Continued FTX drama, New Uniswap contracts - The Daily Gwei Refuel #490 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we cut the latest news in ethereum maker system I'm your host Anthony 18th of November 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so apparently the Bahamas government ordered uh SPF to hack ftx's system and transfer asses assets to the Bahamas government account uh due to a court filing here now this is a pretty wild twist in I guess like the FTX story and just to recap here you remember as the FTX I guess Saga was unfolding uh SBF claimed that there was a hack or I think someone at FTX claimed that there was a hack and funds were being stolen and funds were being withdrawn which then went uh in to die and then bought

eth with it and the entity that stopped quote unquote stole These funds has become one of the largest etholders which you can see on either scan here it is the 30th largest etholder with 241 000 eth and you can click into the address here and see what else they've got they've got a bit of paxos gold here as well worth about 14.3 million dollars but they have almost 300 million dollars worth of eth right now how do I wish that was me right so you can see uh the the analytics on the balance here how it all just basically came in over the last five days uh and yeah that's really all it started I don't think there's been any other kind of transactions out from this uh from this since they basically swapped all their die for eth on uh cow

swap here or cow protocol um but yeah I mean I don't know how true this is that the Bahamas government did this I haven't really kind of um seen any I guess truthful sources uh myself but I'm sure they're out there but I think it's quite quite funny that this kind of news came out I guess a few days after it happened because it's really hard to believe anything right now I mean there's so much misinformation floating around there's so many rumors floating around you know it was funny today I was talking to people with friends and we came to the conclusion that pretty much every rumor that can be spread is being being spread right now so it's kind of I guess like an information overload where you have absolutely no idea what's true and what's not right we've seen rumors about Gemini being insolvent you know digital

currency group being insolvent uh Silver Gate which is one of the main crypto Banks like actual Banks uh being insolvent and all these sorts of things and we don't know what's true and what's not and then I think also some more news came out today about the uh not Gemini um uh what is it uh Genesis Genesis that's the name uh Genesis that before they announced that they were pausing withdrawals before they had their um their call they were seeking up to a billion dollars in emergency funding to meet liquidity needs so some of this stuff is true and real but I think a lot of it really is just rumors and as I said yesterday we're not going to know the what's true and what's not and the full Fallout of things for sure uh for months to come and potentially years to

come there is one big thing that's actually going to play out I think over over the time and that's because uh of of the fact that it's time restricted and that's fun Redemption so a lot of these funds and VCS they have investors themselves that can redeem but those redemptions are usually um on a on a lock basically so you can't redeem it like all you can't basically go to the fun right now and say Hey I want to redeem all all at once right you have to basically wait monthly quarterly yearly to redeem it and I think that a lot of investors in these funds are going to be redeeming and who knows what they're going to be doing with those assets if they're going to be selling them sometimes the fund has to sell them as part of the structure and then give

the investors back their original investment whether that was in cash or or eighth or something else right so that's a lot of uh of stuff that's going to be coming out over the next year and then we're going to see which funds can meet those liquidity needs which ones got blown up multi-coin Capital lost a lot actually I saw a news article saying that their funds down 55 they lost 10 percent of their fund on FTX uh they go they're definitely going to see a lot of redemptions and I think they do quarterly redemptions so this sort of stuff is going to take time to to definitely you play out here and as I said like you don't know exactly what's true and what's not true until more information comes out until things are verified as I said I'm not 100 sure about this Bahamas government ordering

SPF to hack the FDX system to transfer assets to them but honestly with all the crazy stuff that's happened over the last I guess week and a half now it really wouldn't surprise me too much just because other things have come out that have surprised me more honestly as I said like I didn't think FTX was insolvent I knew SPF was a bad actor uh and an egomaniac but I I didn't think that FTX was actually insolvent and then I didn't think that the company was run like it was like as we've seen all the information come out it really looks like the worst run company in history uh in terms of that size obviously there are smaller companies that have probably been run worse but in terms of billion dollar you know tens of billion dollar companies it seems that FTX is definitely up there with one of the

