Tornado Cash explainer, Arbitrum Nitro whitepaper - The Daily Gwei Refuel #436 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host the anthony susana and says it's 26th of august 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so coin center is out today with a detailed factual explanation of how tornado cache works now this is quite detailed i read through it today uh and then i kind of learned a lot about how tornado cache works under the hood uh in even more depth i've obviously got a good understanding of how it works but this goes very very deep into it and basically has a whole overview of how the contracts work how things like the relays work how the mixing actually works how the compliance tool works because for those of you who don't know tornado cache actually had a compliance

tool that allowed you to uh essentially prove where the funds were you know were going to and where where they went uh via a pdf report uh because of the fact that uh that the compliant the cryptography powering tornado cache allows you to do that so you know it's kind of funny how far tornado cache went to make sure that they provided everything for for users and made sure that the users could kind of like protect themselves from certain things but i mean you know we still saw what happened with the ofac sanctions but uh i do want to give a huge shout out here to coin center they have been so active with uh i guess like since the ofac sanctions happened that they've been trying to educate as many people as they can they've been putting out posts

like this uh and they really are a great non-for-profit organization within crypto uh in order to kind of like bridge that gap between crypto and the uh the kind of politics side of things right and the regulation the law side of things they've been at it for a very long time it's obviously coin center is obviously nothing new here but they've been doing a lot of amazing work especially around tornado cash since these sanctions hit so i mean i'm not going to say that you should that you have to go donate but as they are uh not for profit they basically are funded through donations i believe they have an eighth address at coincentre.ed that you could donate to and they typically have a coin grant spun up as well so i just wanted to give them just such a shout out here because they're doing

instrumental work and a very very important work that i mean few of us actually have the knowledge and know-how and access to do at the end of the day if you want to convince lawmakers if you want to convince regulators you've got to speak on in their language you got to play in their playground i can't do that i mean i have a i have a an understanding of how things work but i i don't think that would kind of like listen to me i don't think i'd be able to prepare the proper statements whereas coin center does that they act as our bridge which i think obviously is extremely important uh i highly recommend going giving this uh this detailed explainer a read if you if you just want to learn all about tornado cash and all there is to learn about it and how the tool is not made to enable

money laundering right the tool is a tool it's made to allow anyone to essentially uh protect their privacy because blockchains just not do not give us privacy by default except you know i mean i i shouldn't say not i shouldn't say all of them obviously monero and zcash allow for for privacy at layer one but most blockchains out there especially ethereum does not do not give you any privacy so we need these third-party tools we need these these kind of like applications that are built on top of these networks to allow it and uh and yeah i mean as i said go give this blog post a read i'll link it in the youtube description below for you to do so all right so i wanted to highlight this amazing little staking setup here i shouldn't say little uh it's a pretty

big staking setup here that david theodore shared uh two super fears so he's basically got a setup running on starlink and is powered by uh pure solar power here in a caravan so obviously uh david here is a bit of a nomad and you can see he's set up in his caravan here and you can see the solar panels and you can see uh basically you know him kind of i think this is in canada i believe uh is this no it's in it's in uh there are different pictures in different places so one of them was in colorado uh and uh forks wa i don't know what wa is i don't know what um state that is in the u.s uh maybe washington uh northern uh ca which i'm assuming is california uh but this is just so cool i mean as i said the other

day i love that super fizz started this trend because there's this popular narrative i guess within the wider crypto circles that no one can run an ethereum full node you know no one runs you know solid no one solo stakes no one's a home validator well here you have someone who's literally off grid running validators and he's not only running uh maintenance validators i believe he's running girly validators as well test net validators and also fuzzing a beacon chain clients which is part of testing the merge so i mean david is just i guess like the quintessential etherean going off grid uh living the life basically as a nomad uh visiting awesome places and you know still being able to run validators on the network

uh and if you obviously if you go to the stake from home hashtag there's a lot of new setups there since i covered it last time really really cool a bunch you know i'm actually surprised by the amount of knucks there are it's kind of funny because like a knock as i explained on the last refuel it's the easiest piece of hardware i guess to buy you can slap like a dap node on it and just make it super dap node is a is a it's a piece of software you can slap on it and just make it super easy to stake uh but yeah there's so many nuts there's raspberry pies uh there's uh uh full blown server racks there's so many i mean there's avados here as you can see which come pre-loaded with dap node there's even some mac minis and stuff like that and

uh yeah i mean you can see all the setups which i think is very very cool i just love this sort of guys like you guys know that from day one i had my own pc set up uh to stake with staking from home i was a beacon chain genesis validator and i've added many validators since then to my setup i can't think of anything more i guess important than being a solo staker on the beacon chain as an ethereum that that should be everyone's goal if you're a true ethereum i know that the barrier to entry at 32 8 is quite high but that rocker pool for example is lowering that barrier you can do it with 16th right now they're planning to lower that even more in order to run those those mini pools yes it is not like 100 the same as

solo staking and and fully sovereign solo staking but it's close enough i think you know i i don't blame people for not being able to get the 328 that is that is a very high barrier to entry it's the highest barrier to entry and maybe that will be lowered in the future sometime but if you do have 32 and you're willing to put it up i mean as i said before staking is not risk-free but you're willing to put up for staking you should always go the path of of solo staking in in my opinion it is the best way to stake uh second best i would say at this point in time is probably rocker pool uh because they just got such an amazing decentralized setup there but if you have the 32 eighth required uh solar staking is definitely the way to go you

don't have to go as as um as all out as david here has done with solar power and starlink and all that you can obviously run at at home but i guess this is david's home right like and he's just gone the extra mile so i wanted to highlight that and uh and talk a little bit about how i think it definitely does reflect uh you know the ethereum kind of ethos of running uh you know on grid or off grid running a node running a validator that is what uh what being an etherean means so very very cool to see this thank you to david for sharing it and thank you for uh to superfiz again for getting this trend going you know maybe um i don't know if he's doing this if superfizz is doing this or maybe someone should create a website where we can

have pictures of everyone staking setups or just you know basically document everything and all the tweets on there so that we can just scroll through it from time to time and see and just get inspired by how many people are staking from home because honestly i felt inspired scrolling through all of it because it's all well and good for people to say oh yeah i stake at home oh yeah i do this or yeah i do that but it's it's another level to to actually visualize it to see these boxes to see people's different staking setups and to see that it really is different for every single person like no staking setups are alike just because someone has a the same knock as someone else doesn't mean their setup is the same they could have any number of different setups going people get really creative

with it as as david here has done other people have like bread boards with raspberry pies attached kind of like cable tied to it and and and linking them all up so you can get as creative as you want with it in the day like you guys have seen my setup it's it's i mean it's just a basic pc it's it's nothing over the top but i put like a figurine in it i put a little car in it and i put like a metallic sticker on it so i made it my own like that's the whole point you make it your own and you are contributing to the security decentralization uh and just well-being of the ethereum beacon chain which obviously is uh is very very cool but yeah i'm gonna move on from that just wanted to highlight it for everyone today all right so i missed this a couple of

days ago but kane warwick from uh synthetics has uh put out this tweet where he said the other day i found out that erp 4844 effort is bandwidth constrained and this is the proto dank sharding effort the same thing happened in the early days of one five five nine work in 2019 i spoke to tim biker and offered to help bounty fund bounties with up to one hundred thousand s x i just sent out the first batch so that's about three hundred thousand dollars i believe at current snx price so it's nothing to scoff at and you can see on ether scan here uh the transaction that it's uh the first batch has been dispersed out which is very cool to see but yeah kane was pretty instrumental in getting eip1559 uh across the line with uh or i guess like getting work to actually begin on

