Coinbase enables mev-boost, NiftyApes raises $4.2mil - The Daily Gwei Refuel #480 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we cup the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Ian Vanessa San Andreas the 2nd of November 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so some sad news over the last 48 hours that I didn't talk about yesterday uh but I will talk about today so Alex vandersand here tweeted out uh the premature passing of Nikolai mushigayan is a very sad day for crypto now for those of you who don't know who Nikolai was Alex lists out his accomplishments here so he founded maker Dao he discovered the re-entrancy attack before the Dow uh the Dow back in 2016 and white padded maker to prevent a hack uh developed with wrapped ethereum uh founded balancer and donated 1.4 million dollars to Carnegie

Mellon for defy research so pretty much all of us have been impacted by nikolai's work right like even if you haven't used maker even if you haven't used balancer uh even if you haven't used D5 at all you've probably used wrapped teeth right at some point obviously they go hand in hand using wrapped Ethan defy but still like nikolai's work has touched all of us and unfortunately he has passed away now I know there was a bit of talk or a lot of talk actually from what I saw about some tweets that he'd been putting out over the last few months it seemed like he was suffering from some sort of mental illness uh whether that be schizophrenia or something else and then people were saying and then I think the tweet that he um put out before he died or just before he died was something about the

CIA or mosad after after him in Puerto Rico or something like that but I think you know people are focusing on that but as Alex actually says here uh you know let's not to spend descend into conspiracy speculation uh it's disrespectful to the family and harmful to uh to to uh kind of like uh uh everything around uh surrounding this so I just wanted to mention Nikolai because a lot of you I mean I don't think I've ever mentioned him on the refill before but a lot of you will not be aware of who he who he is or was uh and yeah it's just a very sad day in in E5 now look the the thing about like this is that there was a tweet that I read I can't remember who it was from and it got me thinking so as I said Nikolai suffered

for mental health issues I don't know if he always suffered from those issues while he was at makeup and there's a lot of people who work with him I haven't really spoken to them but I'm not sure if he suffered them uh then but there was a tweet from someone that I saw and I can't remember exactly what it said but essentially it said that you have governments and Regulators going after D5 developers right and these default developers aren't some kind of Macho people who are like super anti-government you know Freedom Fighters with uh you know with guns and riding in tanks and and you know basically uh fighting in some some physical uh uh kind of conflict right these people are just like normal regular to people they're more not more regular developers who want to build cool stuff and obviously they want to

build better tools and tools that enable more freedom for people but the government and nation states are putting so much pressure on these people and putting so much stress on them that it does lead to mental health issues for sure I mean I've spoken about this before in the context of some of the uh Mev boost relays censoring such as flashbots like I can't imagine the amount of pressure flash Bots and and other D5 or D5 teams in general are under from their not maybe not so much directly from regulators and governments but from their lawyers basically saying to them hey you need to do this this and this or else there is like a high chance that you're going to end up in jail or is a high chance you're going to run a foul of some regulator uh or some kind of nation state so so do this and we saw

this obviously play out with uh with the relay censoring the ofak transactions uh sorry the um tornado cash transactions because it's on the ofak list then obviously the penalty for running a foul of ofac is up to 30 years in federal prison and massive fine so you obviously don't want to be messing around uh with that especially if you're a known developer which pretty much I think most if not all of the flashbots developers and gnome same with a lot of the D5 developers out there at least the popular ones especially something like uni swap so I totally understand that and then it obviously lends itself to conspiracy theories and stuff like that as well but I I think generally you don't have to believe in any conspiracy theory Theory to see that governments Regulators do not like crypto do not

like D5 whether that's because they're uneducated or because they are educated and they realize that it takes power away from them when done right you know true D5 actually takes a lot of power away from both governments and massive corporations and Banks uh because it basically allows us to have a parallel Financial system that is decentralized that is not controlled by any of these parties uh and that's scary for them right uh maybe maybe not maybe okay it depends who it is but maybe scary is the wrong word but maybe it's concerning right so they put all this pressure on they don't want to outright ban anything at least in the US they don't want to outright ban anything because that's bad politically and that jeopardizes their own position but as I mentioned I think yesterday or the day be fine I mentioned it plenty of times before they do this

thing through uh uh this this chilling of chilling effect thing where basically they scare everyone into compliance they scare everyone into doing things Beyond what's actually required and that doesn't require them to legislate anything it doesn't require them to to advocate for anything doesn't require them to put any skin in the game at all and they lose no political points uh from that which is obviously uh horrible uh it puts a lot of pressure on the ecosystem and it means we have to fight back and we have been there's been lawsuits that have been lobbied against ofac you know even if there's a slow chance that they succeed that it's still there they're still a fight in us we're not just laying down and taking it but uh the initial reaction uh when those sanctions happened were obvious was obviously definitely driven by Fiat and

