ETF fake news, Uniswap front-end fee and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #673 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delu refuel where C the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and S and to the 17th of October 2023 all right everyone let's get into it so I'm sure you were all made well aware of what happened yesterday with regards to some ETF news or I guess fake news as it is known now so just a quick kind of context here and a quick background story there was an announcement out of coin Telegraph which is one of the crypto media companies out there um basically announcing that black Rock's spot Bitcoin ETF had been approved now of course at the time uh as soon after that announcement I kind of looked at it and I was just like what's the source on this cuz they didn't site any Source they didn't site the sec's

website or black Rock's website or anything like that so immediately I kind of was doubting the news to be honest especially because as I've said before the SEC is probably going to approve all of the spot ETFs at once and the fact that coin Telegraph had the ex exclusive was also a major red flag for me because they never have an exclusive on anything they're basically a a copypaste media Organization for the most part where they basically just relay the news from other other sources which is fine but as I said they're not usually the one to break the story so taking all that into account I went and after I saw the tweet I went and looked at the at the charts uh and I saw that BTC had eth and everything had spiked massively on the on the news of course um but then

moments later people started calling it out as fake news and being like you know where's the source on this that doesn't make any sense it seems fake and then slowly slowly it came to light I think within 10 15 minutes that it was indeed fake uh completely fake it there was it was um completely made up it seems by coin Telegraph and they later deleted their tweet which you can see on my screen here their tweet's not available but Elanor here who works at Fox Business basically said that black rock confirmed to her as well that the information was false and their application is still under review now obviously a lot to unpack here with what happened I think the number one thing is that when you see some news without a source uh and also if the sources are just self-referential where essentially what ended up happening with this is

coin Telegraph put this out there and then I think Bloomberg even picked it up in Reuters and they were basically sourcing each other and then the ultimate source was still coin Telegraph but usually when you see news like this and there's no kind of legitimate Source behind it uh then it's most likely fake news right it's most likely not true here especially when it comes to crypto related news especially when it comes to stuff that's markets uh Market related or can it can impact markets cuz as we all know the spot BTC ETF is being approved obviously I mean we know now now know that that would have a massive effect on the market which is another thing that people were talking about as well where they were basically saying you know what if this happens uh on on fake news imagine what happens when it's

actually real like imagine all the demand that comes in and you can you can kind of see from the the the price action just how much demand is waiting on the sidelines here and people will ask you know why are they waiting on the sidelines if they they basically just you know ape in as soon as the um as soon as the the news comes out and I don't think it's a lot of that I mean people maybe don't understand this about trading but essentially what ends up happening is that a lot of the um asks that is the orders that people have on their um to to sell their BTC at for example they're not necessarily that much higher than the current spot price because a lot of the times people aren't going to put their asks at like 30k right um if they if they're a Trader

they're probably going to put it a bit lower depends on what the market makers is doing and stuff like that so essentially what happens is that in a news driven event the price spikes really quickly from honestly algo Bots and and some Traders just buying into it you get a massive liquidation of people who were short and then because there's not many asks there the liquidity is quite thin um you can see that massive Spike then that's why when you look at the charts he's got all these Wicks on the charts the Wicks are usually that playing out essentially and because of that uh that can give you I guess like better technical analysis if you're into that sort sort of stuff but it can also give you a signal around what kind of move it is now obviously this move was just purely driven by that news but at

the same time it does show that there is a lot of sideline demand in in my opinion and it does show that there is a lot of kind of open air above current prices where there's not that many asks sitting there and I do believe that if the um spot BTC ETFs were approved for real there would be a really really strong bid there and you know I'm not the only one saying this you know there's a lot of people on Twitter saying this and I don't think it's h because you know there there's a video that came out with an interview today that Fox Business did with Larry thinkink where he talked about this incident of course because Larry Fink is the CEO of Black Rock and he basically said well you know even the fake news caused the price spike Because he believes that it's a flight to Quality