worst that's uh worst run ever if not the worst and that's crazy when you think about it there was something that the uh the person that's in charge of uh of handling um ftx's bankruptcy said uh in in his first Court filing he basically said that he's never seen something like this and this is the guy who handled the Enron bankruptcy process or the other Fallout of Enron so when you put that all together yeah things are pretty crazy right now and as I've said before I'm so surprised that crypto prices aren't lower than what they are right now that's not to say that they can't go Laura in the future but the fact that ethi is still where it is it hasn't tested its its low you know from the um the June uh the June low there uh it could still go there but the fact

that it's not there yet I don't know like I'm feeling kind of positive but I you know I don't want this to be a thing where I've cursed and now I've Jinx the Neath is going to go to like 200 bucks or something like that um I think that it's good to be cautiously optimistic now good to have your own sort of plan no one knows what's going to happen from here where things go from here I think and maybe I'm it's cursed of me to say this but I really do think that we're through the worst of it and I mean I can't think of many other things that would be as bad as FTX blowing up or I should say as bad as a centralized exchange like fully blowing up I think that's one of the worst things that can happen in crypto

if I had to guess of something that is worse than that it's probably just like an outright ban of crypto in the US which I don't see happening right I give that a very very small chance of happening uh for a multitude of different reasons uh maybe if binance or coinbase or or or some other bigger exchange was to blow up which again I don't think is going to be the case but as I said they're still going to be Fallout from all the FTX stuff uh but probably not as big and who knows if the Market's already priced that in as you know as I've said before we're already in a deep bear market like if this had happened at like the top of the the bull market it would have crushed prices I mean it probably would have been one of the biggest crashes in crypto history

right but because especially because of all leverage built up but it's happened in a deep bear Market where we've wiped out a lot of the leverage we've also already had many collapses right Terra three hours Capital uh Celsius and this is just kind of I guess uh it happened when we were already hung over so to speak right it's kind of like an the second wave of The Hangover hitting you and you're like uh uh you know you're all over um all over the house just sleeping wherever you can find a seat I think that's what's what's kind of happening now we're used to it the market seems to be used to it I know BTC went to a new low but eh I mean it wasn't really that convincing and it seems like it wants to to kind of like bottom around here but I

don't know I mean when it comes to prices I am as blind as all of you are but I think there are many different heuristics and metrics you can use to basically have more confidence that something is a bottom range so to speak then it is a a kind of um you know a warning sign that we're going to go lower than here but there are still people calling for much lower than here there are people calling for a 400 eth you know I don't think that's gonna happen but they do and they have their reasons and I I honestly think that they're basically just being greedy bears but who knows going forward but anyway I don't want to talk too much about price I think think uh obviously talking about the FTX staff and general Fallout is always going to relate back to price but generally I don't know I

feel like the market is already in such deep such deep territory so to speak that anything else that comes out will just not really shock the market at this stage all right so I've been talking about the Shanghai upgrade uh for ethereum for quite a while on the island the main things I focus on in the Shanghai upgrade are the withdrawals being enabled for the beacon chain and erp4844 but there's something that gets talked about that doesn't get talked about very much and like clients put a thread out about this today uh basically saying that ethereum has recently seen substantial changes such as the move to proof of stake and eip1559 however the evm looks mostly the same this may finally change with the ethereum objects

format or eof uh uh uh or eof for short which is likely going into Shanghai it will be the evm's biggest change since Genesis and this thread basically goes through why that is and how the um eof change is actually comprised of multiple eips which you can see here but this is for the more technical folks Among Us and people who basically are interested in the evm or understand the evm but this is something I didn't know I didn't know that it was this big of an upgrade like uh but basically saying it's the biggest upgrade since the biggest evm chains change since Genesis means that it's the biggest change in over seven years which is quite crazy when you think about it but that is akin to arp1559 which was the biggest change to the ethereum fee Market uh and and I guess you could argue monetary policy