it in earnest because of the fact that there was you know bandwidth constraints and there was money constraints and all that and he's using his platform and he's using uh things like snx which i assume is his snx uh to get the ball rolling here and this is this is this is really cool that he's gotten the ball rolling on 4844 uh you know i i don't have any timeline still on proto dang shotting i feel like it's kind of funny i was thinking about this just before the merge is is is very very close now but it's kind of we're just waiting at the at the moment like the main net clients are out uh they're all published and everything like that besides the gethbug i think the rest of them the rest of the core devs are probably just you know doing run-of-the-mill testing

uh doing kind of like as much testing as they can to make sure everything's all well and good uh but other than that i feel like people are itching to move on to the next thing they they want to be able to work on the next upgrades coming to ethereum now that the merge is pretty much done we're just waiting for it to be activated on mainnet and aip4844 is at the forefront obviously we need beacon chain withdrawals and i think recent advance has showed us that we need them much sooner than than we otherwise would have uh but that's like a relatively basic thing to do uh i think the the only hold up with beacon chain withdrawals is that they want to see the chain running for a while under proof of stake uh before they they do another hard fork or do

another upgrade which is fair enough right and they obviously want to give the core devs a time to kind of like step back a bit take a break because they've been working so hard on the merge for so long but eip 4844 is definitely something that should be at the very top of the priority listing simply because we have the window opportunity right now where the market's quiet uh it's a bear market the you know the usage is relatively quiet so we can get this out by the time you know if the bull market comes back next year hopefully by early next year we have prototank charting live on the network and then we have those very very cheap transactions at layer two because in my mind the worst thing that could happen for ethereum is that we have these layer twos live but layer one

hasn't kind of given them what they need through proto dank sharding and we have this massive influx of users again and they still don't get the benefits of of layer two i think that could that's one of the worst things that could happen now do i expect the bull market to come back anytime soon i have no idea i think that uh arbitrary has proven an optimism i should say as well has proven that just because it's a bear market doesn't mean that they can't saturate their activity i mean you saw arbitrary saturate its activity very very quickly via uh the odyssey program and that's restarting soon nitro is a week away from from today less than a week away from today so i'm assuming odyssey is going to restart shortly after that and uh the the they're kind of like just filling up that capacity like it you

can't just so this is the thing with with scaling and this is the thing with offering more block space you offer more block space especially valuable block space especially ethereum block space right you offer more of that developers are going to feel it users are going to feel it and then you're just back to square one that's why scaling is a never-ending thing like we're never going to get to a point where like okay ethereum's scaled enough let's not you know let's not scale anymore it is a constant thing scaling layer one scaling layer two and all the other stuff around it right there i know starkware's been talking about layer three and layer four and things like that but it is an ongoing process just because people say oh it's layer to summer or it's you know this summer that summer at the end of the day like d5 summer

wasn't just a kind of one-time thing for d5 like obviously dfi summer was very uh very active and there was a lot going on but d5 building hasn't stopped since then there's a lot of innovations that have come out there's a lot of d5 products that have gone live since then uh you know obviously most of them fail because that's just the way it is with with things like most things end up failing but the things that ha succeed and continue to succeed such as uni swap as the quintessential example is doing amazingly and they're they're i'm sure v4 is going to be out soon sooner rather than later at least be announced sooner rather than later uh which is you know obviously going to probably change the game again i i think unisop's got a good track record there uh but but yeah i i think we need 48 44

asap i don't think we're getting it until earliest early next year i think beacon chain withdrawals might come as its own separate hard fork which would mean that we might not get pro bank sharding until q2 at the earliest next year so we're gonna have to see i'm just literally throwing out dates right now uh with not much context behind them uh it's not like the merge dates that i used to throw around where i actually had context behind it until the merge is done until a few weeks after i don't even think i'm going to have an any sort of accurate picture on what's going to happen here because i don't think that the core devs even have that they know what they want to build they know what they want to do but it's all about priorities and i think as i said beacon chain withdrawals have been