I hate this regulation and enforcement via fear which governments love because it's just such an easy way to enforce things as I said without having to legislate on it uh but that's just the world we live in unfortunately and for you know whether it's Nikolai or someone else out there building these tools I think we all donate to maybe be more sympathetic to them and and realize that they're under a lot of pressure even though our own ideals are at odds with that like I have obviously been quite hard for example on um flashbots and other censoring relays because I think that they're basically doing something really really bad on ethereum censorship like as I mentioned before censorship resistance is really that that's it for for ethereum and decentralized blockchains that is the thing that we optimize for and that we we want out of

these things uh if you were just just pick one thing right uh but you know these these uh relays engaging in censorship uh water that down they they make it so that people look at that and at least at the social air and think wow okay well you know some of the credible neutrality gets eroded uh with that and I've been really hard on them but at the same time uh uh and over the last I guess few weeks especially I have more and more uh come to have a deeper understanding and a deeper appreciation for for the positions these people are under because it's all well and good for me to say these things I mean one I'm not a US citizen right which automatically I mean I I it's funny whenever I say that because Australia is basically mini us I mean we we have so

many tree um lines we have an alliance with the US right we without the US China probably would have invaded us 50 years ago but just from a pure kind of citizenship perspective right I'm not a U.S citizen I haven't found any D5 protocols I'm not developing any of these things I'm purely basically an educator and an investor so my risk level is is obviously very low compared to the people actually building these things so I think a lot of since the ofax sanctions happened they didn't happen that long ago it was only August right August 8th I believe and I remember the date because that's my anniversary with my fiancee so I actually remember the date but yeah August 8th uh so it hasn't been that long uh so far uh but it's been yes I've been thinking a lot about it as things

have progressed and has evolved and I basically yeah come to the conclusion that we all need to be more sympathetic towards uh these people because they are under a lot of pressure and this pressure leads to potential mental health issues and in the worst cases it can lead to to what happened with Nikolai where as Alex vanderson said here it's a premature passing we don't know exactly what happened we don't know if he um if he committed suicide or if he had some health issues or if uh you know if you were to believe the conspiracies if the you know the CIA got him or something like that I'm not I'm not going to uh obviously spread that around and say that that's true or not but we don't know the circumstances yet uh as far as I know but uh just yeah an unfortunate uh event in the default

ecosystem but as I said Nikolai has touched all of us in one way or another through his work which I consider to be pretty amazing considering uh you know how big this ecosystem is now and how hard it is to actually make something as impactful as just wrapped ethereum right like that's such an impactful thing even though it's considered something of table Stakes within ethereum these days it's uh it's such an impactful thing and it's what made uh defy work basically uh so yeah not not to this not the discount his other accomplishments obviously found in maker Dao which is basically the grandfather father of defy and founding balancer as well which is a great project but I think uh when you look at the list of accomplishments here obviously uh there is a lot but anyway I'm going to leave that one at that

moving on to some more Mev related stuff you guys love this topic I'm sure but anyway I wanted to highlight this website that I came across today called inclusion.watch now I am so happy that someone has developed this because basically what this website does is it will show you how long it's going to take based on a percentage chance to get your transaction included in a block if it is part of a um a census uh sorry is it if it is a transaction that is being censored by some portion of the network obviously tornado cash transactions are being censored right now and I've discussed this before where I've said okay you know what what are the compliant blocks so 66 of average block of um of the network is currently

censoring uh um tornado cash related transactions but that that means that there is 34 that isn't so what are the chances on a per block basis of you getting into a block So within one block it will be a 34 chance right that's that's pretty obvious then within five blocks you'll have an 87 chance within 10 blocks 98 and for 25 blocks 100 and in the longest um uh time frame here 25 blocks uh it only takes five minutes so most of them are going to be obviously included between one to two minutes and currently but this is what I I guess like I've been talking about a lot and what people have been pointing out is that even though there are actors censoring on this network it's not like

100 censorship right whereas for example let's take uh PayPal for example if PayPal senses you that's it PayPal is a centralized company they're the only one that will process your transactions that will allow you to use your account and there they have uh the sole power to ban or unban you from the platform or to censor or not censor you from the platform whereas on ethereum because it is a decentralized network made up of hundreds of thousands of validators and and many different relayers out there with more coming every day we're never going to get to 100 censorship even if we get to something like 90 there is still a um there is still uh a chance for you to get your transaction in and that chance goes up and up and up the more blocks that uh that are mined right

so even if as I said 90 95 even even I've gone through this before but even if 99 of the network was censoring you would still be able to get a transaction in relatively quickly uh for that that sense of transaction there sorry it's for that um censored uh transaction type I should say now obviously we don't want to get to that point where under the majority is censored and it depends on the transaction as well for something like tornado cash it's actually not a big deal because Toyota cache is more siled it is not a a kind of money logo so to speak it's not something that interoperates with other protocols uh directly whereas if 66 of the network was censoring uni swap for example that would be a massive effect it would have a massive effect on the network and uh

that would degrade Network for performance considerably and actually in that in that position I think that the community would come together and start socially slashing in in that position because right now as I said tornado cash because it's siled it and because you can get your transaction in still and and it's all well and good uh it's not as big of a deal as something like Unison it just depends on what percentage of the network is using it and it's not just Universe it's it's open sea it's um the money markets like Ave for example it's other amms uh you know it's everything that would be popular that is most used by probably gas usage on ethereum or fees burned I should say that would get people's attention um more so than than tornado cash but generally obviously we want to strive

for zero percent censorship I don't think we're ever going to get to zero percent but uh we will obviously improve this over time uh but yeah this website will show you how long it'll take on average to get your transaction in uh which is really cool I mean it's really cool that you can get within with uh you know in five minutes or less you basically have 100 chance of getting on transaction in even though 66 of the network is censoring you uh and you know what's funny about this is that an average Bitcoin block is 10 minutes so you would still be able to get your transaction in uh faster than a Bitcoin block um which which I think is pretty funny uh there but yeah anyway that's enough on inclusion.watch you can check out their website for yourself second bit of Mev news comes from coinbase now

I did mention over the past week or so that I I spotted coinbase turning on our Mev boost on their validators because they went to raider.network and checked it out there and they made the official announcement today that flash boot flashbot says Mev boost uh software is now live on coinbase cloud so they have a thread here about this about one Twitter in particular that I wanted to point out was that uh where do they are this tweak yeah where they said relay diversity encourages decentralization and sensitive resistance in keeping with this principle coinbase Cloud will aim to subscribe to all viable relayers that are operated by known entities and pass our technical requirements so they're not just going to be using flashbots or you know blocks route they're going to

be using as they said here or viable relay relays and I think viable would be a checklist that they would go through such as something you know that has a reliable uptime that is uh that that actually proposes blocks and actually works uh that you know is bug relatively bug free over a period of time uh and obviously there's a whole list of things you can you can have in that checklist and then also they've said Operator by known entities so this is obviously something that they have to do because of the fact that they're a centralized company especially either on the the stock exchange in in the US right um so they're not going to be uh allowing uh sadly they're not going to be subscribing to to relays such as relay all which I've been talking about

the the new non-censoring one and any other ones that are run by Anonymous people which is fine I mean we expected this from something like coinbase but uh still cool to see that they have turned it on they made the official announcements and that they're not just going with flashbots or they're not just going with sensor relays they're supporting all viable relays whether they're censoring or not so I think that's that's very cool there now speaking of Mev watch dot info the relay all which I just spoke about uh is actually over the last day up to 0.66 of blocks now beating manifolds uh relay already so very cool to see them growing and they're actually up to almost 6 000 validators now which is awesome like uh they've been growing so quickly here and you can go check out um the stats for

yourself at this website relay all with three Os or WTF which I'll link in the YouTube description uh but yeah the diversity is getting better guys like it's going to take time I'm saying this every day it's getting better it's getting better it's going to take time but we're getting there which is the main thing here and I'm curious to see what coinbase's diversity looks like over time because right now it's it's heavy flash Bots like if I go to raider.network I should have this website up all the time for you guys but yeah rated.network you can see it's been growing uh coinbase's uh Mev boost relay share so flashbots right now is 4.9 blocks right at 0.9 that's the only two right now that they are uh that have been proposed and there's still a lot of vanilla blocks here but obviously flashbots is ahead now we'll have as I

said I'm curious to see what the diversity looks like will it look similar to something like Lido where 59 is flashbots and 10 is blocks route it's looking like that based on kind of a percentage uh but based on the way it is right now but we'll have to see I'm curious to see how that evolves over time and I'll obviously keep you guys updated on that one there all right so just wanted to highlight this video that uh bankless put out which is a clip from an interview David Hoffman did with with vitalik at Devcon uh in Bogota here where he asked vitalik what will ethereum look like in the year 2032 and Natalia gave us a glimpse of the future now basically what vitalik is talking about here is one of the end game goals of the ethereum protocol which used to ZK snarkify everything now

what this would allow you to do as vitalik States in this video is basically uh you you can download a set of data so say you download 3.6 megabytes of data you hash it you do a couple of elliptic curve equations on it uh and you to check it to validity uh sorry to check a snark and that's it you know that the block is valid and then you can keep doing this for blocks and blocks and blocks and and what this enables is that basically validating the chain from something like a smartphone or a Raspberry Pi device really really quickly uh which is huge right that means that we can keep scaling and this this obviously has benefits for scaling because as we scale up more uh we can with Dank sharding we can increase the size increase the data throughput of

dang sharding which increases the the throughput of ethereum layer one uh but this is that snarkifying the base layer that I've been talking about for a while now I don't mention it that often because as I said it is more of a definite longer longer term thing part of the Splurge I believe which is like the nicer Habs on ethereum but if we can get there in the next 10 years that'd be awesome because as I've said to you guys before the ethereum road map is a five to ten year road map from basically this year so uh snackifying yeah probably won't happen and maybe it'll happen in in the 2020s but we'll see but it's definitely not like critical it's it's as I said it's a nice to have it definitely gives us a lot of a lot of awesome properties but I I do still

think we're going to have a lot more scale than demand to use it uh and we already do technically right uh and as we scale up through dank shining and as the layer twos get better over time uh as I said it'll be it'll be just nice to have the snackifying the base layer in order to validate on a phone and in 10 years I mean he's talking like you know two three megabytes of data right now maybe for a lot of people on a mobile device on a 4G or a 5G plan that's a lot but in 10 years we're probably going to be on like 6G 7g or something like that right the the data that we have we might even end up having unlimited data for for Mobile plans so you won't even have to worry about it at that point which I

think is is really cool but you can go watch this short clip I'll link in the YouTube description and the full interview is linked here as well uh which I'll also Link in the YouTube description below all right some news out of the polygon ecosystem today so Sandeep from polygon has quote tweeted uh Tai Loban who works at JP Morgan and Sandeep said this is a big step for defy world's largest bank JP Morgan and Singapore's regulatory Authority did their first live trade in D5 on polygon so on the polygon POS chain so you can see uh Ty's tweet thread here where he said JP Morgan has executed its first live trade on a public blockchain using defy tokenized deposits and verifiable credentials part of the monetary authority of Singapore's

project guardian uh many world firsts here and since this is a public chain uh you know these are transparent thread on what they did which you can read and I'll link in the YouTube description and Below uh this is really cool because as I said this is actually on obviously it's not an ethereum main net it's on the polygon POS chain but the polygon POS chain is a public permissionless chain this is not a private change it's not a private Fork of Geth or anything like that it's not an internal thing this is done by JPMorgan on a public blockchain which I think is incredibly cool uh and as I said you can check out this thread here now obviously some people will see this and be like you know aren't we building defy to disrupt the banks so to speak aren't we doing aren't we building it to replace the

banks and I've always been of the opinion that we're doing both things we're replacing and updating Legacy Financial a structure but that doesn't mean that the companies that use that Legacy Financial infrastructure can't take advantage of that as well so for example Banks can update all of their um all of their internal uh kind of software can update their internal procedures can update everything that they they do under under the hood uh to use defy rails or to use crypto rails instead of the tradify Rails obviously this is going to take a long time but D5 doesn't necessarily put all of these companies out of business or obsolete them uh just like the internet didn't obsolete all the companies that came before the internet their companies

found novel and unique ways to use the internet for the benefit of their business just like banks will do this just like other tradify firms will do this and this is one of the world this is a world first as as Ty says here that the first live trade on a public blockchain from JP Morgan so I'll link the thread in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I just thought it was something worth highlighting even though it may seem uninteresting to us because because we you know maybe some of you just really hate Banks especially Banks like JP Morgan which are obviously Mega Banks and things like that but you know Banks I think have been a necessary evil for a long time in society Banks aren't anything new they've been around for a very very long time um and I don't think that they are evil

per se and it's a longer discussion than I have time for today but I think if they can adopt the technology that we're building and the technology that we're building can remain neutral can remain decentralized uh and even though obviously JP Morgan's not going to be a decentralized entity interacting with that they're still going to be on a Level Playing Field on the same rails in a more transparent system or more fair system and I think that is a huge Win For Humanity generally even if these centralized companies are using this because you can use centralized exchanges as an example they've been around for almost as long as crypto's been around for right um since since Bitcoin came on the scene and what have they done well they've added actually a lot of value they've

brought a lot of people into this ecosystem that otherwise wouldn't have been could you imagine crypto without centralized exchanges it would still be this Niche little thing that only Geeks cared about in their basement running uh the latest Linux distribs right like it would be nothing uh it's only that because of centralized exchanges bringing in these people and bridging Two Worlds essentializing decentralized worlds together that we have what we have today now is that to say that all these centralized entities are great no I think a lot of them are actually pretty bad and we've seen a lot of them go bust like Celsius and and uh blockfi didn't go bust I mean but basically failed and got acquired uh uh obviously uh Terror you know which I guess like they said they're all decentralized but they really weren't and you know it's

funny their centralization didn't even help them in the end but that's orthogonal to my point here I I think that there's a spectrum we're gonna have centralized entities forever just tapping into these things but it's fine as long as they uh don't have control over the the neutral infrastructure that we're building they can tap into it just like anyone else can and just like any other entertainment all right so an update out of the synthetics ecosystem that I forgot to cover a few days ago so synthetics has now has announced and launched a new snx YouTube channel and they have their first video which features uh afifiya going through perps V2 uh and basically explaining what all about uh perps uh the basics of perps current landscape for D5 perps snx perps V2 so you can go

check out this video I'll link in the YouTube description below but the reason I wanted to highlight this is because you obviously I'm an educator and anytime I see a project especially one that says big and well known as synthetics spinning up an educational resource I always want to point people towards it especially if you're wondering you know what the hell is a perp right uh anyway how does it play Within synthetics if you're a synthetics fan maybe you're still confused well this is something that you can check out and go go watch to get a better understanding I'll link this in the YouTube description for you to do so all right last couple of updates here I've got to do with nfts so a project called Nifty Apes has announced their 4.2 million dollar seed round LED by variant and fintech Collective Now in

your head I'm sure you're saying is Anthony going to say that he was an investor in this as well and yes I am so disclosure I am an angel investor in this because as I've said many many times before the only things that I'm interested in investing in on the nft side are infrastructure things not the nfts themselves and I've explained my reasoning behind that before the tldr is that it's just too hard to pick winners in the actual nft space and I don't have enough time for it but infrastructure stuff I love now what is Nifty Apes well basically Nipsey Apes allows people to get leverage on their nft portfolio and just uh you know obviously leverage I've spoken about before and I've said that you should avoid leverage uh and things like that but I'm also not naive and I know that people will keep using

leverage and I know that not all Leverage is necessarily bad you know for example if you put money in Make a dow um you know you put Ethan make it out and then borrow against it so you you borrow some money to buy a car that's not like djen gambling on eath using that money or that's buying a car because it's something that you need in real life and then you pay off that loan uh over time just like you would pay off a bank loan so not all Leverage is evil when I talk about leverage and and kind of caution against it it's the going you know 10x 50x 100x on uh you know speculative crypto coins and then getting yourself blown up that's where you'd want to avoid it but if you want to unlock the liquidity of your assets without selling them that's where

leverage comes in handy and that's exactly what Nifty Apes is is trying to build TI is a way for you to unlock liquidity for your uh your nfts and you can go to the website to check it out at Nifty Apes um Dot money here to start borrowing and start lending if you want uh and you know they've got a nice little landing page here to learn all about them as well uh but yeah I wanted to congratulate them on this raise as I said I am an investor but I want to congratulate them because it's pretty cool to see something like this getting uh getting uh you know invested in and getting I'm sorry being able to raise money and as I said I love seeing these nft infrastructure projects spin up uh and and get and get traction because I think that uh something like this is a

definite value add to the nft ecosystem so you can go check this out I'll link in the neutral description uh below uh but the last thing another nft related update comes from the nouns ecosystem now nouns is a project that's been around for a little while I think I've talked about them here and there uh but basically it is a project that auctions off a unique noun nft every single day and he's been doing this for quite a while and they've managed to raise I think 20 or 30 000 each at this point maybe more than that at this point I haven't checked lately uh and basically they're a collective that tries to do things with that whether that's being funding public goods or investing in other projects uh basically it's supposed to be a community that can come together and do these things well uh

today the nouns Community announced something called nouns build up which is basically a way to do what nouns does with their uh FTS for anyone so you can upload your art start your own Dow and create as a community all on chain with no code required and you can create your own nounsdale at nouns.build so you can just take the concept and take basically what nouns does with nouns.w2.wtf that's the URL and apply it to your own cause your own project you can imagine doing something say for a local charity you can raise money for a local charity by selling nfts here and then have a dow that manages this uh which I thought I think would be pretty cool uh because I really do like the

idea of that now obviously the more people that get involved the harder it becomes to scale these sorts of things and I think the nouns project from Loosely following it has suffered from this in the past because obviously there's a lot of money there you get a lot of people interested especially if they're buying they're buying a noun because these things aren't cheap they have like little nouns which are the cheaper version but the actual nouns themselves I think they're still going for almost 50 each and at one point they're going for like 108 so then not cheap nfts and this is every day guys like money's issued every day this isn't like a weekly or a monthly thing or a limited thing one a new one is issued every day so that treasury grew really really large the community grew really large and I think they've had Growing

Pains so to speak because of that so that's kind of the thing that that's the thing that I caution I get not against but like that's the the one I guess like red flat not red flag's not the right term what's the word I'm looking for it eludes me right now but that's basically the one thing that I I look at is like okay well what does this look like at scale because when things get big enough and there's a lot enough money involved um there's too much too many voices governance slows down it becomes hard to do anything it becomes very bureaucratic uh it becomes very um ego driven as well because you have different sets of contributors and people want to have their voices heard and all this sorts of stuff right but if you can keep things relatively small I think that works

really well like a small and lean Dows is what I'm most bullish on the really really big deals that just like let anyone in and anyone can have an equal voice I don't really think that that was going to work at all I think small lean Downs with a large community uh is good and you know it's fine money because that's exactly what uh I I guess like um democracies like in general we have like obviously in the US there is 350 400 million people whatever it is right now but there's nowhere near that amount of Representatives in in in in the center and in their house and and local politicians and all that sort of stuff right there is like a few thousand of them I think I don't know how many there are maybe there's not even that many to represent that many people because

that's the only real way to scale it could you imagine if or every single citizen had an equal say in every single decision that needs to be made around the country and and that it would just be debated to death it would nothing would ever get done it'd be gridlocked um and and in saying that there are obviously times where things get gridlocked anyway uh even with the decisions that we have but I don't think Dallas can just you know scale up as much as possible scale up to like thousands and thousands of people and expect to be able to get stuff done they need to have a core part of the Dow which acts as the representatives and then they can have a large community but getting bogged down on these things um it basically kills else I believe but anyway you can go check out nouns.build

if you're interested in starting one for yourself but on that note 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 the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone [Music]