Binance troubles, Flashstake 2.0 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #618 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we capped the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 37th of July 2023 alright everyone let's get into it so some worrying news out of binance today so apparently a bunch of binance a senior executive Executives have quit over cz's response to the Department of Justice investigation so senior figures such as a general count uh the finances general counsel Chief strategy officer um and uh their senior vice president for compliance uh told Zao From the Block this week that they are leaving the company now these aren't just your run-of-the-mill employees leaving binance right like these uh positions uh executive positions these are people in

real power within the company and they have left the company because of CJ's response to the Department of Justice investigation now obviously there's a lot of speculation around this there's a lot of people thinking well if these people are leaving especially the SVP of compliance what do they know right do they know that binance is in a lot of [ __ ] because they've uh uh because they've been Shady for quite a while now and I've said that on the refill plenty of times before that I believe uh binance has been Shady for quite a while they did try to clean up their act I think over the last maybe a couple of years but the problem is is that they played Cowboy for so long and then they tried to clean up their act because they thought they they felt like it was catching up to them and I think I

remember saying this on the refill that I I felt like uh CZ felt like it was all catching up to him so he needed to to play boy he needed to be coming to compliance stuff like that but just because you do that doesn't wash away the sins of the past right and it depends on the regulator and depends on what they want to go after and as I said before binance is not a us-based company so I'm not sure how much damage I guess the the word you could use is or how much I guess like justice if you want to call it that uh the us could extract over binance uh Global binance us is a different story right as I've said before I think binance us its fate is probably shutting down eventually uh but binance Global yeah I feel like CZ is

going to fight that uh truth and now I feel like he's not gonna obviously let his baby die but I'm curious to see how much influence the U.S can have over that because obviously the US doesn't have direct jurisdiction over binance global but they could work with other Regulators around the world to stifle binance uh you know from from many different angles and basically just crippled the binance business instead of shutting it down altogether and you know that's effectively just as bad as shutting it down by crippling it you know killing banking Partners making it so they can't operate in certain countries and we've seen that play out actually binance has not been able to maintain operations in a few European countries uh in Australia actually The Regulators or one of the enforcement agencies raided Finance Australia's officers I think I I read a I read a

post on um over there um the derivatives products so the Crackdown is is pretty Global on on binance generally but in terms of shutting them down yeah it'll be hard to shut them down but uh in terms of choking them out and kind of like uh making it so that they're they're crippled yeah I feel like that's basically what's happening uh and for better or worse uh yeah it's happening now my kind of take on this is that if you still have funds on binance I would suggest moving them off binance I I always suggest don't leave funds on centralized exchanges unless I guess like you're a day trader and you want to take on the risk of living in there and uh and kind of day trading on there I guess from that lens it's fine but at the same time like there's been so many

Blobs of these centralized exchanges and services over the years that I don't know how anyone could feel comfortable keeping any substantial amount let alone you know well I guess like any small amount of funds let alone a substantial amount of funds on a centralized exchange especially one like binance you know there are not every every centralized exchange is created equal obviously right like leaving it on coinbase is not the same or leaving your funds on coinbase it's not the same as leaving your fonts on finance but generally we have the power to self-custody so if you are able to do that if you trust yourself enough to do that then you should be doing that you shouldn't be leaving funds on centralized exchanges because that risk is is pretty high and I think the risk went up for binance uh over the past few months especially not not to say that I

think that anything is necessarily going to happen to your fans that that you know your funds are going to get stolen or or the um or balance is going to shut down and run away with the funds I'm not saying that I think that's going to happen but generally you know the risk is is non-zero and it's gone up over the last few months so I just just a friendly reminder to anyone who has substantial amounts of funds on on binance especially uh probably not a good idea to leave them there even if you're an active Trader maybe try another exchange or something like that but I I get it the other exchanges um and it depends on your size too obviously if you're if you're a small Trader you could probably get away with defy but if you're a large Trader and you're a whale if I may not offer you

what you you know the the um the tools and the liquidity that you need to do those trades but I I think that's a minority group I don't think that's the that's the majority in terms of people maybe in terms of volumes and liquidity it can be be the majority but uh not in terms of actual kind of people actual number of of people there but yeah choosing another centralizing exchange would be pretty hard I mean the only ones that I trust the ones that I've used for a while and I trust them only to the point of being able to get me in and out of crypto so for example I've told you guys before I use a australian-based crypto exchange I've used them since 2013 called coin jar I've never really had any issues with them I think the biggest issue I had

with them was they reset my account limits because I had to apply for a different account for my um retirement fund so I had to spin up a new coin jar account for my retirement uh fund so I couldn't share it with my personal account but then my personal account is tied to that account um because my because I'm personally um in control of my retirement fund right so they reset my limit then I just had to apply for for increased limits again and and that's the yeah that's the most inconvenience I've ever been with them everything else has gone smoothly depositing is is instant um through my bank to The Exchange withdrawing is also instant so I recommend them for anyone in Australia uh and I think they operate outside of Australia too and and as I said I haven't had any issues there but you

know Queen base and Kraken as well I use cracking quite regularly I haven't really used coinbase in the past too much but but Kraken definitely but outside of that I mean it's hard right it's hard to find something that can be reliable and relatively trustworthy because there's just been so many shitty exchanges over the years and uh you know so many people thought FTX was legitimate right so many people trusted FTX with their money and look what happened and I'm not saying that everything is like FTX but you know and I'm not saying that binance is like FTX but I think that it speaks to the fact that people will trust uh certain things that turn out to be complete frauds sometimes so yeah just a general kind of PSA there for people to get your funds off centralized exchanges generally and especially binance and just self-custody

if you're able to but if you're not able to do that you're not comfortable doing that then you just need to accept the risk that uh your funds are not in your control when they're on these exchanges they're in the control of the exchange themselves because they hold the private keys to uh both the hot and cold wallets so technically the funds aren't yours right yeah I mean legal they they are yours and and that that's a kind of funny term as well because legally is also a funny thing because um if the exchange was to go bankrupt then the yeah it's a mess right I'm not even going to go through it all because I'm not an expert on this but when I say legally um the funds are yours I guess like if the exchange is still operating and they

withhold your funds you could go through the legal system to get access to those funds back even though it probably would take a while to do that so to avoid that to avoid that mess to avoid losing funds just don't custody your funds on centralized exchanges learn how to self-custody if you don't know how to it's not actually hard to do guys and the risk of you you know your seed phrase being compromised or you uh or your um your Hardware wallet being compromised or something like that is pretty low I would say that it's low for most people as long as you follow this to stand their practices you know don't put your seed phrase on a computer write it down on a piece of paper or something I guess probably something more uh more um indestructible than a piece of paper right or something uh uh better than a

piece of paper but you know just have it stored somewhere uh you know maybe at your house or someone you trust house or something like that or in a bank safety deposit box or anything unless you're like a big name or someone well known within crypto you're not going to be personally targeted over these sorts of things so in my mind that's safer than keeping your your fans on a centralized exchange by by far and you know you've always got custody over them there but anyway enough about that you can read the full details about this on the fortune article which I'll link in the YouTube description below all right so Terence has shared his slides from Heath Barcelona on enshrining PBS using a minimal approach uh he says yeah I covered why we need to enshrine soon and discuss the latest Mike Newton and uh and Francesco post on

the payload timeliness committee with high level changes feedback welcome so yeah if you've been following along with this uh with enshrined PBS or epbs and I've been mentioning this a bunch of times on the refuel you can go check out these slides basically gives you a rundown of what it is how the core developers and researchers are thinking about it how it can be implemented on the network uh with a bunch of I guess like slides here as well as information attached to it too so yeah I'll link this new to the description below for you to check out but what I wanted to quickly focus on was just uh terence's language here where he says I covered why we need to enshrine soon right so I think the reason why he's using this language and the reason why it's become a more