uh have become a bigger priority than they once were but so is erp 4844 so is scaling like that that's the problem with things that are all high priority you have to kind of you know put something as like critical priority and i don't know if i consider being in chain withdrawals to be critical priority at this point yes they are high priority but uh i do think that 48 44 is is uh is j is just as important but we'll have to see as i said i'll keep you guys up to date on any kind of context around dates that i come across but right now it seems that everyone's just waiting for the merge holding their breath wanting the merge to go well and go smoothly and then we can move on to talking about these next upgrades that are coming after the merge

all right so a new update out of oboe labs here today so uh ashin on twitter uh posted service as saying surfacing today after a crazy last few weeks to say we have released charon version 0.1 this is our biggest release jet and is based on everything we've learned from rolling out our first test net athena so you can go to github and check out the release here but you can read uh ocean's thread here as well for a description of what uh what what happened here i'll read a little bit just to give you an idea so he says over the last month we've had 100 over 100 distributed validated clusters created by our community and most of them have been able to get up and attesting on gurley it is hugely encouraging to see something you have worked on so hard on get picked up and loved by ego

enthusiasts the biggest feature in this release to flaunt is sharon now supports blinded beacon blocks and mev boost shout out to see uh ciaran here uh see ryan yep for the hard work on this and the techo and lighthouse teams for assisting we've also spent a huge amount of time improving sharon's self-healing such that it can handle boot node failures better which you've had to deal with a lot over the last month due to unprecedented demand very very cool to see that this uh dvt from obel is coming along very nicely it seems here i think that uh these blinded beacon blocks i i haven't heard of that before but i wonder if it's got to do with uh with the shadow rise beacon chain i spoke about the other day if i just google blinded beacon blocks i'm not coming up with anything here uh

no i'm it's coming up with a minecraft results okay so that's not relevant there i wonder what that is i actually have to have to um see what blinded uh what blinded beacon blocks is so uh because i think that that sounds like the shutter ice beacon chain and what i mean by that it sounds like you may be able to have uh no maybe not i don't know i'm just speculating here uh i'm not gonna kind of like go too deep into that uh but maybe it's on the github if i go here github blinded beacon blocks anywhere no maybe it's an herbal specific thing i'll have to kind of like look into that and and get back to that but very cool to see that uh version one out is out here of of charon which is uh which is kind of like obl's

technology here and dvt is going to obviously play a very big and important part post merge with staking it's something that's going to help a lot with uh decentralization of the beacon chain and i mean as a practical example here basically what this allows for is that you can retain ownership of your and custodianship over your keys when staking but you can outsource the staking to a centralized exchange like coinbase for example and they can run the validator for you uh so i think that's the simplest example of this but it's a really powerful one because it means you don't have to give up custody of your eth when uh when kind of like staking here yes there's still obviously slashing risk and things like that but it means you can kind of keep the keys on your own you can exit at any time

without needing permission from the i guess third staking service provider to exit now that's going to be mostly important post withdrawals uh but yeah this technology is very very important so great to see this latest release here so if you're looking for some beacon chain decentralization data superfice has a list of websites here that will give you everything that you need uh i have gone through a bunch of these websites on the refuel before such as eatsunshine.com clientdiversity.org and a bunch of others here this is project sunshine which has got to do with measuring the health of ethereum's decentralization i remember highlighting highlighting this a while ago so it measures things like consensus client diversity execution client diversity uh and and a bunch of other things like

geolocation diversity staking pool diversity and stuff like that which i think is obviously very important like if we want to you know ensure that we have this healthiest beacon chain possible we need to be able to monitor metrics and have accurate metrics and also educate users on how they can help improve the metrics too so that's the project sunshine kleindivercity.org is that website that i kind of went through the other day going over what client diversity looks like on both the consensus layer and execution layer uh we all know the execution layer needs some work here but that's going to be a focused post merge and then there's a bunch of others like raider.network ethereum pools beacon chain like you can go check this out i'll link them in the youtube description but these are ways to keep up with the ethereum beacon chain specifically uh and things that surround