he believes that the crypto asset class as a whole not just Bitcoin is a flight to Quality now to hear the CEO of the largest asset manager in the uh management firm in the world say this is a really really big deal and I don't think people have digested just how big of a deal this is because not only is he sending a very very strong signal to the world that crypto is a legitimate asset class but he is also saying that it is a quality asset class it is somewhere where you basically put your money in when you want to flight to Quality right where you want to basically use it as a store of value right which is an extremely strong proposition I think um coming from him because it just signals to all of these people that even the the most serious and and the biggest kind of

asset managers in the world think this way now on top of that what do you think Larry and black rock and all the other spot EF uh kind of um uh uh application companies are doing right now I can tell you what they're doing they are contacting all of their clients especially their High net worth clients they are convincing them to put in a small portion maybe it's only 1 to 2% of their net worth into their Bitcoin spot ETFs once once they launch because for them the launch is a a huge marketing event like if Black Rock launches their ATF or the um especially Black Rock I think launches their spot betc ATF and you see like no inflows that would obviously be a huge blow to the narrative that would be a huge blow to

them as a company uh and it would be a really bad look so of course they're out there convincing all of their existing clients to put you know 1 to 2% which isn't a huge ask right into these products and and basically pitching them with analysis of the different uh uh of the different kind of types of of value acral for things like Bitcoin right how to store a value how to flight to Quality and that's what you're seeing here Larry is basically just saying out loud what he already says to uh black Rock's clients essentially what their marketing departments say to Black Rock's clients and it's not just black rock of course it's all of the other ETF application companies as well they're definitely uh uh kind of marketing to their existing client base because they have tens of billions hundreds of

billions trillions of dollars right under management and if only one to two% of that goes into a BTC spot ETF on like let's not say day one but like let's say the first few months of it that's a huge amount of inflows and you have to remember that once these products are Al it's not like we're just going to get like a couple of days of huge inflows or a couple of weeks of huge inflows and then it and then it stops the inflows may slow down because obviously there's that that pent up demand when it first goes live but then you have a trickling in over time in perpetuity basically until I guess like these products um essentially uh uh I guess like die or I don't know it it would last a very long time right decades to be honest um at at

this rate right so when you look at it like that and from that perspective I think it's safe to say that the ETF stuff is still not priced in and people are kind of wondering okay well are we going to price it in now like is this fake news event actually bullish because it showed the market that there is that pent up demand there that the ETF stuff isn't actually priced in so it remains to be seen how that kind of plays out there but I do strongly believe that it's not priced in and as I've said before guys all that really is required to start a new ball Market is breaking those crab market ranges and for BTC it's only 32k for eth it's 2.2k or or or around that right and BTC went to 30k on this announcement here so and it's still

at like what 28 something k e at like, 1600 or almost that so we're really not far away from breaking those crab market ranges now once they break and hold which I expect to happen probably next year q1 or something like that that would be the official start of the bull market right like that would be the oh okay wow the bull Market's back on I better get it now or I'm not going to have an opportunity cuz it's going to get away from me I do think that that would be the case there and I do think that uh I mean obviously I'm not the only one who thinks this but I do think that uh people at Black Rock and and these other kind of um uh other other companies that that have submitted for ETFs I think they think this way as well

they're definitely looking at things like the fouryear cycle they're not blind to this they definitely understand uh I guess like crypto very well I think they definitely understand the the various Market related memes like the fouryear cycle and stuff like that um you know I haven't really heard anyone talk about stock to flow lately and thank God because Dr FL is basically Voodoo science um but yeah I feel like that's all definitely playing a big part there now the last thing on the ETF news was Eric Boh sharing that Kathy Wood who is the CEO and founder of Arc which has the BTC spot ETF um approval deadline of Jane 10th so whenever you hear me talk about Arc it's it's Kathy Woods firm here she said that the only blocker to the BTC spot ETFs right now uh is Gary gendler now this is not news to us guys

like we all know this is the blocker here uh that Gary gendler is the pretty much the only one standing in the way of it but I think that that doesn't matter at this point because he's not going to stand in the way with it anymore these things are definitely getting approved but I think it's just validation I guess that um you know from one of these companies that have applied for a spot BTC ATF multiple times it just validates the thesis that we basically all have that uh Gary giner has been the way one that's been in the way and really if you actually look at it it's not so much Gary gendler as it is Elizabeth Warren because that she's his boss basically and she is telling him what to do and she's been very anti- crypto so I think it's been her to be honest and and at

this point I think that the SEC has lost enough court cases that they have to begrudgingly approve these things now even if Elizabeth Warren doesn't want this to happen I don't think she can stand in the way anymore of these but really that's the source of things I know we all like to rag on gendler a lot but honestly if Elizabeth Warren was telling him to be Pro crypto he would be Pro crypto he's really just a puppet for for her and whoever she listens to I'm not sure she she strikes me as someone who she probably has people that she speaks to and people she aligns with but she strikes me as someone and I'm not an expert on on us politicians of course but she strikes me as someone who has her own kind of agenda and she runs on that platform because it it it gets her

votes and stuff like that against like Financial crimes generally and she buckets it all together especially crypto obviously because of f you know the FTX stuff and and Terra and all the other scams and stuff it's just easy for her to Target it and then she filters that down to the Regulatory Agencies such as the and then of course Gary GZA is not going to say no to his boss just like you guys wouldn't say no to your boss you know you can always quit but for him he's not going to quit being head of the SEC that's one of the most prestigious I guess appointments in the regulatory apparatus in the US and it is the stepping stone for where he wants to go next which is either the treasury Department or maybe he wants to go back to private um and become like a high up

at a private company where he would obviously be paid a lot more um and and that might be his goal as well but regardless his goal is not to quit just because he disagrees with his boss uh he I don't think he cares about crypto that much to sacrifice himself for for crypto right so yeah good to think about that when I mean not to say that that Gensler isn't a snake in his own right in my opinion um but I think that he's just listening to his boss uh for the most part at at at this point all right moving on so David Hoffman shared a Dun analytics dashboard and a diva scan Dash dashboard here showing the progress of Diva's vampire attack on lato so on here which is Divas scan. enzyme you can actually look and see what the current amounts of s and

eth that have been deposited into this vampire attack contract is and how many holders there are so still early days but right now there is 14,44 uh stth and eth deposited uh with 626 holders and you can see the tvl over time has actually been growing since October 9th it's actually spiked quite quite a bit which is which is really cool to see there and then you can see down here what the tranches look like for rewards so um you get different Diva token rewards depending on how much uh accumulative uh stth and eth is is um is staked and also and you can see here like uh right now we're in the 10 to 20K Tran so you're getting 2.25 Diva per day um if you put in per e right so you can

see here that you would get 2.25 Diva tokens uh per day uh per I I think like one eth if I'm ring it correctly here and then you can obviously put in more eth as time goes on and as I said yesterday or maybe the day before um I said that it's really hard to know what you're going to get from this vampire attack because Diva does not have a price yet but if you want to do a naive assumption on what Diva would be worth um you can work out the price now I don't want to give investment advice here or give kind of any kind of assumptions about what dver is worth but just for a thought experiment here I'm just going to say number just just to just to kind of give you an example of how you can work this out so let's say

at launch Diva's fully diluted market cap is $100 million right um which is I mean it could be that could be higher could be lower as I said it's just an example here and then there's a $1 billion total supply of Diva which means that each Diva token would be worth 10 cents if Diva was worth $100 million right so at 10 cents per Diva if you're looking at the reward rewards right now you would be getting uh 2.25 Diva uh kind of per day here so times that by by 10 cents and times up by the amount of e that you're getting and then you can kind of work out the the dollar value here on what you're getting uh with with this with this kind of vampire attack here if I'm reading this correctly I may be reading it wrong but that's how you

would normally do it right you just assume a market cap divided by the total Supply you get the dollar amount and then you'll be able to see the the rewards that you're that you're kind of getting here um in terms of like Diva tokens so it can be quite quite lucrative uh lucrative for you um if you want to do that so you can go check out um uh check out this uh uh this kind of like table here for the tranches I think I'm calculating it wrong because there is another column here that basically says in this tranch 68 to 412 I don't know if that means you're getting 68 to 412 Diva tokens per one e depending on where you are in in the trancha I I'm not I'm not sure to be honest honestly I I don't know what that means there um

but yeah I mean I'm maybe I'm going to have to look into that some more and see exactly how that payout works there but once you get the actual figures as I said that's how you would how you would work it out there but yeah great to see the vampire attack continuing and L's dominance has actually been still going down I mean it's kind of hard for it to go down right now because there's no new eth entering the deposit Q is basically empty right now but it has has gone down as I as I kind of mentioned yesterday uh there all right so I think that the other biggest news of the last 24 hours besides all that ETF news was the announcement that Unis swap Labs is going to be putting a fee on their front end so you guys know that Unis swap Labs

runs the official Unis swap front end the one that we've all been using for years now you know what whatever it is app. unis swap. org I think it is I just want to make sure that's the one so I don't send you guys to fishing websites uh I never actually look at the URL because I have it I have it I have it bookmarked but yeah app. unis.org is the is the kind of proper uh URL there but uh that is going to have a 0.15% swap fee on the I guess like majority of uh volume that the the tokens go through so I think it applies to like eth and or wrapped eth and wrapped Bitcoin and stable coin so obviously it covers most of the volume that passes through Unis swap here now of course this caused a bunch of drama within the community for

a few different reasons the first reason is that the uni token is kind of useless right there is no fee take on the uni token and for years now I you know basically the unisoft labs team it says it's up to governance but we know that's a meme because governance is controlled by the lab's uh uh team and also the the VCS and and the fee take token had the sorry the the fee switch on the token has not been turned on yet uh and then Inc comes unisoft labs and says well we're putting a 0.15% uh fee on our front end uh that's not going to token holders at all token holders get nothing out of that that's going directly to unisoft labs and their Equity holders so that's what pissed a lot of people off not necessar I don't think people were

annoyed about the fact that they're putting a fee on their front end because I'm not even annoyed about that I think that's just a logical thing for them to do um you know if you're running the front and if you're running the infrastructure for it then uh and you're not putting the the fee on the on the contracts themselves and that's all well and good because the unop protocol doesn't have this fee on it because the Unis swop protocol is uh is decentralized in is immutable and is not owned by unisoft Labs it is it is immutable on ethereum anyone can tap into it and there's various other front ends that you can use and I think a lot of people are actually going to be using a non- unop Labs front end now I think really at this point the official unop front end is used by probably noobs who

don't know any better and also retail investors who couldn't care less about um about fees or DJ investors I should say they couldn't care less about fees because they're aping into meme coins but honestly all the more sophisticated or at least in the no people within crypto are not using unisoft Labs as FR anymore they they're using things like C swap or matcha or one in TR these aggregators because not only do they give you a much better price but also now you're not going to be suffering or not suffering you're not going to be paying this 0.15% swap fee just like if you're a more sophisticated uh crypto user you're not going to be using metamask swap feature which takes a 0.8% fee right you're going to be using uh one of these other kind of uh I guess front ends out there and again

ultimately you can always interact with unisoft contracts using your own locally built front ends um but there is kind of issues around routing and finding the best route and stuff like that so you're better off just sticking to uh for for for most people out there you're better off sticking to things like cow Swap and match and 1 inch I mean I'm personally an absolutely massive fan of cow swap I use it for everything it's always come through for me it's never let me down um and and yeah I think that's what most most people in the know are going to be doing but obviously unop Labs is banking on the fact that there are a ton of new people out there that don't know any better and there's a ton of people who just care about convenience over anything anything else and there's a ton

of Deens that are going to be using the unisoft labs front end which is totally fine but still uni token holders feel very shafted here because they haven't had a fee switch turned on for for uni tokens for years now um and it feels like unisoft Labs double dipped because not only do they get a portion of the tokens allocated to themselves from Genesis they also get the uh this kind of like front-end fee which goes directly to them and their Equity holders as well and the equity holders are probably the same VCS that hold their their tokens too so yeah that that's kind of why it rides people the the wrong way there and and I totally get that but in the end I think I'm going to talk actually going to talk about this with with Eric Connor this week because we have another one of our

drive-throughs that we're going to record we're going to talk about how within trafi fe's actually pretty much like race to the bottom um and that and Eric strongly believes that the same thing is going to happen within within Defi and I don't disagree with him I do think that fees are going to be a race to the bottom but in terms of time frames I think it's going to take a while it's going to take until defi is basically saturated or at least onchain products have saturated the um the global population and it's as kind of like adopted or near as adopted as Trad fight is today because uh unless it's in that world you're always going to have noobs to fleece basically and I think that's what a lot of these fees rely on it's just relies on naive people who don't know any better and don't know

they can get a bu better deal elsewhere but generally yeah I do agree with Eric on that but we're going to discuss that more uh on on the drive-through this week but just on the note about market share here i s in tweet here from Beetle who said uh who works at research at the Block who said only about 35 to 40% of trades on unop are being done through their front end um so and it was 90% in 2019 now of course this makes sense because obviously a lot more interfaces have come online for UNIS swap uh over the last couple of years especially aggregators as you can see here aggregators take up a huge market share um and then there's there's unknowns as well which I would assume are probably some sort of like uh not not Gators but like other interfaces that people are

using to interact with Unis swap so I expect this number to probably drop 35 to 40% is probably going to drop now that they've turned on the fee but yeah I mean that's still a large chunk of change for them that 0.15% because if they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars of volume through there or billions of dollars of volume through there then obviously it's a big deal for them and honestly I don't fault them for this at all as I said it's their infrastructure it's their front end they also built the protocol but I think that the uni token holders feel very shafted and honestly you should feel shafted if you hold uni tokens because when is that fee switch going to get turned on right and them doing this front end switch just shows that maybe they they're never going to vote in

favor of that and maybe it will never get turned on me personally I don't hold uni haven't held it since the air drop basically because um speculating on that token inuring value uh from the fee switch is a huge risk obviously it could be potentially um potentially be a huge reward as well but the risk is too large for me to to invest it so uni as a token is uninvested able to me because of that uh and I think it's largely use useless and yeah people holding it obviously feel snubbed by this as they should but at the same time I do not blame unisoft for wanting to take a fee on their front ends or unisoft Labs I should say for wanting to take a fee on their front end because it's their infrastructure they run it they maintain it they uh they put

the work in for it um just like there are other front ends out there that will also take fees just like metamask swaps feature takes a fee just like centralized exchanges take fees there are going to be fees everywhere guys for offering the service to you but you do have choices just like in centralized exchanges you have choices about which one you use and what fees you pay you also have choices within defi you have plenty of choices within defi of how to interact with unisoft contracts for example how to interact with other protocols out there unless the fee is actually in protocol itself if it's just at the front end you can always get around it one way or another so yeah anyway I'll save the rest of my takes for the episode I'll do with Eric this week with the with the drive-thru um

hope you guys can listen to that it'll be out on Saturday all right so rabby wallet has announced a new product today which is rabby desktop which is a dedicated client for dap security so you can think of rabby desktop as basically a very similar thing to Ledger live so Ledger live is a desk desktop application that lets you interact with a bunch of different things on chain such as interacting with you know dii interacting uh with your different addresses on your Hardware wallets things like that while rabby desktop is a alternative to Ledger live here and honestly it already looks a lot better it's got a more app support it seems like it it definitely has more security if it's anything like the rabbi Chrome extension which I've talked about before um and it's got here you can add uh add

new daps yourself you can add ipfs daps you can add local files for daps you can have like your own front end running within within rabby here which is very very cool um and yeah it's got oh yeah it's got the SEC same security features here because you can see that the um the rabby wallet looks exactly the same as it does on the uh on the web web browser extensions there so this is actually very very cool because I don't think Ledger live is going to allow you to basically Implement I don't know if they already do this but if they don't I doubt they're going to do it where they allow you to add your own kind of ipfs or your own files and get around any kind of um front end fees that they want to take as I was just talking about with

Unis swap Ledger live is one of Ledger's Premier Products where they can capture uh revenue from it right by charging fees for various different things whereas I don't think that's rabbie's kind of goal here maybe it is maybe they will add this eventually um if they want to monetize at some point but yeah it just seems like a very nice desktop interface for you to use if you want to use it through pass through with your Hardware wallets stuff like that as well and with your R existing rabby wallets there so yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description below you can check it out for yourself and go download rabby desktop all right so Josh Stark shared an interesting tweet today with a bunch of uh with some statistics here he said a remarkably consistent metric over the last four years is the growth of

non-english trffic to ethereum.org and you can see the chart in front of me how this has kind of uh grown over time so you can see that this shows the ethereum.org non-english percentage of page views it's almost at 30% and it has consistently been growing since since this chart started which was 2019 so you can see here at the beginning of the chart in 2019 it was what 5% then it spiked up in uh early 2020 to around 177% just eyeing the chart here then it kind of like meandered around that for a while until just recently uh I think over the last what is it 18 months or so it has spiked up and been up only since then basically to what we're at today at about 25% of uh page views on ethereum.org and non-english uh page

views now of course this is because of the massive effort the ethereum.org team has put into translating uh the ethereum.org website not only doing it themselves you know the core team doing it themselves but also getting the community involved and I've talked a lot about this they've done their transon in the past that I talked about on the refill as well uh but it's just really really great to see that um the ethereum.org website is is being able to be consumed by various different uh uh um languages around the world because as I've said plenty of times in the past like yes there are a lot of English users within crypto today but the there is a large part of the world that does not speak English and and a large part of the world uh where English is not their first language and especially in

places that really ethereum and crypto generally hasn't penetrated as much because obviously crypto is very us Centric and and Europe Centric right now but there are plenty of places like in Asia like in uh you know India like in the Middle East like in like in Africa where they're not speaking English as their first language or at all and we need to be able to uh uh essentially make this stuff accessible to them not just ethereum.org but everything in crypto accessible to them because crypto is meant to be a global thing ethereum is meant to be a Global Network it is not meant to be limited just to englishspeaking people I mean I personally only speak English I can understand a little bit of Italian because my grandparents um talk to me in Italian um sometimes they can also speak a little bit of English but for me like

I'm all English right but I'm not naive to the fact that I'm I'm an actual outlier I think I think that most people around the world speak uh speak two languages and whether English is their first language or not is is irrelevant to that I guess but they do speak uh two languages I think it is definitely a very kind of like Americanized and and maybe um maybe Australian view as well where you just speak English I think in America it's a bit different because obviously there is a a large um uh Latin American Community there which speaks Spanish and and various other kind of like offshoots of that but for the most part it's very dominated by English right and a lot of people can only speak English you know at least fluently whereas a lot of the world can't speak English at all maybe they can understand

here and there so we need to be able to translate the various different crypto things for them um without them having to use Google Translate because Google Translate is fine but it doesn't do things perfectly especially when it comes to all the terminology we using within crypto and ethereum um it's not going to do the the job that's for sure so yeah kudos to ethereum.org team for all the effort they've put into translating the website here and the results speak for themselves in this chart 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 thanks everyone