dYdX token, DeversiFi to Polygon bridge and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #179 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily wave refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 4th of august 2021 all right everyone it is the day less than 24 hours until eip1559 goes live on the ethereum main net it is finally here it's amazing i mean i have talked about it endlessly you have heard about it endlessly and we are so so close to going live here now tomorrow's refuel will be recorded before one five five nine goes live um because i have the live stream with bankless uh at the usual time that i record the refuel so definitely go check out that live stream it's on bankless youtube channel uh we're doing that as part of like an ether bankless stream there uh but i mean what else can i say really i mean

i've as i said i've talked about one five five nine enough at this point you all know what it is i think that at this point everyone's just like oh my god okay like let's just get this thing live so everyone shuts up about it and i totally get that but i will warn you people aren't going to shut up about it because now people are going to start posting about how much eath is getting burned and you can see here um the ultrasound money side has been updated with a burn leaderboard or will be updated with a burn leaderboard once 1559 goes live and you'll be able to see like how much each kind of app is how much each app is burning uh based on like 24 hours seven days 30 days or like all time here now as you can see uni swap v2

as at the top uh then open c x infinity tether us uni swap you know keep going to list their meta masks stuff like that um this kind of kind of changes from time to time like the rankings and everything here unisop is usually at the top but obviously open c and actually infinity during this kind of nft mania are you know giving units up a run for for its money um and i hope that they integrate like a usd uh burn as well to just see how much value in usd because i'd be using this like every time there's a large fee day uh it'd be really cool to show this and be like look how much eighth we just burned uh sort of thing so yeah i mean there's that going on but i'm also curious to see like how much of the kind of like

existing wallets and apps that we have uh work really well with one five five nine because they did need to be updated and i i think some of them have already been updated uh to support one five five nine and that doesn't mean that you're you won't be able to do transactions once kind of london goes live and everything like that but it does mean that unless your wallet supports it you'll be doing a kind of legacy transactions which means that you the the av is still gonna be burned but you'll you might end up overpaying so i basically means you won't get the refund portion of a one five five nine transaction uh so you might end up overpaying which is basically the same as what happens now um uh but essentially uh if the wallet does support one five five nine style transactions then that won't happen

you'll get that kind of like refund there and uh you know i'm hoping most wallets will have the support for this by the time this goes live um if not like shortly after it so obviously super exciting next 24 hours to look forward to and yeah as i said the refuel will go i'll record it before uh one five five nine goes live and it will go out after one five five nine goes live uh so you'll see that and then on friday's refuel i'll talk about one five five nine how it all went and everything like that so yeah super super exciting uh to see uh that all playing out it's it's been a journey and we're finally here i mean i can't wait to say this for the merge like the next big event is the merge after one five five nine so i i

really can't wait to be like guys we're almost twenty fret like 24 hours away from the merge getting rid of proof of work forever and and and dropping your issuance 90 and getting on proof of stake it's just gonna be really awesome um so yeah lots lots and lots to look forward to there all right so uh dydx announced their governance token yesterday and now i mean it's no real it's not really generally generally like big news when a d5 app introduces a token like everyone assumes that they are going to introduce a token at one point and i've told you guys like plenty of times at this point assume that everything has going to have a token so use it and if you had used dydx you would have gotten an airdrop of tokens which uh the way they've done it is you actually have to use dydx to claim that

airdrop so you have to kind of do some minimum amount of trading to to get the airdrop on their layer 2 exchange which i think is pretty cool because it basically i guess forces users to obviously use the app uh but also kind of get used to it and see if they actually get value out of it and if they want to continue using it so i think it's kind of like a little kind of growth hack strategy there um but the one thing that kind of like stirred drama up on on twitter and i wrote about this in the delegate newsletter today was basically that the ui dex has barred us investors or at least u.s people uh from accessing this airdrop and they did this by matching uh ips to kind of like addresses that interacted with the protocol and they basically blacklisted

them from getting the airdrop now this is obviously due to uh certain regulations in the united states especially around securities laws and the sec and stuff like that um and i put out a tweet today basically saying you know u.s investors missing out on an airdrop because of stupid regulations is just insane but it's okay they're just trying to protect you from free money back to wage cucking now citizen now i ranted and raved about this in the newsletter today and i'm gonna rant and rave a bit a bit about it um on this essentially uh i believe most financial regulations are total and only exist to protect the incumbents and what i mean by that is that they only exist to protect entities like banks uh you know casinos uh lottery um operators stuff like that when it comes