that and things that surround proof-of-stake so definitely go check all those out i'll link it in youtube description below all right so eleanor here from a16 crypto has announced that a16z is committing 300 000 for open source developers in the next round of git coin grant which is git coin grants around 15 which is happening next month on september 7th to september 22nd this is awesome i love seeing big name vcs like a16z giving back here that's a that's a that's a healthy chunk of change yes i know a16 has billions of dollars and all that good stuff but at the end of the day like three hundred thousand dollars is is is quite large for something like this and this is just one thing that they're doing uh i think it's kind of funny because

a16z and these big-name vc's they cop a lot of flack before for their investments and they do invest in a lot of of things and inevitably you know uh some of those things are not going to be you know great investments not going to be things that we agree with i do want to make two notes here one they have a lot of money from the rounds that they raised and they have to deploy that money if they don't deploy that money the investors will take that money out and go elsewhere and then a16z loses business so to speak right so they have to deploy that money and in that means you know when they've raised billions and billions of dollars putting money into basically everything that is even half decent right uh and then secondly they do a lot of work outside of crypto from what i can tell

especially on like the regulatory side and because they have so much money and they have to have connections they can do things that we may not ever be privy to but have that paid dividends uh and there's also things that we are privy to like them committing 300 thousand dollars to open source developers on git coin grants so i i sometimes kind of get annoyed when people i guess like put all the vcs in the same bucket so to speak because there are extractive vc's out there i mean i've gone on record before and i've made fun of them on twitter a lot multi-coin capital for example they're very extractive i i believe i don't think that they really are net positive for the ecosystem they extract a lot more value than what they put in uh it's kind of and it's kind of hard to quantify this as well but i

think i don't think i'd bucket a16z in there i don't think i'd bucket paradigm in there i'm just thinking of like the big name vc the really big name vcs there's a bunch of others out there as well um but when you're looking at these sorts of things like i know it's easy to say all vcs are evil but i don't think they are and i think that asics they didn't have to do this they didn't have to send three hundred thousand dollars to uh git coin grants yeah and and and kind of basically donate it to them here so i'm really happy to see this i hope they continue to do this because this is going to go towards funding public goods which you guys know i mean if anything like public goods maxie right at the end of the day so so good to see this but

i'm always curious to hear what you guys think like i'm not trying to defend anyone or put anyone on a pedestal here i'm not an investor in a16z myself uh i i'm pretty sure i've co-invested with them on various projects but that doesn't change my opinion or anything i just want to see more nuanced takes a lot of the time when it comes to to investors especially ones that are giving back to the community that's critically important we need to support that as well so yeah i guess like thank you to a16z crypto for doing this really really appreciative of it all right so compound has announced today that compound v3 i guess is live so compound v3 is a streamlined version of the protocol with an emphasis on security capital efficiency and user

experience this is uh the largest upgrade compound has done in quite a while i compound has been quiet for a while right like they obviously kicked off defy summer in may june 2020 with the complicity mining and uh they were instrumental in in just d5 someone becoming as big as it was but in terms of like their strategy over the last couple years i haven't really agreed with it they tried to do their comp chain thing which didn't materialize they've been very slow to deploy to other networks whether they be a layer twos or side chains and now they've come out with v3 very very you know i guess like um very very long after v2 now that's getting that out of the way i still

think this is a pretty cool upgrade that what they've kind of kind of done here so it basically includes advanced account management tools for developers uh and new ux for applications to be built on top of the protocol like a starter interface as you can see here uh and there's a bunch of markets that have been launched with uh with with compound v3 that allow you to borrow usdc using eighth wbtc link uni and comp uh and over time the protocol will support more assets on more blockchains so as i as i've talked about before they are planning to expand to other layer twos and layer ones and side chains they've just been kind of slow on that front there uh and and yeah this is um this is uh this is live right now which is which very i live on the ethereum