pressing issue is because if you're a researcher right and if you're deep in the ways of things like Mev um and censorship resistance and stuff like that you not only see what is true today but you see what is true in the future just based on the incentives that exist today and this is why something like Mev boost actually came to be because the original team behind me Mev boost or that I guess like the current team still that are building it is is flashbots but the original founders of that are one of them are called uh his name Phil Diane who you may have seen on Twitter wrote this uh this post or This research post called flashbots or Flash Boys I should say uh 2.0 now Flash Boys um 1.0 or the original Flash Boys was a

research post pulled out quite a while ago I think uh for tradfy and for like front running and um and and similar kind of I guess like Mev and tradfi uh and that was based on latency games that uh different track fight players were were playing where basically they would um they would have their I guess where no Warehouse the office situated as close to The Exchange as possible in order to get better latency right and then obviously we have Mev in ethereum and other expressive blockchains or just blockchains generally uh and then pull Diane a few others got together and created we're at that Flash Boys 2.0 post uh research post and then created flashbots with Mev Bruce to alleviate a lot of these issues but maybe boost

isn't enough for reasons I've outlined a lot of times in the past it definitely is nowhere near enough actually um it requires um a lot of trust assumptions it's a centralization vector it it basically lends itself to to censorship in some cases as we've seen play out with the with the ofak sanctions so how do we alleviate a lot of these issues well we basically enshrine Mev boost in the core protocol and we call it you know pbser which is proposed to build a separation and that way it's not a silver bullet but it's a lot better than what we currently have and the sooner we get that in the better because if we wait you know if we wait years and years and years the problem of Mev just gets worse we end up suffering from things like multi-block Mev and that becomes more prevalent and then

it's a blocker for things like single slot finality and stuff like that so yeah getting it in sooner rather than later is is the way to go here but yeah you can check out these slides and there's also a post here I just I just saw it I suggested by Twitter from from Mike noodle uh which was I guess like um related to terence's slides yes you can check that out as well it's all about epbs I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right something interesting that I came across before that I thought was just hilarious so the arbitrum Dao has voted in favor of aip-1.1 now this may ring a bell to you because this AIP was basically the spiritual successor to the original AARP that was um handling that 700 million

ARB tokens that were distributed to the arbitrim foundation now have you seen anyone talking about this AIP I haven't I didn't even see it coming up on my Twitter feed I saw this randomly I was going through um I was going through just Twitter and I kind of my like suggested tweets that's the only place that I saw I didn't see anyone's talking about it on Twitter I didn't see anyone praising arbitrim for this and praising the arbitrim community for this um and and anything like that or talking about it uh which was hilarious to me because the original AIP that everyone was talking about um just blew up right like it was literally everywhere on Twitter and arbitrine was copying so much Flack for this whereas this proposal which is actually a really the good proposal and

the doubt voted in favor of it and it puts the treasurer in a vesting contract for uh for over four years uh this got no air time so it just speaks to the fact that drama and like I guess engagement bait just spreads so much further than the truth and and the stuff that may seem less exciting but is actually much more important and this isn't just the case for something like the um this AIP it's the case for everything I I came across a tweet yes uh yesterday or today when I woke up um it was from my uh my friend Liam he put out a tweet saying something about the the eat Supply and about and showed the chart from ultrasound money which showed the Eid Supply uh in inflation

because of the burn and then it also has um a line showing the BTC supply of the BTC issuance rate going up and then I was reading through all the comments from like these BTC Maxis right and they're all obviously coping over this and saying all this other crap about it and they were getting like tons of likes and and it was funny because there was one guy and actually I could probably bring it up here just for the sake of an example here I I um I replied to this guy because I just thought it was so stupid uh let me just let yeah so this one guy he quotes tweeted Liam and you can see the child that I'm talking about on my screen he quote tweeted Liam and he said demand for eth has fallen off a cliff despite their efforts to manipulate the

short-term Supply and they're spinning it as bullish what is he even talking about here right how could demand for eth fall off a cliff if the only reason why ether's deflationary is because of demand because you need feed a man to burn like it doesn't make any sense right and this is obvious to anyone who pays any sorts of attention here but this was from one of the laser-eyed Bitcoin Maxi morons we all know those types look at the engagement 327 likes 24 retweets five bookmarks I don't know who's bookmarking this right um and it was great it was great to see anti-prosynthesis um reply saying do you even understand what that graph is saying and he ratio this guy but still like this is engage instrument a lot of engagement on approach that is literally

completely wrong there is no debate here it is factually wrong but the thing is is that this appeals to Alan's followers right which are probably all Bitcoin Maximus all they want to do is crap on ethereum right all they want to do is insult ethereum doesn't matter if it's true or not so this is related to what I was saying before about how people have a bias towards different kind of news sources and different things people will complain about one thing and then when it's and then when it's rectified in another way they won't even pay attention to it and that's what happened with the AIP here and you see these play out pretty much everywhere on on um on crypto Twitter but beyond crypto Twitter as well it is not exclusive to crypto you know don't get me wrong there uh but obviously being in crypto we all see it

a lot and yeah I just came across that tweet today from from uh from Liam and then Alan and just all the reply it was just insane honestly I I I haven't been putting up with this and reading this stuff for years now um since I've been on crypto Twitter and it's always the same they don't change their tune it's like they're all ready from the same kind of propaganda handbook that basically says list of points to [ __ ] on ethereum with and basically it doesn't tell you if they're true or not it just says something that may might sound true or might not even sound true it just sounds good to the to the Maxi community so that they can crap on ethereum but anyway I'm gonna I'm gonna stop ranting there but I just felt that was very relevant to this arbitrim ARP stuff

because yeah I didn't see anyone talking about this and you probably haven't heard about this until I talked about it on the refuel uh I'm gonna I'm gonna assume that most you have not heard about this until just just then there but if you want to see the full details of the AIP you can it's linked in uh this link here from from tally which I'll link in the uh the Youtube description below um but great to see that movement is being made here in the arbitrim Dr Community uh so yeah I'll keep Subs on that for you guys as well all right so a flash stake has introduced flash 2.0 which is an expansion into the universe of time traveling money basically it is their 2.0 upgrade for their protocol so they say here they've got new tokenomics new architecture new governance with the

same vision so as a sneak peek into flash 2.0 in this Twitter thread which you can check out for yourself uh basically uh the the tldr is in these tweets here where they're showing what changes they're making to the tokenomics the architecture governance uh and more and for those of you who don't know what flash stake is it's basically a um a protocol that lets you get get the yield up front or two years worth of yield up front on things like staked eat so for example you put that you know you put your your Ethan here and you say okay well I want to get the yield right now on this eighth um and then it gives you to you up front uh instead of having two to wait right instantly and upfront instead of having to wait those those two years there and you can see that

flashdeck has been growing quite steadily over time here which is really cool to see um and yeah they can coming out with their 2.0 protocol here uh which basically uh does a lot for the tokenomics the architecture and overall governance so you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right something interesting I came across that was tweeted out by gelato today so they say here ethereum addresses are more readable thanks to ens but keeping these addresses requires regular renewals with uh wary.eth's self-repairing ens a service or strengths that doesn't roll off the tongue at all but s Ren's you could automate renewals using alcamex and gelato and they explain how this works

so the srn service has automated the process of ens domain renewals mitigating the risk of losing your unique.etherdress in the Pro in this process alchemix is leveraged by users to create a self-repairing loans where they convert their Ethan to yield bearing to cover renewal fees uh meanwhile gelato Works behind the scenes to automate the renewal process and ensure that ens domains are consistently updated eliminating manual interventions and the fear of losing your unique.eth address this is really cool because this is multiple protocols working together as you can see here this service leverages alchemics curve ens and gelato to achieve this and allows you to basically fully automate on chain the uh I guess a payment of or the the renewal of your ANS using the yields from from

alchemics that just blows my mind there the fact that it's all just like working together in such a nice and harmonious way to do something as really simple as renewing an ens name but they're right I mean there's a lot of people who probably will forget to renew their ANS name and then someone will come along and and swoop it I mean I I wouldn't know what I do if someone was able to get sasol.heath and then basically uh extort me or or try and blackmail uh not blackmail they're trying to extort me into paying them for it I imagine if someone got sassled.aith and then said hey I'll give it back to you but you need to pay me like 1080 or something like that and the funny thing is is that like I don't even know if I'd pay that or not because the sasol.e address is

very uh important to me and I actually think I have it renewed to a very long date like the year 2050 or something like that um obviously there's a there's a cost involved there but for me it was just like peace of mind I'm like I'm just gonna renew this for as long as I can instead of uh relying on auto renewal but it was expensive it didn't didn't come cheap so for people who don't want to do that um and they you know they they obviously just want to maybe do it yearly or something like that and they want to do it uh with with funds that are being generated through another protocol like alchemix this is a way to do that so you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below I just thought it was something cool to put on your

radar all right metamask has released a new version 10.33 they've said here with a cleaner layout more intuitive site connections Network and account selection foxing with web3 got easier I I do not like that foxing term that that is that is not good I've I've never heard anyone say that they're foxing jeez I actually can't it's just it's so funny no one's ever said like I'm foxying the ethereum chain even saying it out loud just sounds silly but anyway they went with that um and then they said here your feedback inspired us to improve enabling a simpler web 3 uh journey and there is a related news post here so essentially you can see what they've got going on here so uh the

network selection has been moved to the left hand side uh so instead of on the Middle where it says ethereum mainnet you've got a little logo showing you through a Mainland on the left hand side your account selection is up the top uh middle now so you can see here that the different accounts are labeled different things like D5 wallets and then there's a connection status indicator on the right hand side uh they've flipped around the nomination so uh when you're looking at your balance it shows USD in in bold and eth in lower case uh in the in the lower um sorry in the smaller font I should say and there's only amounts in the bigger font I wonder if you can change that around honestly I preferred it the other way around because when I'm looking at my address I don't really care about out the USD

value a lot of the time I more care about the the actual um tokens I have in there but I'm sure there's probably a setting for that and they've added a new button here a portfolio button to I guess to link to their portfolio section of metamask so just a few I guess cosmetic changes here nothing nothing major um and it's still not like user to me in my mind totally user friendly or anything like that it's definitely not a world that I see having like Ultra mainstream appeal but that's okay as I said in the past there's plenty of wallets targeting that rainbow wallet or mobile coinbase wallet you have frame on desktop rabi there's a few other wallets out there they're targeting those different markets right so I don't think metamask needs to necessarily go after those markets they

already have a huge user base they're already uh got such a huge Network effect with people there and people like using it if they're used to it so I mean maybe you'd like using it is the wrong term but people use it if they're used to it I mean I'm not saying I'm not going to say that that I love my metamask experience but I use it because it's reliable I've used it for a long time now I feel it's it's secure because it's metamask where they've been around for quite a while on the arm um and I just you know I use it uh in connection with my Hardware wallet stuff like that so it's all it's all well and good in terms of security uh but yeah anyway just wanted to hide that for you guys that that metamask is improving over time but it is slow improvements so

if you see the uh the change in your metamask what this is why because it actually is metamask pushing through this update uh over over the last few days all right last up here was a tweet from Dan Romero who you'll remember is uh one of the founders or the founder of farcasta which is a Twitter alternative so he tweeted out saying if you're looking for a new Social Network that's mostly people who are creating slash building new stuff optimistic and civil and interested in ethereum DM and I can send you an invite so I've been sending advice to a fair few people uh on firecaster before um but the problem with me sending out invites was that a lot of people that I sent invites to are didn't become active users

um and I I mean I'm not an active user of firecaster either but um because of that I'm not going to be giving out invites like willy-nilly anymore because you get less invites if you invite people that don't stick around that's just how the invite system works right now so like I'm gonna say I've got some invites left but please only DM me if you plan to actually use firecast I know that's rich coming from me since I'm I'm not very active on there um but I guess like for me it's a it's a bit different where I have like such a huge following on Twitter and such a huge Network on Twitter as it's kind of hard for me to switch switch off from that but yeah I've still got some some invites left and you can also uh DM Dan Romero here as well for an invite that's

a fire Caster there but also on the topic of this I wanted to obviously mention uh the threads app that was recently released by meta um where essentially if you have an existing Instagram account or you can sign up for a new one you can access these threads app honestly like I I create an account there just to secure my username which is sasol.0x obviously but other than that I'm not planning to switch over to threads as much as I think that Twitter has become a worse platform since Elon Musk took over as much as I think that eventually Twitter is is potentially going to file for for kind of some kind of bankruptcy because I don't see Twitter being profitable at all and it's just bleeding money the network effect is still there right and I spent the last five six years building up the

network effect on Twitter that the only thing that would encourage me to actually switch off Twitter to one of these other platforms would be if Twitter didn't exist anymore because then everyone would be forced to switch off right oh my network on Twitter at least the ones that cared would switch to one of these other apps that would switch to firecast or threads and then I'd be able to very quickly build up that Network again on these um these different apps and it would just be something that people kind of agreed upon you know this is the new Twitter this is what we're using and then we go on from there but while Twitter still exists while Twitter still works and I I use the term Works Loosely but you know it still works right while it still has Network effect while it still has all

the people on it I'm just going to continue to use Twitter if Twitter says this to exist in the next year because they go bankrupt or something like that which I I mean even if they go bankrupt I feel like someone else will just come along and buy it and because the network effect is so so powerful and the and the network is so valuable that someone would come along and buy it so I don't think Twitter is going to die uh but yeah for me personally it's very hard to switch the switching costs are extremely high but if Twitter was to just disappear then I you know I would I would surely be obviously more motivated to switch to one of these other platforms uh here but I think that threads generally he's either going to be a flop or only appeal to a niche kind

of a crowd and I feel like it's not going to win over the Twitter crowd to be honest because as I said unless Twitter goes under or unless unless Elon Musk screws the the Twitter so badly that it just becomes unusable like he did with the API change which he seems to have walked back and you know being having to be logged in in order to view tweets that those things have been walked back but if they weren't walked back I feel like a lot of people would have switched off because you're just making the product unusable and then people aren't going to stick around if something's unusable right um and you know I've talked about the kind of a mostly centralized platforms so far there are decentralized social media platforms like lens uh protocol um that I've talked about in the past as well but I I've been generally pretty

bullish on but they're still very early I don't think they could handle the traffic of of anything near Twitter just yet but hopefully at some point in the future maybe the next few years they get to a point where they're able to service an audience or size of Twitter and then people can move there and people can do things there and if it's fully integrated with crypto Services stuff like that that would be a dream honestly having all of crypto integrated natively into uh social media app that I use and potentially doing it in a privacy preserving way as well I think that would be really really cool but I think we're a while as a way away from that it's definitely not something that's going to happen anytime soon but I think we can eventually uh get there but yeah as I said you can DM Dan Romero uh for

an invite and you can DM me but please only do so if you plan on actually actively using firecast star um because I will just not get any more invites if I keep inviting people that aren't active on podcaster unfortunately so yeah anyway that's gonna be it for today's episode 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 next week thanks everyone