to to financial regulations because at the end of the day like defy is looking to disrupt a lot of this stuff and d5 gives power back to the people right and it gives power back to investors to be able to kind of like capture early stage investments without having to go through accredited investor laws which i'll touch on in a sec because that's another kind of regulation um and and the fact that like now investors are missing out on airdrops because they're based in the us uh because of these regulations is absolutely insane to me like in in what world is protecting people from getting free money um uh the mandate of like the sec or the mandate of these regulators like it does it's not but the problem is is that these regulations are so draconian and they're so uh i guess like um difficult to maneuver around that

projects and teams literally just give up and say well screw it we're not going to operate in the u.s this is too hard we're not going to take the risk you know sorry everyone we can't do that and you've seen this play out with even centralized exchanges and things like that they obviously don't want to play in the u.s because of all the really tough regulations and a lot of these politicians they'll always kind of talk about sorry um uh you know these things protecting investors and stuff like that but it's all total like maybe they believe it in some twisted way but i don't like i would have to look through like the history of these sorts of things but in no world do i think that um you know bowering users from being able to get an airdrop or use certain apps is

protecting them because at the end of the day coinbase listed shib like as an example here coinbase listed a stupid dog token like i know some people are fans of this project and after the token pump they said oh we're gonna do you know we're gonna make some products or whatever but really i mean it was just a fork dog token that has fallen massively from its highs uh and they listed that in and us investors can get access to that so i i just i don't get it like i just don't get how you can argue that these these regulations are protecting investors while also allowing the centralized exchanges to basically list these things now maybe this comes back and and kind of like bites coinbase in the ass later on for listing something like this i don't think so they would have the best kind of like tap into the

regulatory landscape uh for crypto in the us uh they obviously have like the best lawyers working for them and stuff like that um but yeah and that brings me to my my second major point here which is around accredited investor laws which i think are literally the most damaging financial regulations and the most unfair financial regulations in history or at least one uh one of i don't know all of the regulations in history i'm sure there were probably worse ones that quickly got retracted but these accredited investor laws have been around for a while now and for those of you who don't know what they are essentially uh and this exists in the u.s and some other parts of the world as well i think most of uh first world countries have similar laws but the way it works in the us is that to be an

accredited investor you have to either have a net worth of a million dollars individually or jointly with a spouse or you have to have an income for the last two years of 250 000 u.s dollars or more uh you know individually um or 300 000 or more with it with a spouse and if you don't have that you are not an accredited investor which means you are not allowed to invest in early stage companies you are not allowed to invest in seed rounds or series a or series b or whatever the only time that you're allowed to invest in these companies is when they go to uh the stock market when they're actually ipo'ed and it's on the stock market and you can buy into it now i'm going to take the very cynical approach here but i truly believe this that these laws only exist to protect

the rich because when you think about it the rich people want to get in as early as possible and they want to keep accumulating wealth and how do you do that well you have to you have to get in as early as possible but then you also need people to buy it off you later on right uh so essentially what happens is that if you close the pool of people that can access these early stage investments and then basically uh force the majority of the population to be only able to buy them when they go live on the stock market when it's ipo'd then essentially you have like a a moderately kind of like risk-free uh return on this sort of stuff and you have like a massive return the only reason why returns in crypto seems so insane to uh to us um is because of the

fact that traditionally people have not had access to these returns if you look at um all the biggest companies in the world today and if you had invested in them at their like earlier stages if you were allowed to do that uh you would have made a thousand next 2000 x 3000 x whatever on it right this isn't just exclusive to crypto but because you haven't had access to that you haven't even seen that before like they're it's not public it's not transparent it's always kind of like hush-hush hidden unless you dig around for the valuations you know it's not really talked about too much or it's talked about in an abstract way where they're just like you know this investor is legendary because they made this much money off facebook well i mean yeah because they were allowed to invest in facebook like you

and i weren't allowed to i mean maybe not me these days but like back you know when i went before i became before i was eligible to be an accredited investor like i thought it was total crap and i mean i still think it's total crap it's really unfair that just because like i have a certain amount of uh of wealth i'm allowed to invest in something but someone else isn't i can tell you right now that there are people more passionate about the pro some of the projects i've invested in than i am they probably know more about it than i do but because i have the the kind of like uh the wealth requirement i'm allowed to invest in it and they aren't so from that perspective i just think it's total total crap like it's just the one of the worst financial regulations to exist and

there has been some change here recently where um they've been doing kind of like um instead of wealth tests like knowledge tests and things like that which i guess is a step in the right direction but i still think it's kind of crap because it's like okay you know testing someone based on their wealth is actually much harder than uh sorry on their knowledge is basically much harder than testing them on their wealth because with wealth you can just you know stick a number on it say you know if you have a net worth of million dollars then you know you're good to go but with a knowledge test you basically have to have to standardize this you have to basically say okay well this test is going to be the same one that everyone takes and you have to get like a 70 to be passed to have a passing

grade and then they're going to update the test maybe every year and then you know there's all sorts of things that can go wrong with that and it's very loose right it's not like a tightly defined thing so from that perspective i think that uh it's really the best kind of like option is like a middle ground here where i i don't think a middle ground has to involve like a wealth requirement i don't think it should but like a knowledge test is fine but also the fact that um generally kind of like these laws maybe shouldn't exist at all maybe they should be changed completely where it's essentially okay well you know if you can uh prove that you're knowledgeable if you kind of like sign this thing saying that you're you know you're happy taking on the risk just like you would sign like for a home loan or whatever

that you're happy taking on the risk and and stuff like that then then you can invest in it but if i had my way i would say get rid of these regulations altogether and let people do what they want with their money because and this is the flip side to it in the us right you can't invest in early stage companies unless you're rich but you can do everything else you can get a credit card and max it out you can get multiple credit cards max them out as much as you want you can take on enormous amounts of debt um you can get a home loan that you can't service right you can you can weasel your way into that you can um go and blow all your money at the casino or go on on lotteries there's even been people in congress uh uh encouraging

people to instead of investing in crypto they should be putting their money into lotteries and and basically and and basically investing the lottery because that's taxed and the tax goes to the state and you're helping out your state what what like that's just insane like and and you know the people that say this are obviously bought and paid for by these institutions by these incumbents to say these things and that's not a conspiracy to say this like you can see their donors you can see where the money's flowing you can see who they actually answer to um so yeah i mean i'm not going to dive into like the politics of it but genuinely i just i've become so frustrated over the years especially being in crypto and this is why i uh one reason why i'm so bullish on crypto is because it really does

level the playing field for a lot of people you know think about all the vcs and funds that have missed out on like some of the biggest investments in crypto they all missed out on eth right they all definitely missed out on btc uh recently they've missed out on things like axe infinity there are only a few funds in there most funds weren't in there most vcs weren't in there and the returns i mean you could have bought actually infinity the token for like 20 cents a while ago and you know it's like whatever it is 40 45 today and only just a few short months um and you know there's countless examples of this where you know you can basically get in and and and because it's actively trading it's on the public markets and you're responsible for your own actions you're responsible for the risk

you take on if you lose money if you make money all that sort of stuff um and i haven't really seen anyone complain that they learn their lesson they're like okay well you know it was my fault that i you know aped into this thing i lost money whatever moving on um so i think that's the way to play it everyone should be responsible for their own actions but i know that you know a lot of the time especially when a lot of people get hurt they go running to daddy government and they're saying hey you know help us protect us when they really don't know what they're asking for and at the end of the day most of these regulations don't even work to stop the scammers and the acc doesn't even go after most of the scammers like think about the amount of scammers that have

gotten away with it the rug pulls the the hacks that they say is a hacker really is an inside job the pump and dumps the ponzis most of them like 99 of them have gotten away with it it's only the one percent that gets caught so are these regulations even doing anything to begin with okay are they even preventing investors from getting hurt even if you believe that these things have been invented as protections for investors then um you know they haven't been protecting anyone uh because we've seen this all play out um within the crypto space and even in the traditional finance space um so yeah just i'm gonna end the rant there but seriously like i just i find it so insane that these regulations exist and really the only logical reason that i can think of is that they exist because of the fact that

they are there for the incumbents essentially they're there to protect the incumbent interests um and that's it and that makes sense to me and that's that's the most logical reason in my mind but anyway gonna leave it at that i'm sure a lot of you agree with me on this you probably feel the same frustrations i do and believe me i feel like the frustrations like super deeply for for those of you who don't qualify to be an accredited investor which means you don't get to invest in early stage companies that was my situation for a long time where i had um you know people coming to me and i was like crap i can't because i'm not an accredited investor uh and you know as soon as i crossed that threshold i was like super happy but then i was reminded about the fact

that wow like just because my net worth went up i'm now all of a sudden magically allowed to invest in these early stage companies like my knowledge level didn't really change like nothing else really changed except a number on a screen so yeah anyway end of rant on to the some project updates here so hashflow and network announced that they have launched their open alpha version um essentially there's no access codes and this gives you the best decentralized trading experience on ethereum so what cash flow is from my understanding is it is essentially a um a way for people to kind of like uh trade uh i guess like in size basically in instead of um going through i mean there's been multiple projects kind of like um uh essentially uh trying to do this

where you can like trade in size but i think what cash flow is trying to do is basically make it like make the spreads really really tight so that um that there's no like there's not much price impact when people are trading in this size uh they want to make sure they can ensure um you know very very low slippage or zero slippage uh and they also claim here like mav resistance and stuff like that i haven't dug into how they do that um but like i'm going to i'd only saw this just before so i just wanted to quickly give it a shout out on the refuel and you can go check this out for yourself to kind of learn more about it but essentially i just think that um you know these kind of things are really cool because like i think you know one of the reasons

why something like defy has um maybe not gotten i think it's like two major reasons why default hasn't gotten like the big whales from exchanges to come play in it just yet uh scalability because these whales love to play with all the books exchanges and also the fact that like there's more liquidity on centralized exchanges but that gap is closing and projects like cash flow are working to kind of close that gap and allowing these kind of bigger players to come into i guess like the ecosystem and experience defy and everything like that so really really cool to see that anyway this will be linked in the youtube description and you can go check it out for yourself so diversify and polygon have teamed up to launch this bridge so what this bridge allows people to do is bridge from the diversifier layer 2 uh exchange

to directly to polygons so as the first if i explains here what can you transfer between the two platforms well you can now instantly transfer usdc di and usdc from polygon to your diversified wallet on the polygon network here so uh how quickly will funds uh transfer within minutes of sending funds they'll be available on the exchange um and uh withdrawals back to polygon occur even uh faster and now and diversify says here uh the best part is that to help with the the cross chain fees the bridge will initially be gas free uh so you basically have uh fast and free transfers on that bridge right now so this is really cool i mean this is just another bridge i've been talking about bridges like so much lately um but this is just another bridge that is

coming to the ecosystem uh uh to to enable kind of like the um the the uh i mean i've lost the word here but essentially to fix the problem of fragments liquidity fragmented platforms like this is obviously coming from the polygon pos chain to the diversify kind of layer 2 chain which i think is really really cool because it's like um it's like a hybrid approach here um and you know this is just like the beginning i'm sure they're going to enable other tokens to to bridge across these chains and things like that and i'm sure they're going to add other chains too um and you know i think at the end of the day the i mean i i i've talked about this a lot right like the bridges they they're they're gonna start out like you know limited and slow and not slow

limited and like um you know low liquidity and only supporting a few different kind of like chains and things like that but over time we're gonna see which chains uh gain the most kind of traction and then i think we're gonna see like a a bunch of these bridges like coalesce or at least hone in on the chains that are actually seeing traction and focus a lot of the liquidity there and that's it that's just gonna reinforce the network effects for those um those layer twos and those side chains because if you're a user and you go to a new sidechain or a new layer 2 and they don't have a bridge to everywhere else well then you know you're not really going to get much use out of it because that's what you're going to expect eventually you're going to expect bridges in and out of these