mainland i should say which is which is very cool to see um and i think the biggest upgrade as you can see in the second tweet here is that in collateral remains your property so nobody else can borrow or withdraw it's safer while you won't earn interest on the collateral you'll be able to borrow more with less risk of liquidation and lower liquidation penalties while spending much less on gas i think that's a pretty big feature because as i've mentioned before in a lot of these money markets when you put the collateral in and then if that collateral goes to like 100 borrow then you have to wait until some of it gets paid back for you to withdraw and it can become like a you could be locked into a position for a little while there depending on market conditions so this is really cool um and you know i i kind

of like was saying that compound moves slow i don't actually think that's an overall negative i think you want certain projects to move slow instead of moving really fast and trying to add everything just for security reasons because at the end of the day uh in terms of like i would have to say in terms of where i'd put my money uh and to borrow against it i still think for me maker would be number one uh i would i would still put my my ether to make and borrow against it on there because i i think maker would be the most secure but then compound and are there pretty much tied i think for me um i've used both of them i've used i mean i've used like all of these kind of money markets and it's just about what i feel most comfortable

with based on a variety of factors and i would say that makers definitely first and then compound and rv would be tied for second here um and i think ave i mean even rve doesn't move that quickly they'd be much quicker to deploy in other chains but in terms of major protocol update upgrades they still move relatively slow i think compound's just the slowest of the bunch maker is definitely the slowest of the bunch but but compound is probably the second slowest step but again that's not necessarily a bad thing slow and steady secure uh and making sure that uh the protocol doesn't get hacked or exploited and people don't lose money is a very very important thing um but yeah that's why it's probably taken so long for compound v3 to come out but it's live now you can go use it uh and i'll link

it this in the youtube description below for you to learn more about it all right finally here we have the arbitrary nitro white paper that has been published uh just in time before arbitrary nitro goes live on mainnet so you can actually go here download the pdf or just read it on github and see the entire i guess like nitro um all the details about nitro here now they're calling this a second generation optimistic roll up so this is not just like a small upgrade guys nitro is an absolutely massive upgrade for arbitrary that's why it's taking so long for it for it to come to main net but you know what's funny i was thinking about this the other day not only has arbitrarium done nitro they've also done arbitrary nova which has reddit using it right and

that's actually gaining traction as well so they're hitting it from multiple fronts right now which is very very cool they're managing their ecosystem very well they don't have a token yet and they still have a lot of usage which is very impressive i must say and they just keep they just seem to be kicking all the the right goals here which is very very awesome uh to see so if you want to read the white paper i'll link it in the youtube description for you to do so it's not that long uh it's not that dense either i think it's only about 15 pages so you can go uh check that out if you've read a write paper before you'll know exactly what you're getting yourself into um but very cool for them to publish this just in time for arbitrary nitro here which which i'm super excited for

personally and i hope they restart odyssey rather quickly so i can get back at it uh because i was having a lot of fun on it and then uh it basically got paused because of the network getting load and i totally understood that it hasn't actually been that long right it's only been a few weeks since they paused it i believe so it's good that they were able to get nitro out relatively quickly and i can't wait to see it go live i can't wait to see them scale up and i can't wait to see all the layer twos continue to scale right like obviously optimism bedrock is coming towards the end of the year zk sync zk vm main net is coming within like 60 days or something polygon has their zkvm coming to to main it hopefully by the end of the year as well uh scroll uh has

their zkvm stuff happening too like there's too much happening in the layer two space now for me i didn't even keep up with any more which is amazing i love it when that happens so i will obviously be covering it on the refuel but i'm super excited to see all this stuff i think we're going to get like a really strong close to the yacht and the layer 2 front and leading into next year hopefully the i guess market heats up again so that we can get more users in and hopefully we have uh you know that that scale there for for um for users to take advantage of so they don't have to go to other chains they can stay on ethereum they can get all the benefits of ethereum with the cheap and fast transactions which is what we all want at the end of the day uh but i think on

that note 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 it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone