirely got to do with the transparency aspect to me like i don't even think decentralized i think decentralization is a means to an end when it comes to d5 but the most bullish thing for me is that transparency because as i mentioned last week i think it was one of the episodes the transparency allows for everyone and anyone in the world to

audit the the kind of like standing of a protocol and allow you to blow the whistle if something seems wrong you can't do that with centralized services it's too hard and if you do blow the whistle people will call you a conspiracy theorist because you don't have any evidence to back it up because it's all circumstantial or it's all kind of like speculation you can't point to something on chain for example and say hey this protocol says it's this but this is actually happening and like prove it to someone and it usually the proof only comes out when something like this happens when something falls apart so i think like we need to stop people from or at least educate people on the fact that stop listening to ceos and and kind of like centralized companies they're never going to be honest with you or totally

honest with you they're always going to lie in some way or twist their words they're always going to hide behind their lawyers whereas with d5 protocols truly decentralized you know default protocols they can't lie to you they can't put their lawyers in front of you they're not going to negotiate with you they're not going to they're not going to kind of like even speak to you they're not going to care who you are but that's the beauty of that system it's just so different to what we're used to it really is a paradigm change and i think a lot of people kind of miss that and they and i've seen people you know obviously refer to celsius and blockfy and and voyager as defy and that hurts my soul like seriously it hurts my soul when i see people doing that because it's such an insult to what we're

building within d5 these platforms are not d5 at all they don't embody any aspect of d5 and as i've explained before they may use d5 as part of their operations they may use d5 protocols but they themselves are not defy as i've explained before in my analogy they are basically a a super centralized entity it's basically like a single entity that you send funds into and they do whatever they want with those funds while promising you a a yield for example um and you have no visibility or control over what they do and then withdrawing your funds is basically an iou like you have no guarantee of getting your money back it's same as a bank like you know people kind of like say i keep my money in a bank because it's safer there okay maybe if you're in like a developed country it's relatively

safe relatively like i emphasize relatively they're safe to keep your money in a bank in a bank but the problem is is that banks are still very subject to bank runs as well it's the same kind of like thing and we're seeing this in china right now where people are trying to get money out and the bank's like well no we don't have the money because the monies doesn't just sit in a bank account the bank does things with it so it's the exact same thing that these kind of like platforms like celsius and voyager and all that did they took the money like a bank takes the money and they do stuff with the money they're not just going to sit on it what what use is it just sitting in their vault and kind of like in their in their address for example in their

ethereum address what uses is is cash sitting in a bank account there's no use to that banks have never operated like that the centralized services will never operate like that because then they can't make money so like the safest place to keep your assets is on yourself now obviously with fiat currencies that's extremely hard to do you can't do it in a digital way to access the digital fiat system you have to go through a bank and doing it with kind of like cash with notes is is impractical because where you're going to keep all your money if you've got like a lot of money you can just keep it under the mattress or keep it in your house like it's it's very insecure you're always probably going to be worried about it um and it's just very very impractical having all that cash all the time and also unfortunately

you're gonna put a target on your back having that much cash because the tax office will probably kind of like do data matching and see okay why doesn't this person have a bank account and we look sus that you wouldn't that you don't have a bank account these days which is which is which sucks but that's the reality of this situation right um whereas with crypto we have this amazing self-sovereignty we can custody our own assets digitally we can take you know i mean obviously none of us have a billion dollars i don't think any billionaires watch this show but you can take billions of dollars wherever you want on a on a ledger on a on a lattice on a hardware wall on on on 24 words on a piece of paper that's literally like money that you can access anywhere in the world take it wherever you want um

and you can't do that any other way doing it on uh through the digital fiat system i mean good luck like if you want to move a billion dollars through the digital fiat system you have to talk to humans you have to go through all these middlemen you have to basically assign things you have to like you basically have to have a direct relationship with the bank to be able to do this whereas within ethereum bitcoin crypto generally you can move any amount of value you want over the over the chain um and it's very resistant to censorship it's obviously not censorship proof like it could be censored if the miner's all colluded to censor you or something like that but it's very censorship resistant you have strong settlement guarantees and the security is also very very strong and the best part is you don't have to deal with

anyone you can just do it on your own like there's no need to deal with any middlemen anyone directly no humans at all you're just dealing with the chain itself you're obviously you're probably you know if you're sending a billion dollars across the chain you're going to do food test transactions but at the end of the day you're not dealing with anyone obviously that comes with the trade-off of if anything goes wrong then it's all on you you know if you send a billion dollars to the wrong address well i'm sorry you're never getting that back unless that person who owns that address sends it back to you right if you send a billion dollars to the burn address for some reason that's that's gone forever like unless uh the entire ethereum network came together to run code that would reverse that transaction that's just not gonna happen

right so getting a little bit esoteric here but i think it's important to understand the trade-offs here and just like what a huge leap it is that we have something like self-sovereign digital uh i guess custody of our own assets so the fact that we have that may it just makes me kind of like say this again stop putting your money in these services like i'm not trying to give investment advice you can do it do with what you want with your money but if you've seen blockfi voyager and celsius well i got block fighting blow up but voyage and celsius you saw them blow up you saw block fight go through its issues you've seen multiple centralized exchanges over the years collapse you've seen plenty of instances of centralized exchanges being hacked as well um and obviously d5 suffers from these things too but like

it's not worth it in my eyes it's not worth like five to ten percent yield for a 100 risk of loss of your assets and it's even higher than it is in d5 because of the fact that uh within default you can at least track your funds keep track of it yes if the smart contract gets hacked you could lose your funds or whatever but you could list track it whereas within c5 you have no idea you just have an io you have a promise whereas within d5 you can withdraw your funds if you want to and i'm talking about truly decentralized protocols like the ones that kind of like have admin keys and stuff like that can change things on you uh but yeah anyway i'm going to leave it at that because i've rambled on him too much there just another reminder of why defy

is just leagues ahead of c5 and trad fire like it's not even worth comparing the two it's literally like comparing a horse to a rocket ship like basically like that there's two completely different modes of transport just like d5 c5 and tradfy are all completely different modes of uh of kind of like um interacting with value and money all right so there's been a bit of conversations lately around dos attacks on ethereum block proposes post merge now this has been a kind of like thing that's been talked about for probably years at this stage and it's basically got to do with the fact that potentially uh validators can be identified via their ip address and then they can be targeted in a dos attack in order to send their validator offline uh in order to kind of

prevent them from getting rewards or sending lots of validators offline to prevent the change from finalizing or any of this or make the changes unstable in general or any sorts of stuff this is a sophisticated attack it's not expected to happen but it is an attack that can happen so there's a blog post here from asn who uh kind of like thinks through this from first principles and how you can kind of like gain resilience against dos attacks if you are running your own validator so if that applies to you should definitely give this a read but in terms of like the long term longer term solution here there is something called ssle uh vitalik proposed this on each research you can kind of um google ssle uh ethereum vitalik and ssla stands for uh uh what is that uh single oh god i can't

remember what it stands for but basically it fixes this issue uh and you can go read why as i said by googling it but i forget what it actually stands for i know the the the second sorry the last two letters a leader election um but i don't think the first was for some reason i have single slot in my head i don't think it's that maybe i'll quickly google it so i don't sound like a mumbling idiot right now um if i just google ssl e um yes a single secret leader election that's what it is uh and vitalik's kind of like tweet is actually here maybe if i just bring that here for you guys to see um it's yeah his proposal is called simplified ssle it's basically a proposal on 8th research very very technical don't get me wrong it's nothing that you should be kind of like

expecting to understand through the first read through but i'll actually link this in the youtube description for you to check out as well because i've had a few people ask me about this and ask me about this potential attack vector it does exist there are solutions uh in the short term and there are also solutions in the medium to long term as well all right so some big news out of polygons today they announced that they are part have been chosen to be part of the disney accelerator program and i think they're the only blockchain project uh to be part of this accelerator program i believe uh but this is pretty cool uh you can kind of like see this here exactly what it is and i guess this is disney's um disney's uh uh press release i should say and these are the basically companies that have been

selected or projects that have been selected and most uh these are kind of like the a lot of sorry these polygons the only blockchain platform but there are other kind of like web 3 related things uh flick play is a web 3 social app uh there's in world which is i guess um creative entertainment or immersive experiment experiences with ai lock locker verse which is a web 3 platform uh obsess which is using as a experimental 3d commerce platform to create 3d uh virtual stores polygon obviously and red 6 which is an ar company so a bit of a mix here which is very very cool to see but this is huge news i mean polygon being accepted into the disney accelerator is the only blockchain platform to be accepted in right think about how many different platforms

there are from different layer ones different layer twos to side chains and polygon was the only one that was accepted here pretty awesome news to see uh congrats to them for getting accepted all right so some updates for metamask mobile today you can now add popular uh networks with just two clicks so this is making the uh user experience of changing networks so adding new networks to metamask on mobile a lot easier obviously on desktop it's pretty easy already if you go to uh somewhere that you know is an optimism app or something like that and you don't have optimism on your metamask it'll say hey add this network to metamask it'll automatically prompt you to do that and then you'll add it in it'll it'll all be good and then if you already have optimism added you can just click switch network

