Coinbase sues the SEC, Reth 1.0 released and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #788 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delway Ruel where C latest news in etherum EOS system I'm your host and this 28th of June 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for the little switch around guys I did say that I was going to do an episode yesterday but not today but I switched that around missed yesterday's episode but doing one today and of course you guys know that going forward starting next week the Cadence for these episodes will be Monday Wednesday and Friday instead of every weekday or almost every weekday you guys know I miss quite a few episodes from time to time there but yeah as I said like it'll the new Cadence will start next week but let's jump into the news from the last 48 hours so there was some big kind of regulatory news I guess or regulatory

adjacent news over the last 24 hours in particular and one of these was that coinbase has sued the SEC and the FDIC over FIA or Freedom of Information requests uh and um and says that Federal Regulators are trying to cut out crypto now of course this is just continuing the trend of crypto companies suing the SEC themselves after being sued by the SEC right we originally had consensus uh kind of recer Wells notice over the um I guess a bunch of different things which actually turns out that they're still waiting on a lawsuit from the SEC for so the SEC pulled out with regards to classifying eth 2.0 as a security or something like that or some other case

that would potentially bringing against consensus but I think that they pulled out of that and obviously it was because they also approved the E ETF so it kind of would be insane for them to try to classify ethers of security if they just approved the E ETFs the spot ETFs and had approve the Futures ETFs as well so there is still I believe going to be or potentially going to be a lawsuit against consensus over I believe metam mask uh and some other things like their staking products uh but of course uh K sued the SEC first over this in order to kind of get ahead of the Pacquiao and that's what coinbase has done now by by sing the SEC as well so it says here coinbase which retain consultant firm history associate uh took aim at the SEC and FDIC and lawsuits filed in the US District Court

for the District of Columbia on Thursday the crypto exchange accused federal financial Regulators of trying to cut off the crypto industry from the banking SE sector in the complaints and this is kind of that I guess like choke point 2.0 thing that people have been going on about I've been hesitant to really like buy into this thing like I haven't seen any real concrete hard evidence that there's been a concerted effort from whoever to cut crypto out of the banking system and I don't even think it would be a conspiracy or some kind of I guess like shadowy cabal thing that's going on here I think naturally Banks find crypto to be competitive with them so Banks don't have uh incentive to platform crypto companies right because for them it's like well if we platform crypto companies we're basically uh allowing crypto to grow which is cutting into our

bottom line or cutting into our cutting into our um into our business so let's not do this so we'll see what what comes out of this lawsuit we'll see essentially what gets obtained by coinbase here I'm I'm curious to see if there actually is or was a concerted effort against crypto as this choke point 2.0 uh but as it stands today there's just a lot of circumstantial evidence I want to see concrete stuff here I'm not one to jump to conclusions I don't like jumping to conclusions and I don't like speculating on things I like seeing evidence and you guys know that I always try and stick to the facts the truth the evidence as much as possible I try to minimize speculation on these things uh and I'm glad that coinbase is possibly going to get us these facts uh and and evidence without

us having to speculate much further from here so that was that one on the regulatory side but there was also something that I guess wasn't directly crypto related but pretty cool to see so the Supreme Court uh ruled in a six to3 vote that when the SEC seeks penalties for fraud a defendant is entitled to a jury trial in federal court as opposed to being subjected to the agency's quote unquote in-house legal proceedings and Elanor here expanded on this saying you know what does this actually mean well this move essentially hamstrings all federal agencies not just the SEC by burdening them with having to try their cases in federal court the Supreme Court ruled that the sec's use of In-House judicial processes to bring charges are on UNC unconstitutional so this is a huge deal because uh as you guys know