things outside and and bridges that are quick as well you don't want to obviously put up with the seven-day withdrawal delay for the optimistic roll-ups you don't want to have to put up with any kind of depositor withdrawal delays with any kind of roll-ups generally i guess so users are going to expect these bridges to exist on all the chains they're not going to exist on every chain and not all of them are going to have the liquidity to match on every chain it's going to be a little bit hard there but i think that the ones that they do exist on those people are going to use those the most so the obvious ones being you know polygon optimism arbitram the standalone chains that are built on stockwear and even starkware's uh and zk syncs when they release it they're kind of like evm compatible um

chains as well so i think those ones are definitely guaranteed to have all these bridges coming in and out you know we still have connects and hot protocol and seller network and i mean it's amazing how many bridges bridge protocols we have now and they're all kind of like um you know competing with each other which is awesome because the more competition the better it is for us as end users so i'm really looking forward to just watching the bridge kind of like ecosystem play out and to see if we can basically get rid of like the biggest pain points for users which is that kind of like getting liquidity from layer one to layer two from layer two to layer two or layer two to side chain or basically everywhere because my vision of ethereum has always been that you have ethereum sitting in the middle like so it's a

nexus in the middle and then you have all of these things kind of like coming off of ethereum but then they all talk to each other as well so you have lines going everywhere essentially so it's not just uh you know you have to go from like say this star to ethereum the nexus in the middle uh through one straight line and then you can go to another kind of like star you can go start a star or you can go uh you know the one next to you or you can go start to other star or you can go like um star to ethereum to star in like one transaction so all these kind of things can happen so i'm really looking forward uh to seeing how that all plays out uh with the bridge ecosystem so uh sense finance has announced they're a fundraise and what they're

building is a decentralized fixed income protocol on ethereum um this is a 5.2 million dollar raise led by i think variant uh ventures here led the led the raise from what i can see no led by dragonfly sorry uh with participation from bain capital ventures nascent variant robot ventures the layout among others a bunch of angels here as well um but essentially this is i believe a competitor to um uh what's the what's the thing element finance the other protocol that i've been talking about um the fixed kind of like interest rate protocols and i think there's other ones out there um uh today like not just sense finance and element element finance but i can't remember the names right now um i think this yield uh yield protocol as well but

yeah i mean this is just more competition and what this essentially does is kind of like a similar thing where it splits like the yield and the principle up and people can kind of like play around with that and like buy and sell that and trade that and you have like interest rates interest rates swaps and stuff like that as well which i think is really really cool so i mean basically uh 5.2 million dollars is uh i think this is a seed seed round not a series a round that's a pretty big c seed round but you know it's going to give them capital to last a while i mean given the investors and given kind of like the attention on this space and the fact that uh i guess like fixed income is a huge product in traditional finance i wouldn't be surprised to see uh since

finance raising a series a uh you know sooner rather than later um but i'm i'm pretty cool i'm i'm pretty excited to see that there's just more uh kind of competition in this space and they detailed you know what what sense is and a little bit of background about it in this blog post which you can go check out yourself i'm not sure exactly when this is going to be available on mainnet or anything like that but you can definitely follow them on twitter and join the discord channel to get more involved with the project if you would like to so last up here alchemix has announced that their al-8 deck cap has been raised from 2k to 3k lal-eth now i don't think this deck cap is filled just yet so you can go mint some a al-8 if you want to um this came off the heels of i guess

like the the exploit that was found originally in the alchemics system for al-eth and they kind of like paused it and then brought it back the product sorry and it was at 2k cap and now you know they've raised the 3k i'm sure that's gonna get filled uh sooner rather than later and then they're just going to keep raising that cap from there i believe um so yeah i mean if you haven't checked this out you already haven't kind of minted some ale now would be the the time to do so um but like that was the last time i checked it maybe um it may have been like reached the minting kind of like limit already or the debt cap i should say already but yeah good to see alchemics still building here and still kind of like uh you know progressing along they're

actually they've actually been teasing a bunch of other things as well or at least scoopy triples has um i've been seeing some tweets from them about like the next versions of kind of like alchemics and then and and the bigger products coming to to alchemics um and it's just really really kind of cool to to to see that they're you know just prodding away there because whenever an exploit happens with one of these default protocols you know it's always really shitty and depending on the protocol you get different reactions like if it's a protocol that not many people like or they think is like kind of shitty they'll like you know i guess uh insult it or like bag it out or kind of like on it for lack of a better term um but whether it's like when it's like a fan favorite a community favorite

they come together and they're like you know yeah that's okay these things happen uh you know we're right behind you we know that you're legit we know that you're gonna fix this and alchemics did fix it right they basically allowed people to pay back the ether that they um that they got for free essentially and a lot of people did pay it back and then they covered the rest out of their own kind of i guess like dow treasury i believe or from the fees generated by the by the protocol and things like that so that was really cool to see as well but yeah i mean you know speaking of exploits there's been a few exploits lately that i've been seeing and they've also there's also been um a lot of uh wallet hacks that i've been seeing on twitter lately people getting their their

metamask drained now uh i just i wanted to give a quick reminder to to the refuel listeners and watches here if you don't use a hardware wallet as um your main device for storing your crypto go and do that right now i mean there's a certain threshold where a hardware wallet doesn't make sense like obviously a legend nano s is like i'm i think it's i can't remember the price maybe it's 100 let's just say it's 100 the lattice one is is a bit more than that um and you know there's other alternatives out there as well uh but essentially if you're not using a a hardware wallet you are your funds are at risk and even if you are using a hardware wallet your funds are still at risk but much less so because what can end up happening with metamask for example is that someone can install some

malicious software on your pc through any means i mean this has been happening for for a long time not just with crypto but just generally install some malware on your pc you won't even know that it's there they could just simply log your keys and then what ends up happening is that they can either log your password for for for metamask um if they want to kind of like like log into it using another exploit later on or what they do which is even kind of like more nefarious is they'll uh basically uh reset your metamask so that you basically have to um or at least um you know mess with your metamask so you have to re-enter your seed phrase and a lot of people fall for this where they enter their seed phrase and it works because it's their seed phrase but then that

gets key logged and sent to the to the hackers and then they use that to drain your entire wallet and you don't even know before it's too late so it's really scary you know it's really scary and sometimes they can be lurking in your pc for for a long time before they do so because maybe they're waiting for your funds in your metamask accounts to kind of stack up before they they kind of like steal them from you uh and yeah i've just been seeing like an increase in this lately so be vigilant get a hardware wallet as like the most basic necessary step is a hardware wallet there's plenty of other steps that you need to take to protect yourself if you want to go the extra mile and there's guides out there on how to do so my crypto has a bunch of guys

you can search like my crypto security guide on google and that'll come up um but essentially uh you know other things you can do is like revoking permissions to smart contracts etherscan has a tool for this um basically any smart contracts that you don't interact with anymore you should revoke the token permissions for them um and especially all the untrustworthy ones and stuff like that uh you should definitely install some sort of like antivirus on your computer i mean windows defender is really good that's a free antivir antivirus anti-malware system from windows themselves so you don't have to go buy one of like the the mcafees or the nortons of the world but you definitely want to have like the bare minimum um windows defender you want to have like the firewall on you want to make sure that people that are on your wireless network um you know are known

and trusted and things like that i mean there's this you can go deep with this sort of stuff and i have a background in cyber security so i know how deep it goes um but like as i said the most bare minimum thing you can do is get a hardware wallet and that'll protect you from a lot of these different kind of attacks and but the biggest kind of like um attack vector with a hardware wallet is again um a seed phrase thing where you you know you've written your seed phrase down um maybe maybe you you've written it down on your computer because you for some reason didn't have a pen and paper around and you said oh well i'll just write it down on my computer in like a text file and then the hacker gets access to that text file they have

access to everything and how well it doesn't matter at that point or you sign a transaction that that a um that an attacker has kind of like put into your hyderabad so say you you've gone to like send eth to an address or something and you know that transaction goes through um and then you know what the attacker does is they basically replace that transaction with their own one and then you sign that and then it sends the east to their address instead of yours and that's why ledger doesn't go far enough they don't do they don't show you like all the details of your transaction so if you actually want to see what the details are before you sign it you have to get something like a lattice one which i highly recommend it is a bit more expensive because it's a bigger device and has a

lot more going on but it is probably uh i would say the best advice you can have to protect yourself against these sorts of things and to keep your crypto safe and secure so yeah definitely um check that out if you haven't yet you can google it latiswan from grid plus i highly recommend it um i'm not paid to say that i just you know highly recommend it because i've got one um and and it works really well works as advertised so yeah but on that note uh that's it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone