Devconnect in Istanbul, OP-Erigon announced and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #572 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we cup latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 21st of April 2023. hi everyone let's get into it so first off a bit of Regulation or regulatory news uh related news here so we have a fresh blog post out of the Paradigm legal research team here uh titled the current SCC disclosure framework is unfit for crypto now this is pretty long I don't know if it's incorporating some of the other posts that they have done oh yeah no that it is it's it's basically part three and I've highlighted their blog post before it's part three of a three-part series here where you can read part one and two and I've highlighted those on the refuel discussing uh as I as I mentioned the um

ssc's disclosure framework being unfit for crypto now I've talked a lot about this over the last few days especially in the wake of the hearing with Gary Gensler and I've spoken about it on the refuel in in the months prior as well uh and I think that's pretty obvious at this stage that it it's near impossible if not impossible I mean I think it is pretty much impossible at this stage for crypto projects in the US to be able to actually uh go to the SEC and get any kind of uh guidance on anything really at the end of the day which is obviously very very sad and not very Progressive of the regulatory regime in the US here so I just wanted to hire this post for you guys to to go check out I'll link it in the YouTube description below and as

I said there is part one and two here to read as well if you were going to read anything about this sort of stuff from anyone I would say that paradigms policy team is probably uh some of the best to read uh because Paradigm is obviously one of the biggest VCS in crypto they've been around for quite a while uh they have a lot a rather large legal team I believe a policy team I believe and they are definitely very uh acute of everything going on here or acutely aware I should say of everything going on here because they have a lot of portfolio projects that are based in the US that are dealing with these things on a day-to-day basis I mean one of paradigm's founders is the co-founder of coinbase uh you know Fred ursum who obviously would still have a close relationship with Brian Armstrong I'm

sure they talk about these things all the time so if anyone is going to know uh what the current framework looks like or what the current kind of environment looks like and who can speak to it best it's definitely the Paradigm folk folks so go read this I'll link it in the YouTube description below now speaking about Brian Armstrong he's been sharing a bunch of pictures of him meeting with different members of I guess Congress in the US members of parliament in the UK and other regulators and politicians and it's really great to see him see him continuing to do this now I've highlighted him doing this before on the refill maybe a few weeks ago but he's really ramped up his efforts and I think it's because he knows that there needs to be someone whether it be an individual or a company or both out

there fighting for crypto uh on the crypto side of things obviously there are various politicians within the US Senate and other governments around the world that have pro-crypto or anti-cryptosense is but at the end of the day the anti-crypto crowd can be turned into pro-crypto uh at people I don't think that there is uh I don't think the majority is like forever anti-crypto I think there are certain politicians out there that are definitely anti-crypto and will never change their mind I think people like Elizabeth Warren fall into that bucket right but not everyone's like her not everyone is on the extreme side of things actually contrary to popular belief in popular narratives most people are in the middle right most people get dragged into the extremes by the extremists but they genuinely generally

sit around the middle on most things and can be reasoned with a lot of the time so that's exactly what I believe Brian Armstrong and people around his inner circle are trying to do they're trying to talk to these politicians trying to talk to these regulators and basically uh tell them why crypto is the future why crypto as an industry shouldn't be banned or heavily regulated should be allowed to flourish why the Innovation is happening within the crypto space is good for uh good for the world basically not just the us but the world but specifically with the US yes it's good for jobs in the US for for the US economy it's good for spurring on growth and um it's good for things like USD dominance because a lot of the USD a lot of the stable coins in crypto are pretty much the vast majority are USD based and

all the other kind of benefits there D5 I mean everything right and I'm sure that's exactly what Brian is trying to uh trying to educate these people on now of course there are uh uh some politicians that would already be aware of all of this and they have their own stance whether it be anti or pro-crypto but I honestly think that if a politician or really anyone has actually been uh educated on crypto properly and I'm not talking about educated on one part of crypto or one chain in crypto I'm talking about crypto as more of a a broad thing here if they have been educated properly on it I do believe that they would end up being not necessarily Pro crypto like you don't have to be pro-crypto to be uh to to be kind of like um Pro Innovation right so

I think that they would they would kind of even if they're neutral on it they could be like well you know I'm Mutual on this thing I don't know if it's good or bad I you know maybe maybe I don't even care if it's good or bad right maybe it's just not something they want to focus their time on but at the same time they are happy to let it kind of just play out and let the ecosystem play out on its own Merit rather than trying to strangle hold it or ban it rather than than um not giving Clarity on things so they don't they don't have to have a pro crypto stance not everyone has to be pro-anti crypto there is a middle ground here there is a neutral stance that people can take and you can find some parts of crypto interest

interesting you can find other parts of crypto abhorrent I mean that's what we're like when we're in when we're looking at the crypto ecosystem there's a lot of crypto that I don't like and I think is just absolutely disgusting I mean all the scams is the obvious thing here but even the things that look like legitimate projects that turn out to not necessarily be scans but be really kind of bad for the ecosystem like for example tear out right I I don't know if I I don't think Tara was a scam to be honest like not in the the kind of like traditional meaning of the word I don't really think it was a grift but I think and I don't think it started off like that but I think what happens um not to hop too much on about it but I think what happened is that it grew

really fast it grew really quickly and it attracted a certain crowd and then the underlying mechanism obviously wasn't going to hold and wasn't going to be sustainable and then it all fell apart but the funny thing is Tara fell apart based on its own Merit it's not like the um a government banned Terror and then it just fell apart because of that no Tara was able to play out in the free market yes it wrecked a lot of people right but it played out exactly um as it would have regardless of of any other variable it played out like it was designed to play out at the end of the day uh but in the wake of that obviously there's an awake of FTX as well there's a lot of questions around regulation and that sort of stuff so and and a lot of the headlines are basically painting all

of crypto as a massive group the massive scam all that so basically what Brian and other people like him are trying to do is move the needle back because it's it's a spectrum and as I was saying there is anti and pro crypto and then there is new on on either side and then there is neutral in the middle if we can get everyone on into or most people to the neutral part then that is a huge win like there are obviously people on the anti-crypto side that can be brought over and even people on the the really kind of like Pro crypto side maybe they um maybe they were on Pro crypto a year ago but now they've they've shifted to anti-crypto we can get them back to at least neutral we don't have to get them back to being pro-crypto but we can get

them back to neutral and that's how these things uh move forward I mean I have said before that I try not to be you know left or right on the political Spectrum I try to be Centrist or as Centrist as I can be uh and I mean politics is very nuanced people's views views are very nuanced and I don't and I'm pretty happy that I live in a a place where we have ranked Choice voting so I don't have a binary decision I can actually have more options than just just two options but unfortunately in the in the US a lot of it is dominated by kind of this Left Right politics right this this tribalism is partisan politics um but that is I guess like the the leadership the highest levels within uh the the government itself within Congress itself there's is obviously thousands of people that have differing

views on things and I think that if we can win a lot of them over and then we can obviously uh push more Progressive policies forward for crypto so kudos to Brian for leading the charge here in the US and other places around the world hopefully as time goes on more and more positive stuff comes out of especially the us around crypto all right so the location for devconnect has been announced so you remember that devconnect was first hosted last year in Amsterdam I attended I met a fair few of you there it was really really fun I loved Amsterdam beautiful city I I remember saying that I wasn't a huge fan of the way Dev connect uh is kind of run with the multiple venues I don't know that's like a pet peeve of mine I I

think that a lot of people enjoyed the multiple venues and that's totally fine but for me it was more that it was just very hard to catch up with people because you'd be like hey where are you and they'd be on the other side of the city because you're at one venue and they're at another whereas with something like um with Denver there was just like the one main venue so most of the time everyone would be in the same spot I know that there was a main venue for devconnect as well where there was the hackathon venue uh where all the hackers were but people were generally pretty fragmented but in saying that it was cool it was cool to be able to walk around Amsterdam and not be kind of tied down to one particular spot but yeah I generally prefer like the the one spot

conferences on uh in in that regard but on that note back to the the dev connect that's happening this year this year in Istanbul it's going to be from the 13th to the 19th of November so basically uh closing out the year almost at the end of the year there and you can read the blog post for full details on this as well as this tweet thread now I'm undecided if I'm going to go to this personally uh I would say I'm 50 50 at this point it's basically there's a number of different reasons why one of them is definitely the fact that I honestly don't enjoy Dev connect the multiple venues as much as I enjoy the single venues there's also the travel time for me but given this is a week-long conference I can probably make that work the travel time is 25 to 30

hours at least to get there I'd never been there so that's a huge plus that's a huge Pro like I'd love to go to Istanbul I've never been to Toki at all and obviously Istanbul is one of the the main attractions there so I'd love to to go there and experience the city I know that there's going to be a lot of people there that um that I know a lot of my friends there so another Pro but we'll have to say I'll have to see if I I make it work there but if I do go I I may try to do another daily way meet up there um as I've said before I don't know any other conferences I'll be going to this year besides this but any ones that I go to I will try to do a daily gray meet up

uh but yeah I'll let you guys know about that but as I said you can go read the blog post for full details on this uh and uh kind of uh links to other resources as well for you to check out all right so flashbots has launched their Mev share beta on ethereum mainnet now this is very similar to some other products that already exist out there where it's essentially allowing users to get a kickback in the Mev that's extracted from them uh so there's a tldr on what this is here at the top of the announcement posts uh the first line is user users should decide how when and by who their transactions are executed this enables them to internalize the Mev and be included on chain faster flashbots

has launched Mev share and beta with trusted Auto flow sharing to give users more control and bargaining power in the Mev supply chain so it's basically changing the power dynamics CR so that users have more of a say in what happens with the Mev that's extracted from them obviously a lot of users would love that Mev to flow back to them when they do a transaction and as I've said there are other solutions that are already doing this but flashbots being the creators of Mev boost being the uh one of the biggest if not the biggest players in the Mev space um across all kind of domains here it's definitely worth paying attention to what they've launched with Mev share here so there are a bunch of different diagrams of showing how this works and information in the post for you to go check out but I think this is really

great I think like okay so I've talked about this a lot before but a lot of the Mev research and development is focused on removing as much of the toxic externalities of Mev as possible so one of these is sandwich attacks that's one of the biggest toxic externalities of Mev that is still prevalent to this day and it leads to a lot of users getting wrecked when they didn't have to get wrecked and a lot of Mev Bots profiting from the users getting wrecked and it's it's very negative other negative externalities include censorship on the network which you've dealt with and we've gotten that down since the oefac sanctions happened which is obviously really great uh centralization of block building which I mean it's still pretty centralized we don't have that many

relayers uh so obviously um decentralizing that is is another negative externality that we would love to eliminate there and all of this obviously informs PBS designs and things like that as well but another way we can do it is by sharing the Mev back to the user that gets extracted from them it's kind of like it's it sometimes reminds me of if someone was to pickpocket you right and say they stole like 50 bucks from you but then they're like oh you know what I'm gonna return some some of this value back to um back to uh this person because I'm not going to take it I'm going to be I'm going to be a you know a um a fair pickpocket so to speak so they give you back like half of it right and they take 25 for themselves well they still get

their 25 and you still get your and you get you have you have 25 as well but I mean at the end of the day it was it was your money to begin with right and that's what a lot of Mev looks like where it's taking money that was yours to begin with that shouldn't have been taken from you I'm not talking about normal Mev and normal kind of things that arise from um from like Arbitrage and and stuff like that I'm talking about toxic Mev like sandwich attacks right that sort of stuff is is pretty bad uh pretty toxic uh and at least it can lead to a lot of losses for users and losses that that they don't didn't even know that they could avoid right so I I think that's what schemes like Mev share and others try to do is try to

basically just put the uh put it more back in favor of of the user here so definitely something that you should check out uh you can go check it out I'm pretty sure you just have to point to their RPC to do this or something uh I I saw that somewhere uh yeah flashbots uh protect our PC that's what you have to do to add to your wallet to receive mov Kickbacks and faster inclusion and you can customize your requests to share with additional Builders so that's linked in the blog post here for you to check out which will of course be linked in the YouTube description below all right so I talked about the Magi or Magi or Maggie client yesterday that uh was built for op stack by a16z well it seems another client has been built for

the op stacked called op Aragon and this was built by the test in prod team so uh they've leveraged op Stacks modular and open source design to build op Aragon and alternative execution client for the op stack here so this now means op stack has three clients this is crazy I mean it and back to back right I'm sure they probably planned the announcements back to back here but still op stack now has three clients uh that it can run on I mean I don't believe that Maggie or Maggie or whatever and op Aragon are alive just yet or live on on mainnet just yet for op stock they're in their in testing phase but this is amazing guys like this is proper client diversity you know two clients is great three clients is even better right it's

like that famous scene in The Social Network you know a million dollars is cool but a billion dollars is cool all right well two clients are called three clients are cooler maybe we get to like four or five like we have on on um on mainnet ethereum right just just crazy awesome to see the the client diversity happening here and as I said yesterday this is not limited to op stack I'm sure the other l2s are definitely working on this sorts of stuff as well but just great to see another uh client uh introduced here and announced here for the op stack uh which is called op Aragon uh which I believe is based on oh no it's it's a fork of uh of Aragon I believe or a fork diff I should say that's been modified to suit the op stack architecture so you can check out

the announcement blog post for yourself um if you want to hear my extended takes on why this is really cool for optimism or op stack generally listen to yesterday's episode where I talked about um the Magi clients I'm going to keep saying it in the I'm going to keep pronouncing the word in different ways because I've had multiple people tell me different ways to pronounce it so whatever but you can go check out that um it'll be in yesterday's episode and time stamped for you to do so all right so Ryan berkman's here shared a tweet saying that the French Bank Society our general launched a Euro stable coin on ethereum with the Tikka e-u-r-cv and then he says I believe this is the first stable coin launched by a bank on public ethereum but it certainly won't be the last and then he links to

the contract and to the um uh the press release yeah I believe now I saw a bunch of tweets around this bunch of tweet threads around this this is cool but I think it's worth noting that this stablecoin is incredibly centralized and it's more centralized than the existing centralized devil coins which is kind of funny when you think about it I believe there's a function in the contract that allows the um uh that allows uh the issue asked obviously in this case being uh the Society of General here to steal everyone's money to steal all the stable coins and there are other functions in there that make no sense from like a smart contract perspective where it's very gas inefficient uh and I saw I I saw threads about this I don't have them

handy but yeah it's it's not the best design thing it is incredibly centralized but what's really cool about this is that a bank has decided to uh essentially tokenize um a kind of stable coin on ethereum so it's basically fitting into the ethereum as a as a settlement network uh uh thesis that I've been talking about for a while on the refuel now Ryan also has a second tweet here where he said everybody follows up by saying correction um Society General is not the first bank to do this um the National Australia Bank uh would be uh claims to be the second um and but he's unsure of the first uh so yeah I remember covering the audn that was launched by NAB I don't know

what's happening with that but that was launched as well but the reason why these things are so exciting they're obviously not exciting that they're super centralized right it's not exciting it's not exciting to see another centralized stable coin but what is exciting as I said is seeing the Trad fire institutions these big traffic institutions playing with public ethereum mainnet and bridging tradfi and and defy together now as I said just before this plays into the ethereum as a settlement layer thesis this plays into ethereum as like the backbone of the new Financial system thesis and this is like a vote of confidence from these big institutions that they see value in launching these things on ethereum now of course A lot of these things aren't

going to go anywhere a lot of them will be rebuilt re-architected a lot of them may not even end up on ethereum layer one they may just be done on ethereum Layer Two um maybe some of them end up on base right because coinbase partners with one of these Banks and then it Bridges them across and people can use it on base and then Bridget L1 ethereum and and do all that good stuff there but even if it's launched on L2 it's still settling to ethereum because the L2 settle to ethereum layer one so it's still the the same kind of thing in the end as well so as I said like that's the biggest takeaway from from from these sorts of things uh and I hope that more and more of these tradful institutions get on board with this there's there's been other institutions that weren't Banks

like visa for example are getting on board with this and and doing a bunch of uh stuff on ethereum mainnet so it's very very cool to see more of them get involved here but you can check out uh the announcement blog post for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right speaking of stable coins a mean here has announced that uh something called High which is a multi-clateral rye Fork on optimism which is coming soon so you can read the announcement post here uh on the reflex of Finance uh governance Forum uh which I'll link in the YouTube description below but basically the tldr of what high is is that it is a multi-cladral fork of the existing Rye it is not pegged to an arbitrary value like 3.14

is going to be uh priced at one US dollar uh the collateral types will include eth Rye lsds like St Ethan R8 and assets on optimism like op and uni with room for expansion uh it's got more expected long-term governance than Rye to add remove collateral uh it's got a pi controller to set Redemption rate the same as Rye so this is cool uh this addresses a lot of my concerns with the original iteration of of Rai here but at the same time it kind of compromises on the original vision of Rye Rye wanted to be like a fully decentralized stable coin in the vein of single collateral dye where it only had ether's collateral it had basically no governance

um and it wasn't necessarily pegged to one US dollar it had like a floating Peg based on this PID oh so this this Pi controller model that they built in now with this High kind of model it looks like Multicultural dye where you have multiple collateral ties because you need those in order to scale you're no longer pegging to an arbitrary value you're kind of like pricing or pegging to to one US dollar like other stable coins and you have more governance involved to add in and remove uh collateral so I I it kind of like it gets very blurry now between Multicultural dye and high now the higher may I want to avoid adding centralized collateral ties maybe they just use these decentralized ones but

the thing is is that they've already said here that they're going to be using sta which is a centralized collateral type because it is part of Lido which is a centralized staking Operator Operator at least right now maybe in the future out Lido can decentralize to a point where people actually believe that they're decentralized and Incredibly decentralized but right now they're they're centralized so maybe stf doesn't get added until they're decentralized I don't know um but other assets you know like op and uni they have very concentrated token supplies as well I mean yes okay they may be part of decentralized projects or projects that want to be decentralized obviously optimism the optimism network isn't decentralized right now but the uni swap protocol is but the uni token holders are very centralized right very

very concentrated so you kind of get all these questions around this and this is exactly why people have criticized multiclateral die as well is because the quality of the collateral makes the stable coin it makes the you know it it makes not just the stability of the stable coin but the same safety of it as well and I'm just very curious to see how high is going to handle this and on top of that even though die went multi-clateral it is still not being able to scale as much as the centralized stable coins and it still had a host of its own issues especially around governance and around the fact that a lot of dies backed up by usdc are Central and other centralized stable coin right so when you look at it all together you arrive at the same conclusion that I arrived at a long time

ago where I truly do believe it is impossible to create a truly decentralized stable coin that is stable and scalable at the same at same time as being decentralized and obviously Peg to to um to a currency like the US dollar I don't believe it's possible to do that you can create one that's small and that's decentralized but then it's not scalable right it may be stable as well but it's not scalable so it's not really going to service anyone um and then as I've explained before if you were to create one that's just backed by eth you need to be worth so much right if it's over collateralized you need eth as an asset to be worth so much for it to make sense for your stablecoin to be able to service the world right if you wanted to create a

and but then at that point why would you even be pegging yourself to US dollars to begin with and then you get back to the logical conclusion of well let's just use ether's our money if eath gets big enough to be able to you know if it gets to 100 trillion dollar market cap one day you would be using ether's money at that point you wouldn't be saying oh let's let's use um eth as collateral to create a US dollar stable coin no if each gets a 100 trillion dollars in value it's safe to say that the US dollar probably isn't very strong anymore like if we're measuring against the US dollar right so in that world you would just use eth as your money you would use ethers your quote-unquote stablecoin right and then things will be priced in eth and I've talked about this

before about how when you start pricing things in different currencies you see how stability is actually an illusion because your US dollars is not stable to your power bill if your power bill goes up 10 in a year right and the US dollar in inflation um you know he's only two percent it's not as high as it's been traditionally maybe it's at that two to three percent right um you're you could say that your US Dollars wasn't very stable against uh your power bill right it actually lost a lot of purchasing power against that and it's not just your power bill it's everything basically and everything that gets more kind of like expensive over time which are basically the Necessities like your power bill your groceries your rent and things like that right um your US dollar uh stability is an illusion and even things that get

cheaper over time it's still an illusion just the other way around so when you start pricing things in eth then you measure their value moving value against ethery and then you could say that okay if you stale because one eighth equals one eighth but price it against your energy bill maybe it's it costs ten percent more or ten percent less from year to year and then you wouldn't say that eth is stable to that you would say it's stable to itself so the illusion of stability is something that I don't think many people think about because it's obstructed away completely from us in our everyday lives because it happens over the longer term it's not like like your energy bill increases um 10 overnight most of the time right whereas the value of each can fall 10 against US dollars overnight or could go up 10

against US dollars overnight so when talking about stability you have to talk about it in the the frame of um of of goods and services not just against itself because everything's stable against itself 180 equals one eighth one USD equals one USD right and this is programmed to not do that and it's got like an inbuilt burn mechanism or something but like not in the normal case I'm talking about uh but yeah anyway you can go check out hire for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right matcha is beta testing their new version here and it's coming soon so if you are interested in uh participating in the beta test you can now join the waitlist just wanted to highlight this for you guys I'll link the waitlist in the YouTube description below the matcha is still one of my favorite decentralized exchange

aggregators out there from a UI ux perspective it's probably got the best UI ux out of all the decks aggregators uh out there right now so yeah I'm curious to see what they've got cooking in their new bait and their new version here and you can join the wait list to find out what that is all right last up here is a tweet from tycoon.eth where he said when your ethereum validator gets chosen to build a block you gotta step back and appreciate one of the greatest miracles of Open Source coordination and collaboration for 12 seconds your tiny machine in your bedroom is responsible for carrying on a network worth billions of dollars this is really the true power of being a solo sticker here a homesteaker um you get to basically be part of this

huge multi-billion dollar hundred twenty or 200 300 billion dollar Network that is securing trillions of dollars of value each year and processing trillions dollars of value each year and you get to participate in the consensus of that Network as well not just proposing blocks but you get to attest the blocks you get to be part of sync committees uh you get to share in execution layer rewards once you propose a block as well as the consensus layer rewards and you get to do it while holding on to the asset that is at the heart of that ecosystem and you get to do it from your home using any hot really any hardware you want you and you know I actually had a project idea recently I want to run an ethereum validator on one of those um a little uh pocket emulator devices that

you can buy now that emulates like old Game Boy games and things like that because those things mostly like a lot of the time run like a Raspberry Pi and as I've told you guys before you can run a an ethereum validator on a Raspberry Pi with a full node and it'll run just fine the only concern would be making it fit in something like how cool would it be to be able to get like a Game Boy Advance shell you know stuffer Raspberry Pi in there with a with a terabyte SSD and run a validator off of it and then have like the terminal on their Game Boy Advance screen and then when you know people come over it's like a show pitch and be like hey here's my ethereum validate like I don't know and I just think something like that would be

really cool it might be a project that I look into because I've been I've actually been looking into a lot of that stuff recently um because I I I love that that sorts of stuff but yeah just something that I was thinking about as well but tycoon's tweet here is just great I think it very much encapsulates exactly the power that homesteakers have here and the power that the ethereum network has has given homesteakers because the proposal block on proof of work networks uh especially the huge ones like Bitcoin as a solo Miner is very very hard right and you're not you're not guaranteed to propose a block for a very very long time whereas on ethereum one one validator can actually propose a block every every four months right now and you have relative certainty it's a percentage-based thing but you have relative certainty that you

are going to propose a block at some point and you get to share in those rewards for doing so but anyway 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 newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow oh not tomorrow tomorrow's the weekend next week thanks everyone