for a long time now the SEC loves to sue various different crypto companies or various different I guess like crypto entities and say especially if they've done a token well mainly if they've done a token and say okay well you've done a token we think it's an illegal Securities offering uh and we've decided inh house that you are required to pay St and such amounts uh and then that's what's we call like a settlement right which basically my mind protection money to the SEC to get the SEC to leave you alone now from my understanding the Supreme Court has ruled that this is unconstitutional and that these cases actually have to be tried in a federal court of law they can't just be done by some in-house legal proceedings that the SEC has where obviously 99% of the time the SEC lawyers are going to side with

the SEC right they're not going to give a fair trial it's it's basically like a kangaroo court right so this is huge and as Elenor says here it's not just the SEC that is hamstrung now it is other federal agencies or all federal agencies um including you know the doj for example including um the cftc and others out there so really big win I think overall not just for crypto but for any I guess any of this kind of Mafia Behavior that's been going on in the US recently which has been great to see uh generally there so as I said guys like over the last few months even though you have a really hostile political party uh in power right now hostile towards crypto within the Democrats right even though that's the that's the case when you actually look at what's been

happening the the hostility hasn't actually prevented anything right everyone was going on about oh the Democrats are so hostile towards crypto which means uh you know Gary gzo is hostile the eth atfs aren't going to get approved because of that but then the EFS got approved right and then also even further back than that gry scale won their case against the SEC Ripple won their case against the SEC coinbase won uh not won but like got a lot of the stuff that the SEC w wanted to go after them for dismissed and the main thing was the the wallet stuff basically saying that a coinbase wallet is not something uh is not it's not a custodial wallet it's not custodial so ites it has no relevance to the sec's jurisdiction here so the SEC has just kept racking up losses and I I think that uh the The

Establishment if you want to call it that has kept racking up losses against crypto even though they've been super anti crypto it hasn't mattered and the the the rule of law has seemingly sided with crypto on most of the cases here which has been great to see and as as I said that this new ruling today is even big is an even even bigger deal because of the fact that it basically puts the um I I guess I don't know if you call it power but basically puts the impotence back on the SEC to say okay well you can't do legal in-house proceedings anymore you have to go through the courts where the SEC has been losing in and they don't obviously want to be in the courts because they know that they that they're losing there so they'd rather do stuff in house well apparently

if I'm understanding this correctly that is no longer going to be the case here so just absolutely massive news here and continues the trend of crypto continuing to win in the political sphere even in the face of a really strong anti-crypto Administration I can't even imagine what it would look like in a pro crypto Administration you know if you believe that uh if Trump was to win the presidency the Republicans were to win they would be Pro crypto and that actually follow through with their promises then uh you know I don't even know like what it would look like I mean not only is um is crypto winning in the courts then it has a pro crypto kind of I guess political sphere to to lean into as well that would be cool to see but as I said I don't as I've said plenty of

times before I don't think it really matters who is president or who has power I think what matters is the courts what matters is the rule of law and that's on the side of crypto and historically has been on the side of crypto especially over the last uh 12 months which has been great to see all right so moving on to some eth tech related stuff so WTH 1.0 has officially been released so after almost 2 years of development and a successful audit by Sigma Prime which funny enough is the company that builds the lighthouse consensus layer client for ethereum uh the ref team is finally releasing 1.0 the first prod ready release of their blazing fast ethereum execution client so I haven't tried this myself yet but if you are brave enough and you want to run this for your staking setup or your

solo staking or home staking setup then you can but you can also run it as just a full node you don't have to attach validators to it you can just run it as a normal full node which I plan to do now as you guys know uh by now wreth is built in Rust and WTH is I believe one of the fastest if not the fast Fest execution layer clients currently in production on ethereum I know nethermind has made a lot of great strides in making sure that they can speed up their their full no client here but reth basically was built from I I don't know if it was built from the ground up but there was a lot of modifications and changes made in order to focus on speed in order to focus on efficiency and focus on performance uh rather than focusing on uh you know on on other

things but obviously still respecting security because you have to respect security when you're you're you're a core client here uh but I'm very very happy to see that this is finally live as a production ready client for everyone to play around with now of course I'm not going to be running my validators off this client um not I wouldn't say anytime soon but like for now because obviously I want to make sure that I'm not going to I don't think I'd get slash but like that I'm not going to go offline and then not have bugs where I have to like resync the database or you know things that kind of make it so that I miss block proposals like I'm always very very sensitive to that I don't want to miss block proposals because that's where the the money is obviously uh a testing get you

rewards as well and being part of syn committees and all that but proposing blocks is usually where the money is and usually where the eth is so I want to make sure I'm online as much as possible so I don't miss U Miss blocks here but I do think I'm going to spin up a w full node uh on some of the hardware that I have lying around I have so much Hardware lying around guys like as you guys know my setup is pretty pretty involved I have a bunch of different things going on you I have my Rocka pool nodes I have my archive node I have my solo validators I have my uh um valid validators for my self-managed super fund which is my retirement account um and I have bunch of raspberry pies lying around that I like to run stuff on as

well so I'm going to try and run W on some existing maybe more powerful hardware and then work my way down from there I'd love to see if I can get this running on a Raspberry Pi I don't know if I can maybe I can't uh and then on a rock 5B as well which is a bit more powerful than than a Raspberry Pi there but as I said it is now production ready so you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so and if you're brave enough you can even run your validators on this but as I said personally I will just be trying to run a full node without validators attached to it but and then it's just easy to attach validators to it later if you so choose all right speaking of validators

soy spoke here shared a new report that was uh put together by m Pirates uh nean and chainbound uh so they they they basically work within the chainbound ecosystem here so essentially what this is is that it shows the geographical distribution of ethereum validators so we have had in the past uh I guess like Maps like this for node operators so the geographical distribution of node operator but of course we it's very hard to get geographical distribution of the actual validators themselves because the note operators and validators can be located in different parts of the world here whereas this focuses on just the geographical distribution of validators themselves which is I think a first I don't think we've had this before and

this is quite a detailed report here of how they were actually able to achieve this the methodology use so on and so forth so you can go give the report to read for yourself but what I do want to focus on is the map itself you know as we can see in the map it's no surprise where validators are located both east and west coast us strong um strong uh I guess like concentration within Europe uh generally I guess like Western Europe mostly here and then spotty I guess in Asia generally and then in Australia we we do have a little bit of a green Cloud there but obviously not as prevalent as other places now of course from this map you can also see where we need to do more work to get validators uh in these places so South America uh Africa the

Middle East uh India China Russia I guess like they're the main places where we would like to see more ethereum validators right because it's all well and good to have geographic distribution as we have it today but we definitely want to see the more distribution right we definitely want to see more blue dots as well CU it's not just the it's not just the the the cloud the colored clouds here it's also the blue dots because as you can see there are no identified blue dots in most of Africa like in South Africa you have two blue dots here but most of Africa and the Middle East there's just no blue dots and you can actually go over to to Russia and there's there's no blue dots either from what I can see maybe towards the the South there on the border uh but yeah and in South America it's spotty in

general uh but there there is some going on there especially in Argentina that's been you know there's been a lot of people in Argentina that's been big crypto supporters but generally I think that it's vastly under I guess represented in Africa and the Middle East you can see that here and now I'm not going to get into the geopolitical reasons of why this is the case you can imagine why this is the case right such as the fact that on on average people in these countries are poorer right which means that their first priority isn't to run an ethereum validator or full node because running an ethereum validator is very costly here so if anything I think this map shows generally kind of wealth levels in the world right because if you're running a validator you need to either have 32 e or you need to be part

of a DVT set and the minimum of that is 3.2 e or you need to be um you need to be part of the Rocka pool uh I guess protocol that's 8 e plus I think 2.4 e or something worth of RP right so the barrier to entry of being a validated is much higher than than a full node because not only do you need the hardware which is is cheap relatively cheap but you need the eth collateral as well and you don't just need 32 I mean you don't need 32 eth but you need I mean at minimum I would say 3.2 e the DBT Squad Squad taking there which is incredibly new by the way so there's not many of those live right now but 3.2 e is over is a lot of money guys like the total net worth of a person in a lot of

these countries doesn't even get close to 3. 2 e that's their whole net worth right so I think if anything this just shows wealth distribution across the planet I mean it makes sense as well right um but at the same time there shouldn't be a blocker for us there shouldn't be something that's stopping us I would love to see us bring that barrier to entry down and let people run validators in these in these parts of the world if they want to and if it's possible for them to do that but at the end of the day this goes beyond crypto this as I said is more to do with wealth distribution generally and that's what's going to be the main blocker here I mean it's the same thing for full nodes too guys like if even if you only uh need to spend $500 to run a full node right on

top of your internet connection too don't get me wrong but he still going to price out probably I don't know half the world at least right half the world's population at least because of the fact that they just simply can't afford it and we shouldn't as I said we should lower the barrier to entry as much as possible but there is a flaw here there is a wealth flaw here and that's not something that crypto can do much about crypto in my opinion I've held this opinion for a very long time is not going to solve wealth inequality it is definitely going to at least if we if we build it right it's definitely going to help with giving more opportunities to people around the world to get involved with a financial system and give more financial opportunities that way but it is not going to solve wealth inequality

generally right like it's definitely not I I think that it may even exacerbate it to be honest and I think wealth inequality generally is a much broader topic than just crypto is something that needs to be focused on obviously by nation states um themselves and the governments themselves and and humanitarian efforts and all that sorts of stuff there but yeah it's still cool to have this map but as I said it definitely seems like it is I mean just based on the facts and circumstances it is a wealth distribution map more than it is showing where people would like to run ethereum validators um so yeah that's that's kind of my take on that but anyway you can go read the full report for yourself I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of running ethereum nodes and validators the

ethereum on arm account has tweeted out that they have managed to do a fresh sync of gu and Nimbus on a rock 5B 16 gig ram using only two physical cores and this was something proposed by Nick Dodson here about what the minimum Hardware requirements to run an ethereum full node are well I think we have the minimum requirements uh from from the ethereum on arm account here so as I said they're only using two physical cores on the Rock 5B 16 gig uh Ram Board here and it syncs sync time was 1 day 17 hours database size 1.1 tabes and the hardware was as I just mentioned that board Limited to only uh two physical cores so they disabled six cores out of the eight um and the SSD was a wd green SN 3502 terabyte I believe that's one of

the cheaper SS ssds out there I know that the the green s ssds are usually quite cheap I'm actually just going to look up the price here so I can tell you guys how cheap this actually is um I don't know what it's going to be like in US dollars but this is a 2 TB Drive in Australian dollars let me convert this uh in US dolls this is a $125 you can probably find it cheaper than that but yeah about $125 for that SSD and then the rock 5B board um as well just running two physical cores out of the eight here so yeah great to see this great to see that we've gotten some real results of U of something sinking here and I think gu maybe is a heavier sync than some of the other client maybe maybe some of the other execution layer

clients out there so maybe you could get this down even further and the syn time wasn't too long 1 day 17 hours is actually quite short so yeah just once again speaking to how easy it is to run an ethereum full node uh on low powered Hardware doesn't really say anything about validators because this is just a a full node here like an execution layer client that consensus layer client validator is obviously a different different game their light on Hardware very heavy on Capital uh because you need that 32 e uh or I guess like as I explained before less than that but still very very heavy Capital requirements here but yeah anyway just wanted to hide that for you guys because I thought it was pretty cool all right so an announcement out of Mega eth today so for those of you who don't know Mega eth is an to being built

on top of ethereum what they're trying to do is juice the um evm like basically what monad is doing as an L1 but as an L2 here uh and they announced today their $20 million seed round this is obviously a very big seed round should disclose I mean you probably guessed that by now I am an investor in in mega eia I decided to go in as an angel investor so what they're trying to do is basically get to 100,000 TPS with millisecond latency as an L2 essentially I guess what you could say they're doing is as I said like they bringing what Mon's trying to do as an L1 to an L2 right but I guess it's also the salana approach of scaling execution of being able to do as much TPS as possible with as low latency as possible as I've

always said I felt like this was always better to be done at L2 as an L1 there's just so many benefits to having it done as an L2 here uh and as I've said plenty of times in the past as well the most exciting thing about l2s for me is not necessarily uh I guess like the the scalability because that's table Stakes but doing scalability in unique and novel ways using things other than the evm I mean they are using the evm but the thing is is that this is like not normal evm they're juicing this the evm up to 100,000 TPS and Beyond and they're not the only team doing it there are a bunch of teams out there that are doing this uh today and it's going to be curious to see what this looks like because at the end of the day I don't

think the hardest part is building out the technology the hardest part is building out an ecosystem as is evidenced by the fact that like if we go to l2b and look at the top l2s right now um you know it's it's arbitr one and bass they're the top two right and that's because they've built out a really strong ecosystem it's not because of the tech like no one would argue that arbiton one and bass have the best tech or the the fastest Tech or the or the quote unquote like most performant tech right they're essentially just pretty I mean they they're they EVMS that have been Juiced a bit more because they're l2s and they're not on L1 but still they're not anything kind of like crazy like 100,000 TPS or anything like that but they are successful because they've been managed to build an ecosystem

around them so that's always going to be the uphill battle for for l2s and I mean l1's generally it's the same battle building an ecosystem that that's what's very hard so as I said like the tech the scalability it's kind of table Stak stuff here I'm glad to see the Innovations happening that's why I mean invested in them because I love seeing this stuff built out and I love um being part of this stuff but at the end of the day for every L2 and L L1 team generally it's all about growing the ecosystem so I'm curious to see what uh what Mega eth does here to grow their ecosystem out because that's basically do or die for for for the l2s at this point in time all right moving on so fluent has announced that they have launched their first uh devet for their Blended

execution uh Network so essentially what they're trying to do here is uh create a system where you can basically do execution in both the evm and in WM as well so you can see here the fluent public devet is now permissionless available developers can now build applications with logic written in both rust and evm based languages like solidity or Viper in practice Blended execution enables unique use cases such as building a decentralized Exchange in Rust that uses erc20 tokens enhancing a social feed with rust algorithms playing with generative art or game libraries and developers can go check this out for themselves I'll link it in the YouTube description below should disclose here I'm adviser to fluent but again this falls into what I was saying before about wanting to see more Innovation

happening at the L2 level on the tech side of things you know doing stuff that's non evm pushing the evm to its limit all that sorts of stuff there again I fall back to saying that it's it definitely is still about growing the ecosystem and that's what fluence trying to do here they're trying to tap into a different and distinct ecosystem that isn't that you know that is evm that is solidity developers but that you can bring other developers in that may not want to work with the evm or may not care about working with solidity and they can write their programs in in Rust and they can do this Blended execution where essentially they can write a program in Rust and have it execute as part of the fluent an evm system here uh which is very very cool and I think this is the future I think arbitri has

obviously been doing this with stus or something similar to this with stylus but this is definitely the future of of blockchains generally is allowing developers to build in whatever language they want for whatever VM they want and then just execute it all together so the end user gets the best experience possible with obviously the cheapest fees possible and no need to worry about uh essentially learning a brand new language just to get started like we have to lower the barriers to entry across the board for users but also for developers and that's exactly what teams like fluent are doing so you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the description below for you to do so all right last up here another big announcement out of coinbase with regards to Bringing people on chain and enabling Mass adoption and this is

enabling actual mass adoption like people who say that mass adoption is enabled by getting washed up celebrities on chain to issue their own scam coins and dump on their Community that's not adoption that's literally just scamming people and grifting people like that's actually one thing that's really annoyed me lately is people calling that adoption anyone who's saying that that is adoption is is ridiculously uh I guess like um delusional that's that's probably the word I would use what actual adoption is is giving products uh an experiences to people that they haven't had before and doing it in a way that they're not getting scammed like I don't understand why this is a controversial thing but apparently it is because crypto Twitter is really stupid most of the time but enough of my ranting what is coinbase done well they've teamed up with stripe to bring

bases faster cheaper Financial infrastructure to millions of businesses around the world how are they doing this well essentially stripe is adding usdc on base to their crypto payouts product to enable stripe plat platforms to make faster cheaper money transfers to over 150 countries and stripe is adding usdc on base to their Fiat to crypto onramp to enable customers in the US to convert Fiat to crypto faster than ever you remember a few months ago I said that I wanted coinbase to to go all in on getting usdc adopted on Bas they're doing that and they're doing that in really big ways stripe is a massive company guys it is powering so much of e-commerce online and now that b is integrated into with super low or free transactions with using usdc to move money around the world to do e-commerce

to pay each other and to just do it in such a I guess like onchain native way is really really cool to see this is as I said what enables Mass adoption what enables actual adoption this is what people want uh or at least this is what people will get actual benefits out of and people will get actual value out of people won't just get scammed and grifted on they'll have a nice experience that's uniquely enabled by onchain products so I'm really happy that coinbase is doing this and again coinbase firing on all cylinders here they have the whole pipeline they know what they're trying to do they're scaling up Bas it's at it's an L2 on ethereum so they get to tap into the ethereum ecosystem they don't have a token yet which actually I think helps them for now I do think eventually bass

will have a token like that's something that I I don't know the timing around but I do think it will happen but I think right now it's really I guess critical for them not to do a token because they're building out their ecosystem in a really natural way I mean uh as I showed before on l2b and you can see here arbitrum has a token right but a lot of that token isn't being used to incentivize usage and their uh arbitrium 1 has grown a lot since the token was aird dropped uh bass doesn't have a token and has grown a lot just naturally obviously there are other things on the chain that act as incentives like meme coins and stuff like that but Bas itself doesn't have a token and they've been able to grow to number two even though all these other l2s have tokens I mean

op Manet is number three here but uh you know they had a token token it's the same as Arbitron one though they already did their token and they've been growing nicely Blast has a token that they've used as incentives like pretty heavily they haven't been shy about that lanaa has had a token that they've used as incentives oh they don't have a token yet sorry I believe but they they're obviously farming people here or getting people to farm for the token zky same thing here um mantel I think very similar but I think that they're not like the others where they've got their token already and they've been able to grow their ecosystem out scroll doesn't have a token yet Stark net like if you actually look at the you know measure of TV and activity here it's incredibly impressive what Bas has been able to do

without a token and being able to grow without a token I mean alrum 1 I attribute most of its growth to uh and not its token either like just growing out the ecosystem here and quease adding more Integrations and partnership like this and going all in on usdc which I believe I mean stable coins is the biggest product in crypto this is a very smart move from them so I'm very glad to see them doing this because as I said I think a few months ago like they need to do this because they've got huge competition within tether and obviously tether is incredibly popular on Tron but now that coinbase has base and now that they have I mean for the foreseeable future it's still going to be centralized they have control over over base in terms of being able to scale it up really fast being able to offer you

know low low really low gas fees or even like free gas on things like usdc transfers here and then they've got the brand name in order to partner with other Titans of the of um I guess the financial industry like stripe this is what gets us the you know next billion users on chain this is what brings actual mass adoption in and sustainable adoption as well uh not the scams not the griffs not the CIB coins that's all that's all distractions that's all short-term noise this is the long-term sustainable stuff that I love seeing uh uh crypto companies do and I I hope to see more of this from not just from coinbase but from other crypto companies out there but yeah I think on that note that's going to be it for today guys so yeah 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 on Monday thanks everyone