Tornado Cash sanctioned, The Merge updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #423 - 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 dante susana and today's the 9th of august 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for missing yesterday's episode everyone it was my 12-year anniversary with my fiancee i decided to take the night off went into the city for a nice dinner and all of that and well i decided to kind of like take time off when the i guess like biggest events in crypto happen it seems like this has happened multiple times to me in the past so it's quite funny um but there's a lot to go through as you can see on my tabs here this is actually one of the bigger episodes probably going to go up over 30 minutes here today uh but i'll try not to keep

not keep it going too long but i think the first thing we need to cover is the tornado cash uh sanctioning now i'm going to give a full recap of what happened um and kind of like my thoughts on this but firstly i wanted to start off by reading out this tweet that i put out where i said you know it's been an overall uh sad 24 hours for the crypto ecosystem due to this tornado cash stuff it really reinforces the fact that we need to decentralize everything if we want any of this stuff we're building to work long term we either get truly decentralized apps and services or we get c5 centralized finance and traditional finance but just quote-unquote on a blockchain which is not very interesting right so to recap what happened with tornado cash basically the us treasury department uh put sanctions on the

tornado cash smart contract addresses and associated addresses i'm pretty sure they put sanctions on tornado cash's get coin donation address and things like that which was just insane and they also seems to have suspended well not they but like microsoft who owns github has suspended uh roman cr one of the um tornado cache devs uh github accounts uh and he goes you know he's writing open source code illegal now so there's a lot of ramifications here of what the treasury department has decided to do uh you know over the last 24 hours now what is tornado cash for those of you who don't may not know it is a privacy mixer so essentially what you can do is you can send an amount of eth or usdc into it and then you can kind of like mix it through the smart contracts and then on

the other end it's supposed to basically be clean so it can't be traced back to the original wallet that you funded that you funded it with now many people have used this before obviously and obviously the u.s treasury department has sanctioned this address due to concerns over money laundering terrorism financing all the all that kind of like stuff that they usually say and i personally think that this has come as a reaction to maybe the i guess like ronin bridge hack that was perpetrated by lazarus which is the uh apt or advanced persistent threat uh in out of north korea i think that's it because they use tornado cash and it's obviously being used by other kind of criminals before other kind of people who have hacked smart contracts and stuff like that but it's also been used for a lot

of legit things and this is where i think the issue comes from is where this just seems like a very strong overreaction uh and kind of like very strong like regulation to invoke such a kind of like um a strong kind of like uh a consequence here to some of these things that we've seen play out and there's actually a great thread which i'll link in the youtube description uh below here from from reza who basically lists you know the completely legal reasons to use tornado cash that has nothing to do with criminal activity or terrorism financing or anything like that and i'll list off the reasons here you know say you get paid in crypto and don't want your employer knowing all your financial details well you'll just wash it through tornado cache right like you'll you'll kind of like clean it out so that your employer can't just kind of

pay you and then you know your address and then have access to everything that you're kind of like doing on chain obviously that's something that is not a criminal activity that's something that everyone uh should be able to do second point you pay for a service in eth and don't want them to be able to see everything you've ever done on chain so obviously perfectly uh perfectly legit reason you're worried that they might not let you into a super secret chat if they know your wealth came from apping into us rocket 69 this is actually pretty legit it might sound funny but your unchained kind of like footprint is kind of like an identity for you right and and you want to preserve that identity you want that identity to be basically what you want it to be not what uh it kind of like um it gets

leaked to be in terms of privacy right for example you know if you're kind of like doing something and you have like uh not just a token but like an nft or whatever maybe you did some stuff on your address that may without context look you know i don't know you know look scruples scrupulous to to kind of like prying eyes you just want to kind of have a separation there separation of concerns you know the other important points here you've been doxed and you were being harassed online obviously you want to kind of like clean your address you want to donate to a polarizing cause that's obviously very very important you want to anonymously gift me 1008 you're bothered by the thought that everyone knows your address knows more about your wealth and most of your close friends and family members and you think crypto

will achieve mainstream adoption meaning everyone will have access to all this information such as retailers banks potential employers and you question if they'll use that information ethically so all very legit reasons here now the obvious kind of like uh thing that people will say is well can't you just do all this to a centralized exchange you know can't you send funds to a centralized exchange address and then it obviously gets deposited into their kind of like hot wallet and then if you want to withdraw to a new wallet you just withdraw out of their hot wallet yes you can do that like that's obviously what a lot of people do today uh you know they may use tornado cash they may use other solutions uh but a lot of people use centralized exchanges to i guess like clean their addresses is this an ideal solution no it's not because as soon as

you put funds into a centralized exchange they're at major risk of being kind of like frozen right like i i actually people say the risk is low i mean it depends on the exchange but like it's more than just having the um the funds in your ethereum address obviously and custodying it yourself right for example so and as soon as you send it to a centralized exchange a lot of these exchanges have hundreds if not thousands of employees that would have access to this information now they could leak that information right out to everyone and then immediately everything would be doxed like literally everything like because of the fact that even if you have like uh new deposit addresses that you can generate that's still all stored on the servers of these centralized exchanges so it's just a really really bad thing if that information ever gets

leaked or if the the exchange gets hacked and the database gets attacked and that information gets leaked that way too so that's not a solution that's not even comparable to something like tornado cache which lets you do you know full on chain privacy essentially like you know if you can if you can kind of like justify the cost because it just depends how much you're running through it but there is small increments that you can do and you can do ether usdc and i'll talk about the usdc thing in a bit actually which is kind of another another thing that happened today but essentially there are very valid reasons to to be doing this so i i really hate the kind of retiree that will say well you know if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear i don't believe that is uh that is kind of like

uh the case here and i don't believe that i don't even believe in people when people say that i think that's like a really silly thing to say and i obviously really believe in the fundamental right to privacy here because at the end of the day if you say things like or if you justify the actions that the government takes you by saying you know i've got nothing to hide so i've got nothing to fear okay well then literally put all of your information online for everyone to see right and then they'll say oh well no no i don't want everyone seeing it but the government's seeing it is fine i'm like but that's weird right like it doesn't matter if it's one party or everyone like like the thing is is that like the government is a huge organization they can abuse that information just like anyone else can

they can use it to uh i guess like cancel you in such a way where they uh they can kind of like arrest you and press charges on you and doing the firing things to you like i don't know people just seem to have a lot of trust in their governments especially people in western societies because those kind of like things are limited in scope and they happen to the bad people or those people that aren't them right and this is obviously not unique to western uh kind of like democracies that happens all over the world but it's kind of ironic that people will uh kind of like yell at china for all the stuff they do over their social credit system and things like that and then gladly kind of like cheer on the us government sanctioning privacy preserving tools right like it doesn't gel at all just because it's

happening in china and not in the us like you you can say oh well i trust the u.s government i don't trust the ccp it's like you shouldn't trust governments in general like they're not your friend right like they exist to serve uh you know a society-wide purpose they don't exist to kind of like and a lot of times they exist to serve themselves too but let's get into a whole another discussion and as i said i'm not like a libertarian or a crypto anarchist or anything like that but i do think that people kind of like putting too much trust in any entity especially governments is probably not the right right approach there so that's kind of like the tl dr what happened with with tornado cash uh and what what else happened as well where i guess like um i think eric connor here put out a kind of

like a funny tweet where he said shot chaser where he had a screenshot of me i guess like a couple months ago on the 17th of june saying a lot of people are learning about the usdc blacklist function today to clear things up circle the issuer of usdc can freeze usdc in any address at any time for whatever reason this is the risk of using centralized stable coins just like using any centralized service and then jeremy alaire one of the founders i think he's the sole founder of circle but you know obviously a high up at circle there i said not accurate not helpful uh fud read more and then he actually linked an article under there too i took i'm explaining more there and then the chaser is that circle froze the usdc funds that were in tornado cash's addresses because obviously circle's us-based company uh by the treasury

department sanctioning this means that the that the circle is now kind of like uh aiding uh illegal activities by not freezing this usdc so as i said they can freeze for whatever reason and you know and it doesn't matter if it's kind of like uh if their hand is forced by legal reasons or if they do it for any arbitrary reason they can still do it so maybe some of you didn't know this but yes they have a blacklist function they can literally blacklist any usdc anywhere on any chain that usdc is on and they retain full control over that and that brought up a discussion over centralized stabilizers table points in general and how we need you know truly decentralized alternatives to to usdc usdt busd things like that we have i guess like you could say semi-decentralized ones like die

obviously die is majority or a lot backed by usdc today so you know that usdc could in theory be frozen and then die would become unbacked um there are kind of like some others out there that people kind of like cheer on but i actually don't think that we have um besides maybe rye and maybe lusd the rest of them i don't consider to be decentralized right in terms of in terms of like true decentralization there and honestly i haven't looked into l usd and ryan enough to make like a definitive comment but from what i've seen in the smart people that i've spoken to it seems those two are the only ones that could be considered truly decentralized and i think maybe even just rye is like 100 truly decentralized because it's just backed by eighth it doesn't really have any government governance uh kind

of like um but it has different mechanisms of keeping its pegs so there are trade-offs here but yeah it really does beg the question of okay well why are we like centralizing so much of i guess the liquidity and so much of the crypto space around these us dollar stable coins when we really shouldn't be doing that especially the centralized us dollar stable coins and then it goes back to okay what are the only truly decentralized assets truly decentralized liquid monies within crypto there's only two btc and eighth but in saying that it's only truly decentralized eighth when it's on ethereum layer one like even on the layer twos it's not because the layer twos are still centralized so you've only got truly decentralized trustless eat when it's on ethereum layer one just like you've only got truly decentralized trustless btc when

it's on bitcoin layer one so there are there's a lot of nuance here there's a lot of things here to kind of like consider and think about and this is why i always go on about the risk of using particular services especially centralized services like i i've said before i don't think the governments are going to be kind of like letting this slide from from their point of view or kind of like not coming down harshly here i've said before actually on the refill that it's amazed me that the um stable coins have been able to flow as freely as they have for so long i don't think that's going to last guys like no way because like you think about the the way the kind of like us government operates and just a lot of governments in general they want control over financial kind of transactions they want

transparency over it like they love the fact that the bank banking banking system today is pretty much like mostly digital right they're phasing out cash as quickly as possible and then this kind of like decentralized alternative comes along like bitcoin and ethereum and say well we're gonna do fully kind of like decentralized fully trustless self-custody uh digital banking and we're gonna also do privacy on it of course they're gonna look at that and be like no no we can't have this right it's literally undoing the decades worth of work that they've done to make the entire financial system transparent to them for whatever reason so if you're expecting them this to be the last thing that they do and they only go after tornado cash and they only go after some other privacy tools that's not going to be the case at all they're going to go

after everything that they can they're going to start with the things like tornado cash and maybe the more kind of like quote-unquote things that they can paint as like quote-unquote nefarious right but then they're going to go after the stable coins they're going to go after the centralized exchange they're going to lock that down as much as they possibly can and that's why i said at the start in my tweet that building decentralized tools is now more important than ever as uh especially when it comes to privacy right and that's not to say that tornado cache isn't decentralized right it is but it's not just the smart contracts it's the front end it's the the blockchain it's built on right it's the uh kind of rpcs so infuria and alchemy are both based in the u.s they could start censoring at the rpc level anytime they wanted to and

they're probably going to have to do that because by not doing that they possibly are breaking the the kind of like sanctions and breaking the law right and that that goes into the whole other discussion of okay well if i uh kind of like on my full node or in my uh validate a transaction that happened through tornado cache am i liable for that or if someone's uh kind of like sends funds to tornado cash and then withdraws it to sasser.eth am i liable for that am i breaking the law because i received from funds from tornado cash and then you can kind of like start diving into the fact that this regulation is very rushed these sorry these sanctions are very rush it doesn't really make much sense doesn't gel with reality and there needs to be more thought put into this so that's all we can kind of really hope

for is that more thought eventually gets put into this sort of stuff and insane aheads prevail but you know this just seems very reactionary and as i said i do think it's due to the north korea connection where the fact that they took that that amount of money from the ronin bridge hack and they washed it through tornado cash and all that sort of stuff like i really do think it's because of that but uh but yeah i'm gonna leave that one at that uh i guess like i made a little joke here that you know sanctions aren't going to prevent criminals from using tornado cash uh and you know after all criminals already know they can just use banks to safely launder their money and this is a joke but it's reality the amount of banks that have been fined and caught you know

letting kind of like people launder money through their systems is pretty much every bank in the world like every major bank at least so it doesn't really stop anything here but the that's a whole different discussion i just wanted to kind of like uh bring that up there uh peter van volkenberg from coin center here had a great blog post about this you should go read for more details on this so i'll link that in youtube description below and finally i think to wrap us up here on the tornado cache side of things we have vitalik uh which i guess this is a timely post this happened before the sanctions but he posted an idea about stealth addresses for nfts this is a low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the nft ecosystem so you would be able to eg send an nft

to vitalik.8 without anyone except vitalik the new owner being able to see who the new owner is uh so that's pretty cool right and timely but also happened before the sanctions happened sorry i guess like even more timely but yeah guys like it is a messy situation it's definitely not something that's gonna work itself out overnight i wonder if eventually these sanctions are going to be lifted and then there's just kind of like regulations you know the saying a regulation would be even though i don't agree with this the same regulation would be to prevent uh people that have kind of like i guess like use tornado cash to send their uh kind of like coins to centralized exchanges but that still has holes in it like it's saner than the sanctions but there's still holes in it because as i said what if someone sends

me funds from tornado cash says you know points the withdrawal address from tornado catch to saturday does that mean i can never send uh coins to a centralized exchange again right like this is why it's really hard to regulate this sort of stuff and then people can say well can't we just block certain uh kind of like trend uh contracts from uh from interacting with our address that's not how a blockchain works you can't actually do that like there is no way to prevent someone from sending me funds from whatever address that they want to send me funds from or send anyone funds from right and to do that would require a protocol level change it would require literally putting a blacklist in the protocol which is unworkable right it's not going to happen and no one wants that so the regulations the rules everything needs

to be updated for this digital crypto age or we're just going to keep getting this reactionary stuff and i think we will because it's just it's just sad like and the government moves really really slowly so they're just going to keep taking this kind of approach where they can i guess like use their hammer on crypto as if it's like a nail like any other kind of like financial activity when it's not it's very very different and they're going to keep justifying it with you know anti-money laundering anti-terrorist financing then they're going to bring up the other stuff they always bring up like you know child pornography things like that they always use the same talking points whenever they want to go after something that they don't find desirable and this is why i have like a lot of big issue with people who say well if you're not

if you're you know you're only using tornado cash if you're a criminal if you've got nothing to die you're going to fear all that's like there's so much issues with that line of thinking that i think people who say that are really just in the privileged position of not having to worry about kind of like uh you know or not maybe not even thinking about it correctly right not having to worry about uh i guess like the government coming after them or things like that which again is a wrong line of thinking and it just goes down like such a deep rabbit hole of kind of like political philosophy and all that sort of stuff i'm not going to go into that i'm going to leave that at that one because there's a bunch of other things to get through today but yeah that's my kind of

take on it uh i guess you guys will have takes on it as well i saw the discord channel absolutely blow up with it i actually wake up woke up to this today and it was kind of funny because i was we actually had a hotel room in in the city and i was there and i looked at it and i'm like oh god i'm like okay well i can't catch up with this on my phone so i'm gonna like do a quick thing on my phone and see what it's all about and then i got home i was like okay what's happened oh my god so i can obviously report on it on the refill but yeah leaving it at that all the links will be in the description below for you all right on to happier news merge related news here so uh tim biker put

out a reminder that gurley prater merge is scheduled for later this week uh if you run a node now is the time to upgrade and you can always check the eta on bordell.wtf so the current eta is wednesday august 10th at 10 uh sorry at uh 10 uh yeah 10 52 p.m uh utc time here so i don't know what what time that is for me i i actually have no idea so i i can't do the conversion right now but yeah you can obviously convert it to your local time zone there but it seems that's when it's going to happen on august 10th at 10 52 pm utc and you can also hear that i see a kind of like tweet here from uh parathos as well kind of reminding people that the that girl is merging very very soon and if you're running that no please update

and there's more information here on this launchpad link which i'll link in youtube description below for you as well uh trent kind of like shared uh i guess his um uh merge roadmap again today the the image of his merge roadmap here today up yesterday updated as as of august 8th you can see here that we are so incredibly close right we are doing girly on august 10th then we are going to choose the tt total terminal difficult sorry terminal total difficulty for maynet on the next or all core dev call um i believe that we may even choose it on the consensus dev call which is happening um this week but we it maybe it may get pushed to the all core dev call which would be next week i believe and then we have the ballot con which is the consensus layer fork and

the paris which is the execution layer fork um uh those clients are being released uh you know obviously before the fork happens which is the just a reminder here these forks need to happen in order to get both the cl and el ready for the merge and then the ttd hits the proof of work will be hot swapped for proof of stake and we have that nice energy reduction there as well and then finality will be reached after the usual two epics of 12.8 minutes here so that's it guys like that's that's it that's that's all we've got left to the merge there's no more like there's probably going to be shadow forks and things like that but in terms of the major milestones this is it girly bellatrix and paris which are basically formalities to have for formal hard forks to kind of go in and get activated

ttd being chosen and then the merge actually happening we're so close at this point obviously i'm not going to kind of like go on about how close we are anymore because it's probably just over five weeks out which is very exciting uh and trent also put out a post here one of the last merged community calls is happening on friday august 12th i think this will be maybe the second last merge community call uh maybe yeah there shouldn't be maybe three maybe four maybe i don't think it'll be three or four so there'll be another one after this so this is a merged community called you can join here at friday august 12th at 2 p.m utc which is 10 p.m p.m est or 10 a.m est it's i believe it's 10 a.m est here as well so you can

check this out we'll link it in the youtube description below all right so uh there's a nice image here put out by etherworld which is a quick recap of all the shadow forks done until now you can see all the shadow forks here at the top we have the uh kind of uh uh g s g shadow sorry that's not at the top it's kind of like down in a timeline with kind of like top and bottom here so we have gts f which is the girly test net shadow fork and then we have msf which is the mainnet shadow fork so you can see here we've had 10 main shadow forks and six girly test net shadow forks here which is very cool to see i think we're gonna have a few more i mean i don't think there's any more girly ones scheduled obviously but i

think we're gonna have maybe one or two more i would say maybe even three more main net shadow forks before the merge happens and then that's it we won't be doing any more merge related shadow forks but i believe for future upgrades we're probably going to be doing shadow forks still this is as i said before this has been something that is it is new to the ethereum ecosystem we didn't do shadow forks before for any upgrades and it kind of became a thing with all the merge developments happening so very cool to see this very nice image here from etherworld i'll link it in the description for you to check out as well all right so the protocol guild announced that they have completed two important milestones over the weekend they have begun distributing vested assets of 1.7 million directly to members and have updated the split to

reference active contributors from 111 to 119. so now there's 119 people on the protocol guild split contract that he's kind of uh are going to be getting a share of the funds that they have there so you can check out the split update transaction on nurse's safe here and you can kind of and you can go see the dune analytics dashboard from sorry for the kind of like relative member weight and kind of who's getting what yeah so you can see the percentage allocations the addresses associated with it what's been invested uh what's been uh and what the total funding is for each address which is very very cool to see i've shown this dashboard before i'll link you to the subscription again for you to check out all right so we have a couple of one five five nine related uh images here from taken's theorem today so this is i

guess a uh post here from coinmetrics actually they're theorem has kind of taken and shared on twitter you can read this post i'll link it in youtube description below uh but this basically shows that the evidence of that mev no longer able to capture as much value now that erp-1559 introduces a base fee that all transactions must pay at a minimum so you can see on the left-hand side of this image if it wants to load uh before erp-1559 lowest 10 000 blocks by gas price a lot of them got pushed to the right you can't really see because my camera's covering it but got pushed to the right-hand side here and then after one five five nine the lowest ten thousand blocks by gas price it's all kind of like bundled up and there's not really anything on the right so it just smoothened it out and that's the

whole point of one five five nine wasn't to reduce gas fees but was to smoothen them out uh and that as i said before is because of the base fee mechanism uh got to do with mev so to put it in simple terms before when mav was being captured before one five five nine you were able to kind of like pay uh a go completely out of bounds and not have to play any eath to the base layer you could just pay basically you could have like a zero guy transaction go in because you would pay the miner directly right but now that's no longer the case with one five five nine you have to pay eth on the base layer because the base fee isn't eat you can you can't do zero guy transactions the base fee right now is tengwei you have to pay tengwei because of the fact

that the protocol will not allow you to put a zero grade transaction in uh because that the base fee has to be paid in eth so we got rid of that negative externality there and and and by doing so we were able to smoothen out a lot of the kind of like gas facial and smoothing out the mev that was extracted as well which is very very cool to see and the second image that taken's theorem put out here is a better visualization of how eip159 smoothed out the gas phase you had before after and recent so before it was very very erratic you can see here and i'm sure a lot of you that interacted with ethereum layer one before one five five nine experienced this erratic kind of like gas phase then you can see after it you know smoothened out a lot more and

recent blocks it's still very very similar in how it kind of like smoothened it out so just another kind of i guess like uh way of visualizing the fact that one 559 made the uh transaction fee pro or i guess like transaction fee market much smoother which is obviously a very big upgrade for everyone on layer one ethereum all right so moving on to i guess non-ethereum core stuff here so paulie now put out oh i guess like shared a governance post that they posted on the optimism governance forum uh where they quote where they kind of captioned it by saying a few days ago i drafted a proposal to pause funding activities on optimism primarily citing regulatory risk i believe we now have a precedent to take the matter more seriously while the proposal doesn't have much support i will personally abide by it now the tldr

of this proposal is that uh the reason why polynomial wants to pause governance fund voting cycles is because the optimism is currently extremely centralized like pretty much everything is centralized fraud proofs aren't in place i add the sequencer the validators all of it centralized it has a centralized key honestly guys like it's more centralized than pretty much anything in crypto today like it's it's as centralized as a centralized exchange i love optimism i love layer twos but as it exists today it is not in any way decentralized so i do agree with pauline now that that's a big risk especially in light of recent events with tornado cash and should go give this full post a read and all the responses here and give their full tweet threader read as well for justification for this or reasoning around this um and i think that's good reasoning because

like having such a centralized service isn't just a risk of like say you know for some reason just a hypothetical optimism got sanctioned and they had to basically block all u.s users from their protocol i mean it's an impossible ask but basically they would have to pause the protocol on that kind of like uh in that case right but also it's a big risk in the fact that what if the optimism teams keys get compromised and someone was able to drain the entire system because of the fact that optimism owns everything we don't and sorry the foundation owns everything basically right so there are all those kind of like inherent risks there from that extreme centralization so i do think that uh paulina is right here that maybe the incentive should be paused because right now the incentives are

leading to a lot of tvl and a lot of activity on optimism which is great from a growth perspective don't get me wrong but it's also scary when it's when optimism is still very centralized now their fraud proof system isn't actually coming with bedrock which is coming in q4 i think their footprint system is going to be called canon is going to be coming in q1 or maybe q2 next year and i don't know if that's going to be fully decentralized for all proofs either maybe centralized ones too so i i would have a feeling that by the looks of things we wouldn't expect even like a you know maybe minimum decentralized optimism till maybe the second half of next year so there's still a while away here and it's also a kind of like thing of balancing decentralization and growth like i get that but i kind of like sympathize with

both sides here and i definitely sympathize with paulinha's argument so give their thread a read give the blog pro give the governance post to read i should say i'll link it in the youtube description for you to check out all right so we have a fresh guide here from alex connolly which is a co-founder and cto at immutable so this is a ground-up guide to zkvm and evm compatibility and rollups and this is basically a 21 minute read so again if you read uh john's kind of like uh a complete guide to rollups the other day it may have come and covered some of this but if you want even more than that i think it was 80 minute read you can read this blog post from immutablex here today uh which is about a 21 minute read all about specifically zk roll ups the evm

compatibility and roll ups in general too so yeah i'll link this in the description for you to check out but good to see that we're getting so much literature so much riding on roll ups in general and on zk vms and zig cabs and things like that because i think there was a lot of confusion over the last few weeks especially around zkvm because of everyone being like you know no where is it kvm no you're not a zkvm or where were the first one and we weren't the first one and all this sort of stuff like just craziness around that like i'm glad we have more literature here to kind of like expand upon and read more about and educate ourselves because at the end of the day we all need to kind of like be aware of what is an actual kind of like true zkvm which ones

are decentralized we you know which ones are going to work which ones aren't what evm compatibility actually actually means and all that sort of stuff uh kind of like around it so i'll link this in the youtube description you can go give it a read yourself all right so uh speaking of optimism they introduced something called nft mirroring so you can now mirror your optimism nfts on ethereum mainnet so you can display them on apps like twitter this will be dropping exclusively on optimism soon and you can check out uh kind of like kelvins pfp if you want a sneak peek so basically this nft is on uh optimism but he's using this mirroring technique so that he can kind of have it on ethereum mainnet and then verify it on twitter you'll notice that he's got the hexacon profile picture here which means that this is a verified

nft coming from his ethereum address that he's linked to twitter this is very cool because people have said before it's like okay well i'm gonna have my nfts on layer two but like how do i prove providence on layer one like how do i you know aren't they more valuable in layer one all these sorts of stuff how do i interact with things that are looking for a layer one interaction well you can do it with nft mirroring which is really really cool because it's still a cryptographic proof that you own that nft it's just not on layer one it's on layer two but it it's kind of like acting obviously it's mirroring it like it's on layer one and you can use it like where you use all your other nfts if they're on layer one which is very cool i wonder if you could do mirror trading or

something like that i don't know if you could maybe you can like it should be possible to do such a thing where you have a mirror nft on my own ethereum you go and sell it on openc and then the ownership of that mirror nft gets transferred to the buyer of of it and then on layer 2 it also gets transferred to them so through the kind of like contract but it technically should be possible to do i don't know how gas intensive that would be i don't know if even if it would be desirable but i'm kind of like curious how that would look but in terms of just kind of being able to prove that you have the nft and to use that with things that don't support layer 2 so don't support optimism specifically this is a really cool feature so i'm very

excited to see this go live on optimism soon uh yeah so you mean i'll link this in the youtube description i think there is code on github uh maybe to to look at uh maybe not i don't know yet but uh yeah this is very very cool all right so another really cool thing out of the polygon ecosystem is uh and this this happened a few days ago actually i forgot to cover this that one of the largest education departments in uh mah i don't know wow how do i say that maharashtra i'm butchering the kind of like pronunciation there but they have issued 100 000 plus verifiable digital diplomas on polygon enabled by uh legit dokya so this is one of the largest on-chain credentialing credentialing systems in india very very cool to see this is this

is awesome like i think so this is an indian state that's that's the word that i can't pronounce here um this have a population of 112 million and a 400 billion dollar gdp that's that's huge and they've issued these digital diplomas on polygon that's actually huge guys like i see people kind of like often going on about using nfts for things like you know documents in general and diplomas and degrees and stuff like that well it's actually being done now on polygon through i guess like this legit doc service which is very very cool to see and you can you can kind of like expand this to any unique document that you want or any sort of document that you want obviously a blocker here would be privacy like for example you don't want sensitive documents being open to the world and again this goes back to what i

was saying about privacy before guys like i just saw it's so insane that people think that if you want privacy you must be a criminal like some people actually think that which is just insane to me because like i use a simple example with people like um sometimes where i say okay do you like in a public restroom do you keep the door open when you go to the toilet right like no right you close the door right because you want privacy like just a simple example like that and people say oh oh right they get kind of like stumped on that you should use that example the next time you have someone that that kind of says to you ah i've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear i'm like okay well then why do you do that then but that's that's

orthogonal to i guess this but just generally like institutions whether they be kind of like educational otherwise definitely care about privacy right they want privacy uh they want kind of like privacy preserving tools because they don't want their for example if they're a business they don't want their competitors seeing all of their stuff but they still want to be able to use on-chain uh kind of like activities so yeah i think from that perspective uh the privacy stuff is very important but also very very cool to see that this state in india which is obviously very very big has 112 million people living there which is just crazy to me like australia is so small compared to the rest of the world that like it has 25 million people in australia eight million in in melbourne this uh and i was i should say eight million maybe

victoria or something like that um or nine million or something like that this uh this state in india has like over ten times the amount of people uh that my state has i can't even fathom that many people to be honest but yeah anyway that's getting off track a little bit there very cool to see this uh i hoping it continues obviously very cool to see it on polygon uh and i can't wait to see what else get gets kind of like uh shaken out of this all right we're coming up on the end here i didn't go too far over which is nice but basically just wanted to give a quick shout out to the show me the crypto podcast here i went on for a second episode with them and this one's all about the merge so basically i spoke for i think about an hour and a half

about all things got to do with the merge definitely go check it out if you haven't yet it was a really fun discussion uh with kind of like wade and olfia they're really great hosts i love their show i love kind of like especially their intro for their show it's really funny it's like a parody of show me the money from what tom cruise does uh in that movie that i've forgotten the name of but yeah go check out this i'll link it in the youtube description below it was a very fun episode uh speaking of appearances i'll also be going live today at 1 p.m australian eastern standard time with collective shift uh to talk about the merge as well right and talk about kind of like all things ethereum uh the merge scaling wars upcoming narratives things like that so and that's gonna be on

twitter spaces so i'll link this in the youtube description you can go set a reminder for yourself before this happens i'm excited for that chat as well but i think that's gonna be it for this long episode today again apologies for not putting an episode out yesterday there will be kind of like times like that where it's just like okay well i'll just wait a day you know i'll take some take a little bit of time off there and i also didn't put a newsletter yesterday either but uh but yeah anyway i'm back be around for the rest of the week so i'm gonna end that one at that 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 newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you

all tomorrow thanks everyone