since Genesis and proof of stake which was the biggest change to ethereum ever right the merge was the biggest change to ethereum ever well it seems that we're in the mood to keep doing these big changes and eof isn't the only one obviously 4844 is one of those big changes and dank shining in general that has been a long time coming but if you're interested in learning more about eof and some some of the more technical stuff potentially coming in Shanghai you can give this thread a read from like clients I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right an announcement out of consensus today where they said two months ago the core devs behind the merge eliminated 99.992 of ethereum's carbon footprint today cop 27 a consensus and partners from across web 3

are launching the ethereum client platform or ECP to build on their achievement so what does this mean uh basically consensus is partnering with all of these different different uh entities here to launch this at this ECP or ethereum client platform in order to uh be be built for the ethereum ecosystem with the intention to serve as a model for the Global Tech and business Community to address their own historic carbon footprint so consensus has been quite involved with these I guess um climates uh looking climate forward sorry climate change for looking uh uh kind of initiative CR and this is just another one that they've been doing you know

what's funny whenever I see something like this I know that there are going to be people out there who fight it and say oh look it's consensus getting into bed with the climate change people and the the weft the world economic Forum look at them you know ethereum's a scam vitalik's a scammer blah blah and it's always bizarre to me when I say that because it doesn't really make much sense to me I know that the the weft hasn't got a great reputation and that's probably deserved at this point just given a lot of the stuff that they've put out they're responsible for that uh you'll learn nothing and you'll be happy meme I believe but I think anything that encourages uh lowering you know our carbon footprint as a species and and basically uh uh keeping on theme with uh helping out with climate change and all

that sorts of stuff is a welcome thing because I think the ethereum community especially cares a lot about this obviously the move to proof of stake was was driven by this and not I mean it depends who you ask but like it was definitely driven by this but I don't know if that was the main thing in the end I think the main thing became we need to get off proof of work because uh it's basically very very expensive as a mechanism to secure ethereum and previously it gives us a much better bang for your buck and private stake also enables things like sharding and finality and all that good stuff there but the climate impact of proof of work was definitely a big driver and the original driver behind the move to proof of stake so I'm glad to see consensus carry the torch here with what they're

doing with this ECP platform if you want to learn more about this I'll link this thread in the YouTube description below all right so something that caught my eye today from coinbase wallet they have added a feature that now simulates the outcome of your dap transactions before you hit confirm letting you explore web3 with greater confidence now I've talked about fire that extension that is like a sister extension the metamaster comes up and shows you exactly what's going on when you interact with various on-chain contracts well coinbase wallet has added something similar natively to their app which I think is really cool and the reason why I think it's really cool is because obviously coinbaseball is probably going to be used more by a quote unquote normies or more by the mainstream than something like a

metamask would be or some other kind of wallet out there because coinbase while it looks nice it's connected to coinbase coinbase points they're users towards coinbase wallet they have all these really nice to use features they have things explained in such a way that's really nice on a UI ux perspective and I think this is just a huge feature ad for them and I think that coinbase if they keep doing this they're really going to capture a lot of that mainstream audience which is what we want to see I really want the mainstream audience not to have to use metamask like I love metamask but it is not at wallet that's built for mainstream audiences and I and when not going to get Mass adoption if metamask is out is our best option now metamask mobile is I believe uh I mean it's similar to the the browser

extension but it is better on the UI ux front but uh as I said I love metamask I use it all the time it is still my main wallet but I feel like it's more for power users than it is for the masses like I wouldn't ex I wouldn't kind of uh set my mum up with a metamask wallet right I would definitely set her up with something like a coinbase wallet because I it's a lot easier to use and it's a lot more friendly but it's not there yet either I think the the winning wallet's probably long term are going to be the ones that just abstract away absolutely everything like you can see in this screenshot that coinbase is still showing things like Network fee right and the network you're on and the address and uh obviously the asset changes for their transaction preview

and things like that that's all well and good and that's what we're used to but again I don't think that's how Mass adoption is going to happen Mass adoption is going to happen through abstracting away every single thing that you can while still giving user enough information to feel safe in what they're doing and to under understand what they're doing I think that eventually the fees are just going to be eaten by the wallet providers they're either going to take their own fee and then just pay the the gas fee which will be very very low because they'll be on layer twos and layer threes and then not show that you the use of that at all because by showing the user a network fee then you have to have a little explanation about what that is and as you can see in the screenshot they do

have a tooltip that you would hover over and that would explain what the network fee is you're already going to lose people like that you're already going to confuse people like that that's not how Mass adoption happens so if we can get the wallet experience down to literally one to two clicks to do basically most things then I think that's that's a better way of doing it and I'm not against these wallets being centralized or being more like a centralized exchange just tapping into these things uh and acting as a as a kind of vehicle for users but the Holy Grail to me is really having you know these centralized services but allowing users to still have a non-custodial experience it's where they still have as their assets are you know um controlled under their

own under their own control uh and they still retain full custody of them there's no risk of them losing them to something like the FTX blowout but at the same time like we can't expect everyone to download metamask and custody things on there and custody things in their in their Ledger Hardware wallet or ladder Swan Hardware wallet that's all well and good and I think there's people a lot of people are going to do that but Mass adoption is different Mass adoption is like billions of users guys I think what I just spoke about appeals to maybe tens of millions and not maybe not even that because if you really look at the amount of active users that metamask had I think at the peak of the bull market across all of the change that they support which is obviously pretty much every evm chain

you can get the scope of basically the active users and I believe at Peak metamask had 15 or 20 million monthly active users and that's potentially not unique either you could discount that by a few million at least because people will have multiple wallets whether they're on multiple browsers or maybe they have a mobile wallet and a sorry mobile metamask wall and a desktop one so you know at most if you really want to be generous you could say that we had like 10 to 15 million monthly active users at Peak using metamask and pretty much everyone had metamask at that point but these days I I would say it's much much lower than that like definitely much lower than that at least 90 percent down from that I would say right um and there are other wallets coming onto the

scene there's bars that optimize for things like nfts well it's that optimized for things like D5 but I do think the winning wallets are going to be those ones that basically abstract everything away making a dead simple allow users to do what they want you know custody of their assets be able to send their assets across addresses if they want to interact with all the stuff that they that they want to in a seamless experience where they don't have to ever do something like contact customer support for example uh but I hope that it's a smart contract wallet as well something like an Argent or one of these other up and coming ones because smart contract wallets offer a bunch of functionality that non-smart contract wallets don't and I think that's what we're going to be moving towards as time goes on all right so uniswap has a big

announcement today so they've said uni swap builds public infrastructure that pushes crypto forward today we are excited to introduce permit 2 and Universal router new smart contracts that increase the flexibility of token approvals and token approvals and Aggregate erc20s and nft swaps into one so remember I think last week or the week before Hayden teased that there were three things coming to uh three big announcements coming from uni Swap this is one of them and I did say that I thought that one of them would have to do with nfts while this seems to be that one and I think the other two one was um uh uh uni sober V4 and the other one was me just purely speculating that it was going to be like uni Channel or something like that but we'll have to see I'm sure they'll announce those in the near future but what is this you

know what is permit to an Universal router well unisop explains it here they say permit to improves the security user experience and flexibility of erc20 token approvals with features like shared approval management across applications Universal permits for any token time bound token approvals batch approvals and reverse works for tokens so basically bring in-house a lot of the things that you've needed third-party tools to do before which is really cool and Universal router Aggregates erc20 And nft Trades into a highly flexible and gas optimized swapped router Universal router allows you to swap multiple tokens on uniswap and buy nfts across marketplaces all in one transaction again this goes back to what I was saying before obstructing away as much of this experience as possible for users is the way to mass adoption and

uni swap I think definitely understands this so this is very very cool so you know and they say as always these new contracts are not upgradable unowned fully audited and open sourced they will be released following a two-week bug Bounty period with more details to come and you can find the source code here I believe the bug uh Bounty for this is up to three million dollars that's a that's probably the biggest bug Bounty I believe in crypto history I think I remember two million dollars was from optimism but three million dollars here from unisop labs for these new contracts is contracts is massive so if you think you can break these contracts if you think you can find a bug well there's up to three million dollars up for grabs so be my guest be uniswap's guest go check

this out but awesome to see that unisop is is um is continuing here on making it easier for users to do things on uh using uni swap without having to go to third-party tools I especially like the in the native uh revokes revokes for tokens uh inbuilt here because that's something that you've netted third-party tools to do and that's something that that has actually stung a lot of users in terms of um scams and things like that so very very cool to see this uh released by uni swap all right another update out of Aztec today they've said Constitution Dao attempted to purchase a copy of the U.S Constitution they educated Millions on the power of web 3 it fell short partly because of one small problem privacy now for those of you who don't remember uh the reason why the uh the Constitution

the art didn't win the bid was because their bid was publicly known and I believe Ken Griffith from Citadel which which is a huge um Trad fire player basically won because he could see how much money the Constitution Dao had uh to bid on it and he was like well I can just bid higher than that and they're out of money now right so how do we fix this well with privacy so this year the people Dao and Juice Box are trying again in partnership with a go nuclear and Aztec to bid on uh I don't I don't know if it's the Constitution themselves uh but the Constitution itself but they're bidding on something here I'm gonna go scroll down this this thread so you know how does this all work if you're ready to buy the Constitution

again you can contribute it publicly okay so they are trying to buy the Constitution again here so you can contribute publicly using juice box or privately using a nucleos private multi-seek integration with Aztec users of Aztec and send funds confidentially confidentially to nucleos multisig which then controls this disbursement to the L1 treasury private contributions mean no one knows who bid no one knows the maximum bid and the Constitution gets another chance to land in the hands of the people again this is very cool this is just another use case obviously of privacy here this is something that was brought up at the time I remember people being like we're idiots we just literally showed our hand in this in this auction of course the person is going to be like well all I need to do is beat this dollar sum that I know that

these people have and then I win so as I said how do you protect against this well with privacy I mean it's a pretty simple solution right uh and Aztec is taking a step here to do this now I I believe at the time they raised over 40 million dollars for this that's not going to happen now that was at the peak of the bull market in November of 2021 40 30 million I mean we don't think we're not even going to get close to that I don't think but still being able to contribute privately and showing the power of the Privacy Tech that we've built uh on ethereum through Aztec is still very worthwhile and I really like that Aztec is doing this so you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so a new project or a project

that has been around for a while has released something new today called party protocol so party down release party protocol which is an open protocol for on-chain group coordination so while trustless protocols have enabled new kinds of services and financial Primitives we believe there's an opportunity for a protocol that enables new social behaviors a protocol for group coordination and you can read the full announcement in this blog post TR and so what does the party protocol aim to do well it aims to enable a multiplayer future providing functionality for Core Group behaviors such as formation assembling a group and combining resources coordination making decisions and taking actions together and distribution sharing Resources with group members party protocol has been audited deployed to mainnet and open sourced which you can view here

um and yeah I mean you can read the rest of the thread I'll link in the YouTube description but I think this is really cool because I've talked about coordination issues before in ethereum in you know real life and how I guess ethereum and apps built on top of it can help with this gitcoin has been looking into this a lot and and get coin grants a CLR matching rounds have been a tool that we've used to coordinate capital in order to get people to donate to various public goods and then get their donations matched quadratically which has led to a pretty big Boon in public goods funding so what if we can extend this to basically everything what if we can create protocols and tools that allow humans to coordinate in a much more uh scalable and healthier way online and in a decentralized and

trustless way as well well that's what party protocol aims to do here and this has been something that I've been very interested in for quite a while just this coordination because really when you think about it all comes down to coordination like how do the ethereum core devs work together to ship upgrades for ethereum how do they work together two shift emerge well it was all coordination you know they had to coordinate to do that there was no way they were going to be able to do that if they all just worked on it in their own silos you know they had to come together they had to coordinate and it was one of the biggest uh software undertakings of software coordination in history I believe leave in terms of the scope of it in terms of the fact that they were doing it live and it was a fine there

was a lot of money at stake um that all happened and the fact that it happened so seamlessly speaks to the Epic amount of coordination that was needed and that actually happened to to make the merge happen so what if we can harness this energy harness this coordination and apply that to so many things within crypto within within the world uh with you know for things like social goods and public goods and things like that well we can make a very big difference here obviously it's not a silver bullet obviously it doesn't mean that that we're going to save the world we're going to fix all the world's problems but I think it's another tool that we have in our tool belt to make the world a better place which I I obviously obviously am very very supportive of it's the main reason why I'm in ethereum to increase freedom for

the world and make the world a better place but I think it's always worth keeping grounded with these things as well and realizing that they're just tools and tools can be used for good tools can be used for bad tools can be used for nothing I mean there are tools out there that uh that are seemingly really cool but no one really uses them correctly and and they don't really go anywhere right but still cool to see party protocol live today you can read the thread check out the little teaser video here and obviously the blog post as well which I'll link in the YouTube description below all right last up here we have a thread from laconic network uh which is behind the new movie Mask feature or Murray Mass product that I talked about the other day which is basically a way to

help people or prevent people from getting fished when interacting with web3 and on-chain things uh in the ethereum and wider ecosystem so they've put out a thread today diving deeper into what mobymask is and how a laconic is powering it so I just wanted to highlight this for you guys because I did talk about memory Mass the other day and maybe I didn't explain it well enough or you were confused about what it is and what it does and why why it's needed or you can read this thread to get a grasp of that which I'll link in the YouTube description below um but yeah that's the last update but I do want to spend the last couple of minutes here talking about something else that has really annoyed me over the last couple days now I know that people have that I talked about this yesterday

and maybe even the day before about all this fud around the beacon chain withdrawals but what's really annoyed me is the fact that people fighted the merge for a very long time they said that it was never going to happen they said that it was a scam they said it was uh it was too big of an undertaking that it was going to fail and then it happened and it happened seamlessly and perfectly and instead of people changing their tune or not bringing up you know not making up more stories around things uh more sorry more stories around similar things they've doubled down and as I said they've doubled down by bringing up things like the beacon chain withdrawals it's like all these people suddenly discovered that you couldn't withdraw your out your staked

teeth right um and it's like they all discovered that at time of the merge because they had to quickly pivot to a new thing that to fight ethereum about and the most hilarious thing to me is that anyone who's staking and staking via a non-lsd knows that they're not going to have liquidity on that ether not gonna be able to withdraw that eth until withdrawals are enabled no one is forced to stake their wreath right they're literally no one is even forced to buy eth so what exactly are these people concerned trolling about like what what exactly are they concerned about because it is concern trolling like are you concerned that people can't access their eth they voluntarily put their eth in right and if they wanted liquidity on their act if they didn't want to be locked in they could have gone with a

LSD such as rock a pool such as Lido such as a centralized exchange as coinbase and binance they didn't have to solo State they didn't have to stake with somewhere where they didn't have liquidity on their eth so I really think that this fud that we've seen around withdrawals is just something that uh the people who were fighting the merge pivoted to in order to cope with the fact that they were so utterly wrong about the merge now what's going to be hilarious to see is is to see what they pivot to next and it's going to be a long list of of things that they're going to go through and they're like let's pick on this let's pick on that and the reason why I bring this up is it's not just some small troll saying this sorts of stuff it really is uh

these big accounts spreading and stuff they're getting a ton of engagement on it and they're not only fighting withdrawals they're also making false equivalences between SPF and FTX and um metallic and ethereum it's just so bizarre it's pure cope it's pure concern trolling I just wanted to bring it up because I hope that you guys aren't taking any of it seriously and not listening to any of that for sure do your own research make sure you know what's true and what's not but seriously like when you see stuff people spewing stuff like that and people calling ethereum a scam and Metallica scammer you can safely ignore those people you can literally just mute them on Twitter they provide no value if they think like that and that's at least in my opinion but anyway I don't want to rant too long there as I'll turn into Alex Jones or

something right I've said this in this school before where I said I tried to limit my ranting because I don't want to become like the Alex Jones of crypto or become like bit boy just ranting and someone will clip it and share it on Twitter um so yeah I'm gonna leave that at that thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone