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Weekly General Discussion - July 17, 2023 <-> July 23, 2023

Welcome to the Weekly General Discussion on Ethfinance

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  • (crossposted from r/ethfinance - would love to see more action here)

    EthCC day 1 recap

    Notable talks:

    "MEV, toxic flow and its consequences" by Robert Paluba (0x).

    A very interesting deep-dive into the analytics they have done on mev strategies for the biggest UniswapV3 pool, ETH/USDC. In the past three months hft market makers have taken over mev for this pool completely and pushed sandwich bots into unprofitable territory. It's just a handful of entities with deep pockets now that run the show and by combining dex/cex arbitrage with transaction frontrunning and block building. Surprisingly, this actually improved slippage for end-users but takes revenue away from other LPs in the pool.

    "Introducing Lens Protocol V2" by Stani Kulechov (Aave)

    Lens gets a bunch of new features including "actions" and a composable nft-based identity. There still is a waitlist for new users though.

    "From self custody wallets to self custody payment - annoucing Gnosis Pay" by Martin Köppelmann (Gnosis)

    The just-launched Gnosis Pay combines a Gnosis Safe wallet with real-world fiat payments via visa card or sepa bank transfers, all in a convenient dapp. They utilize a Polygon zkEvm L2 settled on Gnosis chain L1. Early access preorders for the visa card are available for EU residents via a POAP given out during the talk. To me this looks like an exciting product where a lot of puzzle pieces suddenly fall into place for a great user experience, I will definitely order the card to replace my cex visacard (sorry Bitpanda).

    "Lessons from a seasoned web3 security firm" by Mehdi Zerouali (Sigma Prime)

    Good overview over smart contract security best practices. Sigma Prime also just published a lot of their audit reports, and they offer 8-12 week internships in case anyone is interested.

    "Introducing Uniswap v4" by Alice Henshaw and Sara Reynolds (Uniswap Labs)

    V4 allows extensive pool customization with smart contract hooks for all important pool interactions. The new singleton contract design optimizes gas usage while "flash accounting" helps with transactions spanning multiple pools (sorry, didn't quite understand the example they provided).

    "The New Frontier of Liquid Staking" by Jordan Sutcliffe (StakeWise)

    Stakewise V3 has exciting new features: staking vaults are highly customizable and enable "white label" liquid staking solutions for all kinds of organizations. You can mint 111% overcollaterized osETH tokens against your staking deposits and use them in defi. They currently run a public testnet (pacific.stakewise.io) and are eager for feedback from users.

    "The Verge: Converting the Ethereum state to Verkle trees" by Guillaume Ballet (Ethereum Foundation)

    Description of the different possible strategies for bringing verkle trees to Ethereum. Migrating the existing Merkle-Patricia-Tree state is computationally expensive and will probably need to be done gradually over the course of weeks of months with high gas prices.

    Random observations

    • the sponsor stalls in building B are in a big hall with super high noise level, making it hard to have meaningful conversations
    • the nethermind devs said snap sync should take only a couple of hours, so there was definitely something wrong when my resync a couple weeks ago took 6 days to complete. They recommended bringing this up in their discord
    • I have neglected getting a party invite for today and will instead hit the climbing gym :)

  • (Accidentally cross-posted in the previous weekly. Here's my re-crosspost from ethfinance.)

    This post is relevant to ethfinance, as it really underscores that we don't own our community here, Reddit does. If as a moderator your community's desires are at odds with Reddit's desires (not rules, mind you - desires), they will permanently ban you if you choose to stand with your community instead of siding with them.

    As we know, a few weeks ago Reddit cut off access to the API. Many subreddits went dark for a couple days to protest. Some subreddits rightly realized that a protest with a defined end date ultimately doesn't make their voice heard, and they wanted to make their voice heard. The /r/dndmemes subreddit was one such subreddit.

    Now, one of the rules made clear by the Reddit admins is that you're not allowed to label harmless posts as NSFW to try to harm Reddit's ad revenue. In my opinion, that's fair enough. Content should be properly labeled.

    The members of the /r/dndmemes community, however, wanted to continue making a point without violating this rule. So in protest of the API changes, the community decided to changed their meme subreddit into a pornography subreddit. Full-on, D&D-style NSFW content. Every post was tagged NSFW, because every post was NSFW.

    The problem came when Reddit simultaneously announced a new rule, retroactively banned moderators who violated that new rule, and then started manually removing content from the subreddit. Here is a post from one of the remaining moderators that explains.

    This afternoon, r/dndmemes received the following message from the Mod Code of Conduct account:

    If you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action. 3 moderators have been permanently suspended and removed from the mod team for participating in this activity already. They are not to be added back to the team under any account.

    Moments later, and without further warning, the following mods were removed from the team and permanently suspended from Reddit:

    • u/Dalimey100

    • u/4cheese

    • u/EquivalentInflation

    As part of their community action, the Reddit admins also removed two of the NSFW flairs that the community had begun using, so it was no longer possible to properly categorize or filter new posts to the subreddit. In the aftermath, due to these sudden changes the Reddit admins made against the community's will, the remaining mods have marked new submissions to the subreddit manual approval to stem the tide of now-banned NSFW content. They're now swimming in a sea of posts that follow the mods' own rules, but don't follow the new rules Reddit Inc has decided to impose on their community, and they're expected to moderate their subreddit according to Reddit Inc's imposed /r/dndmemes rules.

    (part 1 of 2)

    • (part 2 of 2)

      This kind of direct community intervention is completely unprecedented in Reddit's 18 years of operation. Reddit has historically had a very laissez-faire approach to their communities, letting their communities themselves - represented by their community moderators - dictate what they want the content of their communities to be, and how they want their communities to be run. They've held this laissez-faire attitude even to a fault, letting the top mod of each subreddit unilaterally dictate subreddit rules and unilaterally add and remove other moderators, even at the protest of their community. A great example of this was when the /r/bitcoin community wanted to remove theymos as a top moderator due to his wildly unpopular community policies - Reddit Inc did nothing. Of course, that's all flipped on its head now. Reddit is no longer a host for independent communities run by individuals - it's a host for one big community run under the discretion of Reddit Inc, where ownership of "your community" is a privilege that can be taken away unilaterally at the whims of Reddit Inc without recourse.

      I foresee a time before too long, perhaps within the next few years, where the /r/ethfinance moderators will have to face a similar choice - whether to side with the desires of Reddit corporate, or whether to stand by the desires of the community, be permanently banned from Reddit, and be replaced with Reddit's own hand-selected moderators.

      With ethfinance, of course, the divide between the community and Reddit Inc will not be a divide of SFW/NSFW, because that's not this community's style. It will be a divide over the heart of what ethfinance means to us. Perhaps it will be the inability for communities to opt out of Reddit community points, causing ethfinance to drop in quality due to points-chasing in the same way ethtrader did. Perhaps it will be the discontinuation of old.reddit.com along with the incessant enshittification of new.reddit.com and the official app. Maybe it will be site-wide automod deletion of external links (in the style of YouTube comment automoderation), removing a crucial information-sharing tool from this community.

      Whatever the divide is between ethfinance and Reddit Inc, it will stem from this community's desire to just be left alone to do our own thing, in conflict with Reddit's desire to step in to make changes to the community to increase their own ad profits (because shortly, they'll have public shareholders to answer to!) And Reddit Inc is the one with the keys to the server rack, so ultimately, whatever they want to do, they will do. Just one of the perks of running permissioned forum software on top of a permissioned database.

      I share this because I truly believe that at some critical mass of platform enshittification, the "magic" of this community will leave /r/ethfinance and go somewhere else, just as it left /r/ethtrader to go to /r/ethfinance all those years ago. And it's important to keep your eyes and ears open, because wherever the magic goes, so will follow the alpha, the good friends, the counterculture that makes ethfinance such a fulfilling and worthwhile place to visit.

      Finally, a parting meme to make light of Reddit admin logic:

      https://i.imgflip.com/7sz8kv.jpg

  • Last week, I reported that Intel was exiting the NUC business, with implications to ETH stakers. This week, I am happy to report that Intel has licensed the manufacturing, support, and future design of its NUC line to Asus, who will be picking up the torch. It means that stakers will continue to have a robust option for small-form-factor nodes.

    https://www.servethehome.com/asus-and-intel-agree-on-deal-for-a-nuc-future/

    • I'd add that there are many more good options for small form factor nodes. Intel's marketing for NUC worked well, but it's still marketing. As if to prove my point, a colleague just walked in with the Dell Optiplex 7010, which would be a great option for a node if Dell could get their collective heads out of their asses and ship them as barebones, or if you can find someone to offload that useless stock 8GB of RAM / 256GB SSD on

  • Slightly late, Ethereum!

  • (again crossposted from r/ethfinance)

    Devcon Day 2 recap

    Notable talks:

    Of course today had many interesting talks and Vitalik's keynote, but there is one talk I want to specifically highlight because it resonated strongly with me and my beliefs. This is what we as a community or society in whole should all work on, instead of dreaming about lambos:

    "Rewriting the shared myths that run the world" by Tamara Helenius of Commons Stack.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS4YuOlRfS4

    Oh yeah, and Polygon premiered their zkEVM documentary "SCALE" today after the conference closed. It was more or less an infomercial celebrating and thanking the great people who worked on it. I'm a bit of a fanboy myself, but there was not much to learn here.

  • For those who use both Lens and Farcast protocols, which one do you prefer, and why?

    Bonus question - do you expect to see protocol convergence or consolidation at some point, or is the so-called Web3 social media market large enough to sustain independent communities?

  • (oof, nearly went to bed forgetting my crosspost from reddit)

    Just got back from the ether.fi x obol x ethstaker x dappnode x avado side event at EthCC, so bear with me as I'm slightly drunk.

    Met the one and only u/nixorokish and some other nice poap-wielding folks, we had a great time at Café de la Presse near Bastille.

    Sooo, time for the holdrcon ethcc day 3 recap!

    There were quite a few notable talks I want to share, thanks to the great recording crew they are all on youtube already:

    "Ethereumverse... loading. Or: Why we NEED horizontal scaling"

    Friederike Ernst of Gnosis (forgot which sub-company) made a case for scaling with l2-native dapps and assets that are not bridged from l1. I am impressed with what they are doing, a week ago I still held the narrative that Gnosis Chain is just an Ethereum testnet and suddenly they have a real world payment solution with visa and bank partnerships and more in the pipeline (e.g. the "hashi" cross-chain-communication protocol).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HDdLXY_pT0

    "A Token Decentralization Journey Under Fraud, Rug Pulls and Scam Attacks: The OCEAN Story"

    As part of the token engineering track, Trent Mcconaghy of Ocean Protocol gave an interesting insight on the evolution of the OCEAN token. Through several rounds of community feedback, emergency rugpull reactions and simulations using the self-developed "tokenSPICE" tool (analog circuit design anyone?) they arrived at a point where the protocol is close to fully decentralized and they can focus on pushing adoption. He also referenced a bunch of blog posts that might be an interesting read if you are designing a token model yourself.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQEqlPe8MJw

    "zkEVMs - One year in"

    Lea Schmitt of Scroll gave a good overview over the development of evm-compatible l2s since EthCC5. To me however, Scroll is still a mystery: who are they? do they have a community?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maddK7ch0v0

    "Reth: A new Rust Ethereum Client"

    Georgios Konstantopoulos delivered a very confident pitch for the latest contender in the execution client playfield. After overcoming some challenges like incomplete API specs they now have an alpha version that can run mainnet and offers vastly improved performance over geth and nethermind and is designed as a moddable base for further development. Nice! Also, they seem to have really cool, focused team and look for contributors with a mentorship program to help onboarding.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zntRpCKHyDc

    "Next Gen Cross-Chain Bridges & How All Bridges Still Suck"

    Today was a lot about l2s and bridges, but Daniel Lumi's talk was all you need for an overview over the different types of bridges and their weaknesses.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAkOHyWPI4o

    Random observations:

    • the sponsor stalls in the "B" venue were swapped for a whole new groups of projects. This means new swag, and I loved to meet the POAP team, (ex. Gnosis) Safe and Gnosis pay. Not too thrilled about seeing "Neon EVM" (an evm compatible runtime on Solana) but whatever.
    • four days of EthCC is a lot, I'm actually considering bailing out tomorrow and visiting one of the side conferences (Impact Blockchain) for a change
    • traffic in Paris is surprisingly chill: only cars seem to follow rules while cyclists/pedestrians/rollerskaters/... do whatever they like. Still everybody seems to get along well, I wish it was the same back home...

  • EthCC Day 4 recap

    Wrapping up the conference from the train back home as good as I can (on-train wifi is spurious and seems to rate-limit youtube and social media).

    Notable talks:

    "Ethereum Protocol Fellowship: Becoming a core developer"
    Mario Havel of the Ethereum Foundation talked about the fourth cohort of the EF fellowship for protocol level development. The application period for this round is over, but access to the program is permissionless and you can run along the selected participants and receive support and benefits if you have an interesting project to contribute.

    informational blogpost: https://blog.ethereum.org/2023/06/01/ethereum-protocol-fellowship-fourth-apps-open
    youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je_hGsACRkk

    "Real-time monitoring of your validators. For you and the ETH network!"
    Emmanuel Nalepa (Ethereum Foundation Fellow / Kiln) showcased the software they developed for monitoring validator health and performance. Cool stuff, I can use that!

    youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkyncLrME1g
    github: https://github.com/kilnfi/eth-validator-watcher

    "ETHcc meets QPL - a meeting between crypto and quantum"
    A panel discussion of math and quantum geeks Fabrizio Genovese, Justin Drake, Stefano Goioso and Matty Hoban. Most of the discussion went over my head, but my key takeaways were: one-shot signatures could be another important cryptographic primitive for crypto, and while real quantum devices are still scarce a lot of computational optimizations have trickled down from the work on quantum computing to traditional math.

    youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDIe9n8Qi2A

    As indicated yesterday, I was getting fed up by the conference topics and decided to quit in the afternoon. Instead, I headed over across the Seine to https://impactblockchainconference.org/, a parallel conference under the "blockchain for good" umbrella for two panel discussions and an nft exhibition.

    Summing it up, EthCC[6] has been a great experience and I want to applaud organizers, team, speakers and volunteers for what they have put together! If I would be asked for critical feedback, my only advise would be to not grow any bigger, as the vast amount of content from conference and side events combined was overwhelming.

    For your reference, here are playlists for all the recordings grouped by room:

  • Will FedNow affect crypto prospects, do you think?

  • https://lenster.xyz/posts/0x0d-0x03ea-DA-27346e91

    What feature do you want if u/lenster have communities 👥?

    If you have an account it'd be great to show support for reddit-like threads and mod tools. You probably won't be able to comment on this post but there's a few comments that say something similar that you can like to give a sentiment boost such as this one: https://lenster.xyz/posts/0x1d6e-0x092a-DA-0563fbdf

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