it'll prompt you to do that and everything's good there but now you can basically do uh similar with two clicks on metamask mobile so if you're a mems mobile user this would be of interest to you obviously you've got to update the app i think uh but yeah definitely do that if you if you haven't yet all right so i came across this just randomly today uh this kind of like game here is the first time i've heard of it called the beacon and they announced that they will be building on treasure which uh which kind of like exists on arbitram uh and they say we feel these ecosystems best align with our long-term thesis for web3 gaming so i guess i just wanted to highlight that i don't know really much about this game but what i wanted to highlight is that more games

are being built on arbitrage which i find really really cool obviously uh gaming i think is going to be quite big for better or worse like i don't know how crypto gaming is going to um shake out here like a lot of it right now is just the play to earn stuff which looks like ponzi's but i think longer term there'll be fun games there's just crypto elements built in and i think those the most successful ones will obviously be built within the ethereum ecosystem uh whether that's at a roll-up or a validium or something else right like at the end of the day it can't it doesn't have to be a roll-up and maybe a roll-up becomes just too expensive for games in general but it can be like a mutable x's approach whether or not they store data off chain have proofs on chain still and it can be

very very scalable like that so just wanted to put this on your guys radars the art looks really cool as well uh as i said i haven't dived it too deep into it just yet but i am planning to because i am on the hunt for a good crypto game that isn't a ponzi right um and that kind of like actually makes sense so that's why i'm paying attention to crypto gaming just to try and find something because you guys know i'm a gamer i i love gaming don't do as much these days as i as i once did but i definitely love gaming and i'm curious to see if crypto gaming can actually be a thing and be more than just ponzi's all right so an update from synthetics today so they said here's instead he's excited to share the snx 22 uh 2022

release milestones many key features have been released this year such as synthetic futures anatomic swaps and many more are coming such as future of atomic swaps purpose v2 and synthetics v3 and you can uh read more in this blog post here so i think they have like a nice little roadmap item here and this is basically what their what their release milestones are for 2022. some of them have been delivered more more more are coming such as uh the susd synth bridge in early august uh purpose v2 not no date there but that's coming in a bunch of uh and synthetics v3 as well which is really cool so you can read this i mean these uh updates from synthetics are always quite comprehensive basically covers their entire ecosystem which i think is really really cool

but i've talked about synthetics before on the refuel a fair bit and i've said that the fact that the ecosystem was finally able to be built out as the original vision um that kane and his early team had uh is awesome because it obviously wasn't able to be built out on layer one ethereum for the fact that it just wasn't scalable for them fees were very high they were actually the one of the first d5 protocols to suffer immensely from the high fees especially snx staking so they moved to optimism was basically the first project on optimism uh and have been on there ever since and have been growing ever since and doing a lot of really great uh kind of like activity on there and good fear of a new too actually if i go to crypto fees.info i think yeah they're still up there

they're doing uh kind of like 280 000 of kind of like fees today and some of those fees go to snx takers guys like uh this is the the difference between kind of like synthetics and a lot of other d5 protocols they've had a fee switch on uh for basically ever like i think since snx taking was enabled essentially so snx takers have always been able to get a share of the fees from the platform and that is definitely very different to most of the tokens out there these days right like there's only a select few that actually enable that so very very cool to to see that but yeah anyway you can give this a read the blog post i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so just a quick shout here that tomorrow i'll be uh doing another kind of like uh twitter spaces with ssv

network as part of the merge series here this one will be with vito from uh alchemy he works as developer relations there it's gonna be a pretty good conversation i think we're gonna think talk about all things developers and web three developments uh kind of like and everything around that sphere and i'm gonna ask him some questions about the merge of course and how alchemy is is handling that for those of you who don't know alchemy is basically an infrastructure provider for ethereum and other chains very similar to infuria so i think it's going to be a really really great conversation looking forward to that it's going to be at 9 00 p.m uh australian eastern standard time you can go check out your local time by checking out the twitter spaces it'll be linked in the youtube description you can set a reminder but if you miss it there will

be a recording of course all right finally here i just want to give a quick shout out that uh johnny from what the co-founder of element finance here i put out a tweet that said we're looking for a guard tier solidity dev to join element finance so alif doesn't have to deal with me which i thought was quite funny here so uh there's a little like a little meme here let's not merge console log and then he's got the meme here of cartman saying but ma'am i still have that ingrained in my head uh him saying that but yeah if that sounds like you if you're a solidity developer you're looking for a new team to join element finance is up there with uh the the kind of like top tier teams in the industry especially in ethereum defy so definitely uh kind of get in contact

with them or kind of like i guess dm johnny here for a chance to work at element finance and i think on that that's 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 me a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone