zkSync 2.0 testnet live, 6 months of eth2 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #133 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the deadly way refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 1st of june 2021 all right everyone first day of winter for me down here in melbourne uh it's getting a bit cold lately missing those summer days i know in the u.s it's just um you know just got got the summer i guess like the northern hemisphere is pretty much all summer right now but a lot of my u.s friends keep going on about like you know summer and how the how they're going to be going outside and enjoying all the sun and i'm like yeah that was cool during you know the um the the the kind of like holiday period around christmas and it's always funny like it's just flipped um for most of the world and the

southern hemisphere because obviously most of the world is in the northern hemisphere but anyway um i i'll move on from that for now so uh i put out a tweet today saying that i'm helping the arbitram team to find a passionate marketing community person to help them with uh their mission to scale ethereum here so if that is you or you know anyone that might be interested in this role please dm me on twitter uh you know and it's not just arbitrary there's a bunch of other teams also asking me for for people as well so please reach out on twitter if this is someone uh if you're if you're someone that fits into this role i really do get asked mostly for marketing and community people and you may be wondering you know what does that entail well a lot of marketing tends to entail

a lot of content related work so writing blog posts writing tweets coming up with campaigns stuff like that uh and community stuff is like you know i mean i guess like it's pretty self-explanatory but like sitting in the discord channel responding to tweets you know getting to know people within the community um you know the community members and things like that managing uh all the social channels and stuff so if that's something that you are interested in doing you want to do and you're happy to do uh definitely reach out to me i mean i did it for set for about 18 months it was you know the best job i had ever had uh honestly it was so much fun uh and you know i i never had like a marketing or kind of community management background either uh so i learnt it all kind of like on

the job and i think you know you can do that in this industry so if you're just a passionate person in crypto um you know you have a lot of crypto knowledge that you'd like to impart on to others and you want to help an early stage earlier stage team like kind of arbitrarium and you know i mean i've talked about arbitrary a lot but they just went live with their mate the developer mainnet last week they're definitely in need of a marketing person to kind of spread the word about this so yeah i couldn't you know honestly i would uh i would join um and do this for them if i had the time because i feel like this would be a really fun role so definitely uh go go check this out if that's how you're interested in um and you know dm me if if you want to

learn more about it so speaking of i guess scaling solutions uh we had the one of the biggest announcements from the last 24 hours was that uh zk sync 2.0 alpha test net is now live which features their headline technologies the zk evm and zk porter so the zk evm is the zero knowledge evm uh and zk porter is their scaling technology which kind of puts together zk roll ups and um i think volidium i think that's the other solution if i'm remembering correctly but anyway they promise a hundred thousand plus transactions per second using zk porter but i think for me the headline feature really is the zk evm so the zero knowledge ethereum virtual machine which essentially allows for

evm compatible uh zk rollups to exist which is by considered by a lot of people to be the holy grail um and you know there are obviously kind of trade-offs here with all these kind of roll-up solutions and stuff like that it's nothing's perfect here this is still early test nets but zk sync is claiming that the solidity smart contracts are almost here so they're built with that they're i think this is their language llvm here um and and their compiler can already compile this all down and everything like that to to evm byte code the core infrastructure is fun functional and everything like that and they were able to meet their their may deadline but it was it was really tight obviously this came out i guess like the last day of may here but anyway this is awesome i mean like i've been

saying for a few weeks now there's going to be all these solutions going live over you know i guess like the summer period for the northern hemisphere winter period for for for southern hemisphere um and we've already had like arbitrary optimism i mean optimism is technically live just not in like a very public mainnet capacity just yet uh starkware is working diligently on their solution which they promised for kind of i think june at least i think was their first iteration of it and zk sync has promised uh their main net in august um and you know obviously the test net is live here now so those are kind of like the four big ones that that a lot of people are paying attention to there are a bunch of others out there as well of course but these are like kind of the the four big

ones here so there's already a test net explorer up for for zk sync 2.0 here um in this blog post they go through kind of everything that's with that kind of like is coming with this release and or sorry has come with this release how it's all working how they're able to do kind of like zero knowledge evm compatibility uh sorry evm compatibility at uh with zk proofs here um they also put together this kind of graphic where they compare side chains optimistic roll ups uh zk sync 2.0 and z guessing 2.0 with each data sharding i i love the zk sync team but whenever i see these kind of things um coming from one particular team um you know i i always take it with a grain of salt because obviously there's bias here but i think that it's pretty accurate i mean a side chain definitely is more

uh programmable and and scalable uh sorry he's definitely programmable and and scalable but it definitely lacks the decentralization of ethereum and in turn the security of ethereum here uh optimistic roll-ups i think i don't know if i would say that they're that bad on scalability they're actually pretty good um with scalability and especially with with data sharing as well um and and i i believe that they're very good on security decentralization too uh but you know zk sync um is claiming that they're better across a lot of these metrics which you know remains to be seen we'll see how it plays out on kind of like main net here uh but i you know i always take these things at the ground of soul anyway but still i mean for me like i've been saying for a little while a lot of these layer two solutions need to just deliver

and get their stuff out there into developers hands to build their products on top of this and you know once i see that i kind of like stopped being you know very skeptical about it and that's exactly what zk sync has done here actually the zk sync team made some grand kind of claims a few weeks back about you know what they're bringing with zk porter and stuff like that um and i kind of like was like okay well i'm super skeptical because anytime someone promises something this big i get skeptical but from the people that i've spoken to some of the smartest people that i've spoken to they say that zero knowledge proofs um in general are kind of like the you know they are that they aren't too good to be drew they are that good uh so yeah still though i'm i'm waiting

to see some real apps live on this that i can use myself and that we can all use know and love um using this kind of new technology here but again i don't have any reason to doubt these these kind of teams out there i just want you know there's been so much talk over the years of layer 2 stuff i just want to see it kind of functional before i kind of like promote it as like the holy grail and that goes for all of them i mean you know arbitrary and optimism and stark where all this sort of stuff like zk sync was live um is with their git coin integration it worked really well starquest technology is being used by a number of apps arbitram uh has has at the test net which worked quite well from the developers i've spoken to

they're having really fun time with arbitram um and also optimism obviously has been working uh with kind of synthetics and stuff like that as well so yeah but still really really great to see this um this is just huge honestly like i don't think we're gonna need a hundred thousand transactions per second for a little while uh while we kind of like i guess scale up the industry and more people come on board and things like that um but i i do think that the fact that we're already at that kind of like milestone or like almost there because i think the hundred thousand tps is with eth2 data sharding um that is is amazing i mean visas 40 000 transactions per second which is a global payments network so if you can have like one kind of like zk sync instance just running like a

global payments network or kind of like one other layer two instance doing this that would be absolutely huge and i think that that's kind of like the holy grail or the end game as they call it here so definitely going to keep an eye on that and see where kind of like how this progresses for sure uh and i you know this was just like something really nice to wake up to today because i think that the more of these solutions out there the more i guess like the narrative just completely changes and people say well ethereum can scale and gas fees are still quite low right now i mean at the moment they're like what 20 grey i don't know if this will come up on the screen it doesn't uh rapids like 21 way and like under 20 for like you know normal transactions here so

it's it's kind of insane to see that but i do think that that's the very temporary thing just because the market's quiet right now once the market heats up again gas fees will spike and people will be complaining again so you know rolling up these layer twos during a quiet market is actually pretty cool because then when the gas fees spike again people will be like oh well i can just use layer two now instead of having to sit at layer one here so great to see this from zk sync anyway um and i am just like never been more excited about the general kind of layer two space here so uh this kind of like uh ethereum treasury's website was launched today by i think a couple of people here uh a couple of people that i hadn't actually heard of before but they damned

me and said hey you know check out our kind of like ethereum treasuries uh website here and they've posted it on product hunt so if i go here to the actual website you can see what this is so essentially it's a list of uh companies and funds that have eighth on their balance sheet here and and you know they link to kind of like proof of it and stuff like that and purchase filings i mean i this was expanding before i'm not sure why it's not expanding now um but it was expanding and they had like links here to kind of like um i guess like see uh where the eighth was what where the where the address is where their announcement was and you can see here like uh that the biggest companies out there like grayscale ethereum trust holds a lot of ether uh my two you know

those that was that kind of like hong kong uh public company who bought more ethan btc uh and a bunch of others here like uh i guess uh coinbase has a lot on their balance sheet of course and other etfs and stuff like that uh so yeah really really cool to see this i mean obviously there's been a lot more institutional interest in bitcoin over the year last year and it's just started for eighth as well i've seen some companies double in this but i think the institutional flows for all of crypto seem to be on pause right now or at least they haven't been publicly announced yet i think at the end of q2 um we're gonna see uh kind of like i think that ends june 30th we're going to see a lot of these public companies do their earnings reports and they're going to

say they hold the ether on their balance sheet because i think the run up to 4.4k eth was definitely got to do with a lot of them uh but yeah i'm curious to see how many kind of announced this but great to see that there's a website tracking this now definitely going to link this in the youtube description you can go check it out for yourself so bitfly put out a tweet today that has been the six months since the beacon chain launch so uh for those who don't know the beacon chain it launched on december 1st 2020 so today is june 1st 2021 which is six months since then and and since then five million plus eight has been staked which is around five percent of the eat supply there's 153 000 active validators 30 000 unique ethereum deposit addresses and 99 point uh

x percent blocks were successfully proposed so almost 100 kind of uptime here uh i you know i think there was that like tiny hiccup with the prism client the other day that kind of um you know put us just off 100 but still the network besides that has been running absolutely amazingly uh you know it's actually i was talking about this before but it's actually really amazing like how well the network has been running this whole time uh given that it is a brand new consensus mechanism it's based on brand new kind of like research that is is definitely a bleeding edge has been around for a while but definitely bleeding edge and it's something that has never existed before in in the world in any kind of fashion ethereum's proof of stake is not like distributed proof of stake or depos or any of these other kind of

proof of stake systems that you're used to it is unique and novel and completely completely new kind of um across the board here so to see such a successful first six months is absolutely amazing and this is actually one of the prerequisites or at least the main prerequisite for the merge so i think all the research and developers would love to see six to 12 months of perfect kind of uh you know running of the beacon chain before they felt comfortable merging in each one and i think we're going to get that and speaking of the merge as well jeff lao here from ens domains put together an amazing thread breaking down what the merge is uh and kind of like how how it all ties into kind of sharding and like the broader e3 roadmap here and why it was prioritized over

sharding so i'll let you read this thread for yourself in the youtube description it covers a uh you know it's got i mean sorry it's got a few links to different resources here as well that you can go check out uh to learn more about this and it covers it i mean it covers a lot of what i spoken about on the refill really well just recaps it in a really nice and kind of like single thread here and i'm really glad to see uh jeff doing more threads because if you remember i actually featured i'm pretty sure on the refuel he's threaded about layer two solutions and kind of like you know roll ups versus side chains versus plasma and all that sort of stuff and jeff's obviously got a lot of great knowledge here so i'm i'm really happy to see him putting together more of

these threats so definitely go check this out uh it'll be linked in the youtube description so i missed this tweet i think maybe two days ago from ryan watkins where he said um this was like a really really good tweet he said the reason many people don't get crypto is because they're too busy looking for technical innovation rather than institutional innovation the most exciting attributes of blockchains are about how we design and run internet institutions not computational performance and he followed this up by saying this insight is foundational to crypto and and then he linked to two pieces that really drove the point home for him now i want to talk a little bit about this because a lot of you may see out there a lot of different projects especially quote-unquote ethereum killers

advertising that they have better technology that they've got more tps they're more decentralized because of this blah blah blah blah right we've seen this time and time and time again from all these different solutions i'll never tell you the trade-offs but they'll tell you the benefits but the reason why none of these have taken off or at least one of the major reasons is because they think it you know the developers and the communities behind this think that this is a technological uh revolution rather than an institutional kind of revolution and innovations across that front think about it bitcoin and ethereum are the two most um unscalable at layer one blockchains but they're almost they're also the most decentralized and they're also responsible for some of the greatest kind of innovations in institutions in history think about what ethereum has brought to

the table in terms of dows i mean there's a great tweet here from peter pan that goes through the dao history and timeline where you can see like all of the experimentation and innovation that's happened on the dow front which is which is obviously integral to institutions and the innovation on institutions here and how far we've come i mean we had the original dao and the dow hack and make a dao and now we have things like snapshot and flamingo dao and and pleaser down things like that that are just like forming um you know to kind of i guess like coordinate human capital and you know monetary capital as well uh so yeah that's that is like the major reason why these networks live or die based on their communities because the communities are the ones that build the institutions and hold them up and build

the values directly into the um the protocol itself and and directly into things like ethereum so uh and that's what a lot of these kind of like i guess ethereum killers get wrong i believe they start from the technology point of view first and they don't start from the human point of view i think what ethereum did was it really started from the human point of view it focused on building a community first and then it um you know and in parallel it also did technology that you know uh technological innovation um not you know but it didn't prioritize that over its kind of i guess community building because one if you don't have like a layer zero like a human layer that is um strong and and kind of like

you know distributed decentralized and full of the right people then you're not gonna you're gonna go nowhere you don't have a lasting community and i think that's why bitcoin has been so resilient as well that even though you know people will call them bitcoin is toxic or whatever um they're not toxic to themselves they're pretty good as like a community and they're pretty good at sticking to to what they kind of like believe in to an extent and and kind of like um innovating across that and adapting to different kind of narratives i mean you know bitcoin as an inflation hedge wasn't it wasn't a thing a couple years ago now it is because the community decided well this is what we want bitcoin to to kind of be we want it to sell it as an inflation hedge because we believe that that's what it's very strong at

whereas with ethereum it's be you know ethereum evolves all the time but ethereum evolves from a different point where the kind of like people doing stuff on the network whether that be through applications or through dows or through institutions set the kind of narratives for ethereum as a wider community and network here so that's what i think a lot of people miss that's what and and it's not it's very hard to miss sorry it's very easy to miss this if you're new to the ecosystem because this is definitely deeper level stuff you can't just come into the ecosystem day one and kind of um see ethereum you know see it at like 15 transactions per second see this other ethereum killer saying oh we have like you know 10 000 transactions per second of course the the you know the the noob is where a lot of the noobs are going to

be like well you know why kind of you know why isn't ethereum doing this oh ethereum is old tech right and then it takes them a while to kind of clue into exactly why ethereum and bitcoin are as big as they are and have retained their number one and two spots over all these other kind of ethereum killers and bitcoin had its own killers back in the day right with bitcoin cash and bitcoin sv and a bunch of other kind of like forks out there i mean i'm pretty sure litecoin originally you know i don't think it was positioned as a bitcoin killer but it was definitely positioned as an improvement over bitcoin and obviously that never materialized for a number of reasons but i think that the the the main reason is that that kind of human layer there so really great tweet from ryan here and

really great kind of tweet from peter here with the dow history uh sorry the history of dows and how much kind of like innovation has gone on over the years and how it's all culminated into what we see today which i think is you know pretty pretty good what we see today i think compound governance is really great um you know there are some that are broken for sure i'm not going to go over the ones that i think are broken but i think generally we're getting better at dows and we're getting better at human institutions using ethereum here so xerox api is now live on the polygon network so if you are a builder a developer and you work with xerox on ethereum you can now work with it on polygon and you can integrate uh through kind of like xerox uh on polygon

to to a bunch of different kind of uh i guess projects here um you know these projects aren't all on polygon just yet but some of them are which is really cool to see as well so yeah if you're a developer and you've been building on 0x or you're interested in building on xerox um with their kind of like api here you can now do so on polygon so channeling god put out a really interesting tweet and something that i actually spoke about on the into the ether podcast that's going out um you know uh today uh the latest podcast where i i said the same thing he did and i actually didn't see his tweet until after i said it so it's really cool that that we basically both agreed on this but he said in his tweet here i believe the future will inevitably be

a multi-chain world but with two key nuances it will be a power law distribution between chains and adoption will concentrate to specific environments and most change will be l2 roll-ups that store data on l1 shards and co2 ethereum this is pretty much exactly what i said on the into the ether podcast uh because basically we were talking about eric and i were talking about how uh you can view kind of like this ecosystem or at least different kind of chains as like app stores now if there's like 10 different chains that means there's 10 different app stores that means there's 10 different implementations of an app that the developers would have to maintain so could you imagine the rv kind of core team and governance maintaining 10 different um you know instantiations of rv across all of these chains

for different environments and things like that no i don't i don't think that's going to happen i think that the evm is already won i think the evm is is going to be the winner for for the long term and i think that uh there's going to be a point where it's basically like there's going to be a handful maybe two or three so uh different chains and l2s uh maybe it's you know you could say ethereum polygon um and one of the kind of two of the layer twos as the main kind of places where these developers can actually uh afford to to keep up with kind of like uh you know four different things where they deploy their upgrades to all four of them at once um but eventually maybe it becomes a thing where there's only like two or maybe three solutions that are

kind of uh live where developers can keep up with because they've got limited bandwidth and maintaining kind of ten different in you know instances of the same app you know across different environments is is a nightmare from a developer point of view like you can you can just kind of look at what happens with the um with the app stores the only two dominant app stores today in the west uh the ios app store obviously and the android play store uh the windows store is is dead right windows phone died as well uh because they weren't able to get developers to adopt their technology developers didn't want to build for a third uh you know operating system and that's why you see the same thing or at least a similar thing with uh with computers as well like personal

computing uh windows and mac one that but there's also like a hobbyist linux community um and linux obviously runs a lot of the server infrastructure of the world and things like that but in terms of like home pcs it's pretty much like mostly windows um or at least it has been windows for most of most of uh of the last couple of decades but it's also like apple with mac os and and obviously like a lot of over over the last kind of few years has trended towards mobile with um ios and things like that and and and android and stuff but you know generally it's just like two or three major players uh and that's it there's not going to be like in terms of major platforms there's not going to be 10 different platforms out there that have the majority of the network effects on them there's going to

be two or three and that's why it's called a power law distribution and as chainlink god says here he believes most chains will be l2 roll-ups and i also believe that most chains will be l2 rollers because there is absolutely in my mind no reason to build your app on an on a chain on a new chain with a new kind of like ecosystem with a new programming language with a new kind of like environment rather than building it on a layer too secured by ethereum because you get all of the benefits of ethereum's vast decentralization security community um you know battle testing all of that sort of stuff and you get uh uh you you know you get the scalability of layer twos which have also been in heavy research and development for a very long time now uh for many many years now

um so from that point of view that this is exactly what i believe is gonna gonna play out uh and when people say multi-chain world i don't think a lot of them are referring to this i think a lot of them are trying to kind of meme the the fact that there's going to be like millions or like lots of different blockchains out there they're all going to be like talking to each other and everything like that i mean sure they'll probably all talk to each other through different bridges but most of them are going to be zombie towns like most of them are not going to have any activity on them and we've already seen that play out uh so yeah from that point of view i i you know i'm i'm even more kind of like eager to see the l2s go live

to see kind of like what the power distribution looks like even after a year because liquidity in this industry moves incredibly quickly and you can imagine like how fast liquidity is going to migrate to like these layer twos just how quickly it migrated to something like polygon or bsc or kind of like any of these other evm compatible chains but at the end of the day there's diminishing returns here so i'm looking forward to seeing how the entire layer 2 space plays out so zappa put out a tweet today welcome to the zappaverse which is basically um welcoming everyone to their new zappa kind of like gamification nft features here so i think they posted about it on uh yeah they did on their learn.zappa.phi here where basically you can complete uh

different kind of like tasks in your zapify dashboard such as adding liquidity doing a swap and kind of things like that and earn uh nfts and and earn like exp to level up here through quests and things like that this is really really cool i like the idea of gamifying these apps because it gets people to use them more obviously gets them to do things they may not have done in the past uh teaches them to do new things and keeps it like fresh and fun uh i completed my daily and weekly quests it reminds me very much of world of warcraft for anyone who's played used to have these kind of quests in in world of warcraft where you'd earn specific kind of like items or kind of like gear for your character now you're earning like exp and nfts within zappify and they've also kind of teased

here that uh you know you can expect to see different types of rewards in the future like exclusive merchandise more nfts and potentially more than that so there's a lot of people speculating on zappa having a token um you know i disclose you here i'm a seed investor in zappa i don't know you know if there's going to be a token or anything like that i don't have any special knowledge here but you know definitely i think that it's a it's a it'll it'll probably happen eventually um at some point in the future but for now you can do these quests level up get these really cool looking nfts uh and you know potentially do things that you haven't done before like providing liquidity and stuff like that this is a really good motivator i think so yeah good work on this to the zappify

team here i'm i you know i'm really looking forward to seeing what else they do with this so a value disciple uh posted in the index co-op forum a really really great kind of breakdown of what you can do uh with your dpi with your default pulse index so if you're looking for ways to kind of make this a productive asset there are so many things you can do here like if i'm just scrolling down the list here you can see there's different things you can do like provide liquidity mine liquidity yield farm leveraged yield farm you know uh lending it out on on money markets and borrowing it on money markets uh collateralizing debt positions with cdps and things like that and they also go over the risks associated with with all of this which is really really cool

um i think that generally any assets that don't have productivity is something that most people don't want to hold i don't want to hold assets that don't have productivity that i can't do things with because at the end of the day you know i want to be able to do with my assets like that that i'm holding for the long term i want to be able to do things with them so that i can kind of compound my gains because i don't care about the short to medium term movements of these assets but what i do care about is them not just sitting in my wallet doing nothing especially if they're a d fly asset so for me you know what i hold you know a lot of i hold you know eighth obviously um and i put that to work traditionally i put that to work with yield farming

but these days i'm moving more and more and of it into e2 staking i have like snx that i bought a while ago that i'm staking of course i have um index tokens which i can't do anything with just yet uh and but like that's just an exception to the rule because i'm so bullish on the project because of um the fact that i'm close to the set team which which uh it plays a big part in the index card pr um but there's a bunch of other things that i have as well like i have my inverse finance airdrop that i that i'm staking i have um some llcx tokens which i'm farming with so i don't like just tokens sitting in my wallet doing nothing like and i think that's true for a lot of people out there and i think this is going to

become more and more true as time goes on so yeah great post here on the dpi and what you can do with that are really cool to see this and i hope to see more kind of i guess um protocols and and token kind of like uh projects with with tokens do this and show people what they can do with their token i'm i'm pretty sure yearn did this recently and this was the inspiration for this yeah i went through this on the refuel what you can do with your wi-fi so this is basically inspired by that and i really hope to see more teams uh doing this for their tokens as well so yeah we'll keep an eye on that definitely keep you guys up to date on that but for now i think that's it so thank you everyone for watching and listening

be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone