Client diversity improving, Fidelity Crypto live - The Daily Gwei Refuel #550 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this Asana and to the 16th of March 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so first up was this tweet that I came across uh just earlier today from honey albu going through what the execution layer client diversity has looked like over the last I guess almost a year so this chart goes back to I believe uh May if I'm reading the date right here the first of uh first of May here in 2022 and you can see that the execution layer client diversity has gotten much much better since then with uh Geth dominance going down and other clients getting more market share like Aragon Basu and never mind now I've shown you guys this

website before client diversity.org which basically shows the percentages on both the consensus layer side and the execution layer side and it's looking quite healthy I mean the consensus layers say we ended up fixing quite a while ago and it looks really great now I mean obviously it could be better but it's it's much better than what it was it you know at one point prism I think was uh or 70 or so of the of the um the market share which obviously wasn't ideal and now it's under 40 uh same is true for Geth gether was actually worse I think get accounted for 90 at one point of of market share on the execution layer slide side of things well now it's under 60 uh and nevermind has really been though the biggest kind of a Gainer I think here

standing at 21 of uh of the market share now and I believe a year ago it wasn't anywhere near that I mean you can see in the chart here right uh how never mind has grown a lot uh whereas Aragon and Basu they've kind of remained quite steady but never mind's really been the standout you can see the yellow on the chart here is never mind it has grown substantially and I've talked about it before but I run never mind and it has got has become such an amazing client to run I had I don't have any issues with it anymore I'm actually running it on um on my solar staking box right now and it's funny because I've actually been running into issues issues with gether it falls out of sync on I I have Geth on my rocker pull node and it actually fell

out of sync today while doing the uh tree generation for the Odell and at time of recording my tree generation still is not done usually uh mine's really really quick to finish but because my execution layer fell out of sync uh I it kind of went to the archive node that I've got running there which is a lot slower than just the execution layer full node so yeah it's still going now which is frustrating so I'm going to change over from Geth to never mind on my rocker pull box as well uh once the um the tree generation is done I don't want to interrupt anything happening there uh but yeah that just speaks to the fact that nevermind has has come a long way and is actually becoming or has become one of the most stable if not the most stable execution layer clients

which is at least from my experience which is obviously really great to see obviously Geth is still very popular still works really well for a lot of people but for some reason I've just had bad luck with it lately and honestly I'm gonna try running Eragon and base suit as well I have tried running them in the past but quite a while ago I want to try again Aragon definitely is more focused on archive node infrastructure rather than full node infrastructure but I mean it still runs just fine and basically I've heard good things about as well so I'm definitely going to be testing those ones out but as I said nevermind has been my go-to lately it has worked wonderful wonderfully and I'll definitely be changing over my rocker pool node to that but anyway you can go check out this chart for yourself I'll

link it in the YouTube description below all right so the protocol Guild put out a tweet today saying to date uh our 130 members have collectively contributed 399 years towards stewarding the ethereum protocol and of course you can see the members at this website that's Linked In the Tweet here and I've got I've highlighted this before actually pretty recently uh where it's listing all the members the teams that they're working for and then all of the addresses and their weight weighted total here of of their rewards that they get from the protocol Guild as I along with a bunch of quotes from core devs and researchers yeah that's actually a pretty insane stat though collectively contributed almost 400 years towards the ethereum protocol and uh they're getting

rewarded for that which is which is just awesome I mean you guys know if you've been around for a while that core protocol uh funding or core Dev core research funding has been sparse it usually came from the ethereum foundation and a few other select organizations like consensus but it's become a lot better especially over the last year or so especially with the admin of the the protocol Guild um we're in a really really great place on the core development funding side of things and it's not just funding for the sake of funding I think you know at the end of the day there are salaries that you pay obviously to call devs and researchers but they should have a stake in the protocol itself and that's the whole point of the protocol Guild uh Distributing out uh tokens and eth to these uh these people because not only

should they be getting a salary but they should also be getting paid a reward uh in the network token such as eighth or any any of the project tokens that they're basically building this protocol for and I've always thought that was critically important now it's obviously not obviously the ethereum protocol can't print more eth to give to these people and obviously the ethereum foundation has a finite amount of eighth and it's already given away a lot it's already spent a lot of its eighth um so we have to find other ways to do it and the protocol Guild is one way git coin has traditionally been another way through grants and I'm sure we're going to find other ways to do it as well and there was actually a funny discussion during the eip1559 um development period of about two and a half years where early on people

discussed instead of burning the eighth why don't we donate it to you know public goods well the issue with that is that it kind of compromises on ethereum's credible neutrality because if you are going to distribute it to public goods well you have to have someone stewarding that distribution right you have to have like a dow or something stewarding it well then that doubt stands the risk of being captured uh it stands the risk of falling into governance hell this is protocol rewards being paid out to this day out right which needs to distribute it um so it's obviously compromising on ethereum's credible neutrality so it was just decided that there was no real credibly neutral way to to do that so we just burned the eth anyway and and honestly I think burning the eighth is

is actually probably the best credibly neutral way to do it because it means no one gets the eighth but it accepts etholders right so if we are if we do get Ethan to the hands of these people and they hold it well logically over time e should go up because of they their work but also because it's the the value is being directed to the eighth token itself you know obviously because we're burning most of the fee revenue on the ethereum network and the fair revenue is only High because people are getting value out of using the ethereum block space which the core developers and researchers have given value to by working on the the core protocol and upgrading the core protocol over the years so I think uh we kind of lucked into that and and it kind of works out in the end and we don't have to go

through the process of setting up a dow and going through governance how I'm worrying about capture and all that sorts of stuff which is obviously something that we want to avoid for the ethereum core protocol itself that is probably the number one thing we want to avoid and the number one thing we want to promote is ethereum's credible neutrality and and censorship resistance and all that good stuff that I've talked about in the past that to me is really ethereum's value prop and if we compromise on that yeah everything else falls apart in my eyes but anyway great little stat here from the protocol Guild looking forward to this going up to a thousand years and Beyond all right so I spoke uh yesterday about how the different I guess staking providers in the ethereum ecosystem are going to be enabling withdrawals at different times I mentioned that Lido

isn't enabling withdrawals to at least mid-may because they're still running through audits of the smart contracts that they need to integrate to upgrade their system to allow for withdrawals well coinbase put together a thread on staking withdrawals here and they also announced that within 24 hours after the Shanghai upgrade completes coinbase will begin taking unstaking requests so as I said yesterday uh they're on the ball here they seem to be doing it as I said within 24 hours so that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out it's going to be very interesting to see how many people leave coinbase staking and go elsewhere especially because I believe CBE has been one of the tokens that have had the biggest discount or at least the longest discount for quite a

while so anyone who didn't want to take any kind of hit exiting their coinbase stake position he's probably just going to wait until withdrawals are enabled and then exit like that but it's not just coinbase obviously it's every staking provider I haven't said anything from binance yet but I assume that they're going to be the same here cracking same thing uh obviously kraken's in a bit of a different position because they can't actually offer staking to retail investors in the US anymore so there's going to be a forced unstaking there and those people are going to have to find another home whether that's coinbase or binance or rocker pool or or later you know it remains to be seen where that where that is and we'll have to do some unchain uh kind of uh sleuthing and Unchained data collection to actually see where that it

goes if we can even see it because it's going to be hard because the it is coming from a centralized exchange and it's kind of hard to map that out but uh I'm sure people will attempt that and and try that there but uh but yeah this this is great uh kudos to coinbase for doing this as I mentioned yesterday and as I mentioned plenty of times on the refill before I still strongly believe that that over the next 12 months the ethereum is taking landscape is going to look very very different I actually was talking to a project just before about something that they're working on for ethereum staking another another um staking provider service that's that's quite unique uh you'll hear more about them as time goes on but it's not just them right there's so many of these taking providers that are either online

right now or coming online they're all going to be competing with each other and as I said in the past I really think or at least hope that we can get to a point where no staking provider has more than I don't know 10 15 market share obviously right now the biggest is Lido by far it has around 31 market share if we can get them down to below 20 that I think is a huge achievement now in saying that it's going to be an uphill battle obviously um uh there's a lot of work to be done there there's a lot of work to educate people we need to make it easier for people to stake with to solo stake or to become rocker pool nerd operators uh all to stake in other decentralized Solutions even centralized Solutions is fine I think that as I've explained

before as long as no centralized service has too large of a market share on the network it's totally fine for people to stake with centralized Services because at the end of the day as long as it's the distribution that we care about the overall distribution that we care about um not just from an e-stake distribution perspective but also from an Effectiveness perspective because we don't want for example well let me put it to you this way the worst case scenario for something like a coinbase or a binance they're you know they have like 10 of the network well what happens if all the validators go offline for whatever reason well the ethereum network will suffer from a network degradation of about 10 so there'll be 10 of blocks being missed because coinbase's validators are

offline uh and that that's obviously not great right that's obviously going to lead to uh instability on the network so it's not just from a stake distribution perspective from a decentralization perspective it's also from a resiliency and liveness perspective that we should be encouraging the um the the distribution of stake here the one Saving Grace about lighter even though they are 31 of the network uh they have they do distribute that out to different node operators so if one load operator goes offline it's only I think at most a couple of percent of the network that would be offline rather than the the 10 that you see it see here but I'm sure obviously the big staging service providers like coinbase have tons of redundancies in place and with DVT technology distributed validated

technology like opal that's going to become even more redundant and we're going to be able to do some crazy setups there in order to basically ensure that most of the network never goes offline or if it does go offline there are backups that that kick in and those backups don't actually get you slashed I I've discussed this in the past about how a lot of people do backup systems where the backup system accidentally comes online when the main system is still online and it leads to them getting slushed uh and and that's a pretty pretty big punishment obviously especially pre-withdrawals where you can't even restake uh because you can't withdraw your stake you're just it's just dead eat until staking withdrawals are enabled there but anyway you can read coinbase's thread for yourself I'll

link it in the YouTube description below all right just a quick update on usdc uh they announced today that as of close of U.S banking operations on Wednesday March 15th uh Circle have cleared substantially all of the backlog of minting and Redemption request for usdc and of course usdc is also back to Peg at one dollar so yeah it seems like all the Doom and Gloom scenarios that people came up with over the weekends didn't pan out at all which should have been obvious to anyone paying attention of course uh and it seems Circle was able to process all of the withdrawals which I believe was about three billion or something worth of withdrawals I think it was something High I don't know if the numbers actually uh yeah 3.8

billion dollars uh what was redeemed with 0.8 billion dollars um minted uh on since Monday morning so over three or a period of three days they were able to redeem almost four billion dollars and obviously mints are almost 1 billion dollars here which is which is quite a testament to the resiliency of their systems that they've got in place and I actually think that this uh recent event with usdc has strengthened usdc and not weakened it I honestly don't think people are going to view these deep hanging events uh and say okay well I don't trust usdc anymore because at the end of the day every single stable coin that exists has the pegged at one point or another and I think depending events are generally fine as long as the peg is restored and as long as it's not

something like an algorithmic stablecoin the thing the the dangerous thing that happened with um the UST stable coin from Terror uh was that it depegged back in May of last year and then it repegged and everyone's like oh well okay it depeg then it's repacked it's all well and good now but no because nothing of the underlying um faults in the system actually changed it was still a Ponzi at the end of the day and that's why obviously in the end it ended up crashing and burning the main difference between that and usdc and and usdt and other Central centralized collateralized stable coins or even decentralized collateralized stable coins is that you can see that the collateral is there right and you can have relative

certainty uh for the centralized stable coins that the collateral was there and they can a process redemptions and and all and withdrawals and all that sort of stuff there and they can get back to Peg and that's why it's it is very different to something like UST so not all stable coins are created equal but the ones that have a strong collateral backing the ones that have strong teams behind them and strong assurances behind them like usdc and usdt what you know just because they've de-pegged in the past doesn't really mean anything for them uh going forward uh at least negatively and the funny thing is tether usdt has actually depaked multiple times in the past based on uh some you know fears of them not having um the collateral to back it up and all that sort of stuff there but it's gone

back to Peg multiple times and that actually I think reinforces the positive Network effect of that stable coin because if you can go back to Peg multiple times and you're not like just a blatant Ponzi that leads to more confidence because it means that the next time there's a depending event it should logically be more likely for you for the stable coin to go back to its Peg uh depending on the situation of course now I think as I said usdc had a really really great trial over the last few days and has proven its resiliency and strength and circle I think handled uh it very very well uh in the end there uh I guess as I said on Twitter pouring one out for anyone who sold their usdc under a dollar but especially under 90 cents you didn't need to do that if

you're a Trader of course it's different but I think that that's a learning uh or a lesson for a lot of people in that don't listen to just like the Fiat and the that you see on Twitter look at the facts look at what's actually going to happen and come to a conclusion based on that instead of speculating uh wildly uh based on Twitter I guess drama all right so I missed this the other day but synthetics had a record daily volume for synthetics perps over the weekend I believe that a hundred million dollars worth of daily volume here so this is really really cool because obviously this happened over the the volatile weekend that we had but you can see that this isn't necessarily a big outlier synthetics perps have actually been growing uh in Feb like you can see here it's been on the up and up and

obviously we had that outlier there because of the volatility over the weekend but it's great to see that uh that that these things are still growing and synthetics is actually able to handle this demand now being on on Layer Two being a lot cheaper to use and being a lot more efficient with with capital and you can see it's not just on one interface either there's a bunch of interfaces that people can can work with obviously Quinta is the Forerunner it accounts for 96 of the volume but there's others on there and those others will uh probably over time grow and take take your market share away from Quincy here uh but great to see that this is all working out and Kudos and congrats the synthetics on this record day I'm sure it's going to keep growing as I said this wasn't that big of an

outlier the trend is up and up on the synthetics perps here especially since they launched in in December right you can see here December it was a bit quiet January started heating up February really started hitting up and I think that they're probably going to have a big March especially uh this uh uh the big rest of March especially because uh I think the Market's going to keep heating up from here there's a lot of volatility that's going to probably happen uh and synthetics uh seems poised to uh to take advantage of that all right so as I mentioned yesterday oil Labs was going to launch a one million dollar bug Bounty uh program or reward program in the hope that it provides additional uh incentive for information that leads to the Euler protocol attackers arrest and the return

of all funds extracted by the attacker now unfortunately I saw today that the attacker continued um uh washing funds through tornado cash which means that they seem to have no intention of returning the funds as I mentioned just today it's still speculative as to who actually did this attack I did say yesterday that if it's something like a someone like North Korea then you can kiss those funds goodbye they are definitely not returning those funds at all but we'll have to see and you know it's funny because the attacker's identity can be revealed months after the fact based on evidence that is collected over time and based on maybe they're making uh you know wrong moves here and there I would think that North Korea wouldn't actually care about being

um I don't know if the word is caught or being kind of identified fight but I think that if they wanted to cash out that eighth in any kind of capacity through a centralized exchange somewhere they would have to wash the funds through it because obviously the centralized exchanges uh have tagged the exploiter's address and won't accept deposits from that address they'll basically just keep the money for themselves so I think that that's why that they would be doing that because they need to get the money into I don't know probably US dollars or some other currency uh you know if it's North Korea for example I don't know what you know what they want to do with the money but maybe they want to buy more missiles right they're not going to be able to pay in eth for that or maybe they do and

but they're not going to be able to pay in tainted either needs to be fresh clean eat and that's the whole point of washing it through uh tornado cash there so again I'm just speculating here because and the reason why I hop on about North Korea is because they have been responsible for some of the biggest hacks in uh in the crypto ecosystem so I think that it's it's it's probably likely that this could be them or could be an associate of them but we'll have to see we'll have to see if it comes out um hopefully there is evidence that he's found based on this one million reward because it means you know this is open to anyone like any Unchained sleuth or anyone that's got access to more information than your regular kind of Joe can uh can do the investigation and see if they can come up with anything

and they stand to be rewarded with up to a million dollars if they if they do um if they do come up with anything but unfortunately it's not looking good so far I really really do hope that the funds are returned in in some capacity because I I don't want this to be the end of of Euler obviously uh it's going to be a very very uphill battle for them going forward not many people are going to trust the protocol they're not going to want to use the protocol and it's just really sad I mean you guys know or probably don't know I should understand that I am an investor in oil I have been for quite a while um uh but I'm not just saying this because I'm an investor I really do think that Euler was a was a is a really really cool protocol I think the team uh

it is really great and they were building a lot of really cool things and the fact that so many people were affected by this means that there were a lot of people getting value out of actually using the protocol itself so I'm still holding out hope that most if not all the funds are returned uh but as I said it's not looking good right now given that the funds are being washed through tornado cash you don't do that if you intend on returning the funds but we'll have to say and I'll keep you guys updated if any new stuff comes out but if you're feeling up to it if you think you've got what it takes to possibly track down the hacker well you can stand to be rewarded up to a million dollars so it might be something that uh you might want to get

you might want to do because at the end of the day that's life-changing money right there right like uh um so there might be something that you're interested in but anyway the full details is in the Tweet I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so the block reported that Fidelity crypto has quietly Gone live which gives millions of retail customers access to BTC and eth now for those of you who don't know Fidelity is a huge kind of uh in uh Investments uh company in the US uh I don't know if they're in other countries around the world but they have a lot of users you can see here uh the block said that they have 37.1 million total retail accounts and most if not all of these accounts are

not people signing up to buy crypto because Fidelity Fidelity has not traditionally offered crypto Investments so these are investors that want to buy things like uh like shares and bonds and ETFs and stuff like that so now they have access to uh all the wait list users all the people users that signed up now have access to a BTC and eth on the platform now you may be wondering why people would wait until Fidelity I guess enabled um uh BTC and eth buyers or crypto buys instead of just spinning up a coinbase account and going and buying it there well the big reason is that there's a lot of people especially the older folks that will have had a Fidelity account for a long time that

don't trust these crypto exchanges right they don't trust coinbase they don't trust Kraken but they trust Fidelity because that's what they know maybe they've had an account there for decades right so they're going to look at Fidelity and they're going to look at Fidelity um uh from from their perspective of being a reputable firm that they trust and say okay well if Fidelity is supporting BTC and eth that means it's a a good investment for me or an investment that I should look into and that's what they're going to do so it should naturally lead to more demand for BTC and eat that wasn't necessarily there before now I don't know as well if this um can play into people's retirements accounts too because as I said Fidelity is integrated with the traditional Finance system they have

different accounts for different kind of things um but I'm not a user of them so I don't know exactly what they've got going on there but I'm sure all that plays into it as well so just great to see them supporting BTC and epr I'm sure they're going to add more or other digital assets over time obviously you want to start with the big two and then move down the risk curve here but this is great and this is this is kind of the stuff that you want to see happening in a bear Market I remember uh last bear Market there was a lot of similar stuff going on where more and more Avenues got open for people to get exposure to crypto and I remember thinking at the time the same thing that I think now is that uh the more access that you give

the better it is for the overall Market because it means that we're going to add more users which will add more value to the um uh to to the coins essentially right to the to the assets themselves it does take time to play out it's obviously not going to happen overnight but it will I believe happen over the longer term and it's great that this will be here for the next time the markets heat up right this will be available to people to to just buy on the platform instead of having to run through the KOA C process on centralized exchanges and and Trust in exchange that they've never heard of for they've already got an account with Fidelity they already trusted Fidelity and they can buy BTC and eth on their uh right now if they want to all right last up here we have a article

out of the block again reporting on metamasks Swap volume so I've talked about metamask swap before and about how uh the metamask team takes a 0.8 cut off every swap that they uh process through metamask Swap and they make a killing doing it so you can see here uh the chart uh this is uh a chart that's on the block of the amount of money that the um sorry the amount of volume I should say that runs through the metamask swap feature here while they had a record day over the weekend as well because of all the volatility and apparently they made uh 1.5 million dollars in swap fees on I believe Saturday or Sunday so that's just one day right which is absolutely insane when you think about it because the minamas team itself is quite small

metamask as a product doesn't have much overhead right they Outsource a lot of uh they Outsource the probably the biggest thing which is the RPC stuff to infuri which obviously is under the same consensus umbrella but still it's not something that minimize has to necessarily worry about and they just clean up on on fees now obviously not every day is as big as uh as I think it was Saturday or Sunday but generally even on the quieter days they're still making a a boatload of money here and I I think this is just like a really great business model for metamask they finally you know started making money when they integrated this and this is also why the you know uh certain um teams are launching wallets like for example the other day I spoke about unisop launching their own wallet

well you could imagine doing units up doing something similar like this the UNICEF Labs team I should say where they essentially build a swap feature on top of the unisop protocol and all those other liquidity pools and they add their own fee on there so basically it gives the same uni swaps experience to to users gives them a wallet and then unisoplabs starts making money uh from that and that's not probably going to go to token holders because the unisop protocol in unisoft Labs is different but unisoft Labs will be able to to make money and and be profitable just based on that and that's kind of a value-added service that they can kind of offer I guess like they can offer people and people can choose to go through that or just just I guess going through the

universal front end on its own or going to another Dex aggregator but this is a pretty lucrative thing if you've got the user base for it obviously metamask has the user base for it obviously uni swap does as well and I'm sure we're going to see more and more of these types of products as time goes on uh integrated within you know not just wallets but uh but just front ends in general because at the end of the day we need these uh companies and these projects to actually make money outside of just issuing a token and hoping the token goes up they need to be profitable and they need to I mean just make Revenue to begin with to be considered proper businesses I think that's what's been liking traditionally in crypto but it's getting better over time it's definitely becoming more prevalent for companies to be generating

Revenue which is obviously a very positive thing to see but on that note I think that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone