Ethereum staking chat, Real world assets and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #510 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where he kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony and since the 20th of December 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for missing yesterday's episode everyone I was feeling a bit under the weather so I wasn't able to record one but uh today's episode will cover the news from uh I guess like the weekend last 48 hours I guess yeah 72 hours or so there um and just for future reference I always announce in the Discord Channel when I'm not going to be doing a refuel so if you join the Discord Channel you can just subscribe to the announcements Channel if you want and then you'll be able to see when there isn't going to be why but it's rare for me to miss an episode like that

with with short notice um but yeah anyway let's get into the news so uh over the weekend actually I spun up my new solo staking PC and I posted it on Twitter here you can see the picture in front of you on your screen I basically spun up a bunch of new validators and also migrated my validators over my old staking PC which I've posted about before but it was really fun uh and you know I posted this and then people are asking for I guess like the specs and things like that and I posted the specs and look the specs are completely overkill for staking like this is a bit I mean the specs on this thing is basically a gaming PC uh except the graphics card obviously I didn't put a uh you know 40 90 Nvidia graphics card in it there was there's no point in

doing that I just have a very basic graphics card in there for uh for graphic output there basically but I don't really use the GUI I mean it's running Ubuntu and you can see it on the screen there uh on the right hand side I have a monitor there but I don't really use that I just SSH into it but I went Overkill with it because I just like pretty things I mean it looks pretty it looks cool I like having things on display I mean obviously with all my figurines and stuff around me uh so I just went Overkill with it and uh you know as I said here I need to be clear for people you don't need this and you can actually run validators on a very low powered Hardware I mean I've talked about the rock 5B board before I've talked about running validators and

Raspberry Pi's before it does depend on how many validators you're running of course like if you're trying to run hundreds of them then obviously you're probably going to need better Hardware than uh than something like this like a rock 5B board but generally you should be okay now the the biggest things I think when with staking to I guess a concern yourself with is really the RAM and the storage space uh so I've got a two terabyte SSD which is enough uh because you only need to run one instance of an execution layering consensus layer node and you can run mini validators off of that but as time goes on you're gonna need more and more storage space obviously so you can buy multiple SSD drives and connect them up together or you can just have one which is what I've got right now just one two

terabyte drive and uh you know when that kind of hits capacity there I'll probably upgrade but I've got 32 gig ram in my solo staking PC I don't think you need 32 gig 16 gig should be enough my rocket pool uh uh staking PC right now is running a 16 gig of RAM I do want to upgrade that the 32 32 gigahertz I feel like 32 gig is definitely more future proof but I got I got 64 gig in um in this PC yeah my new solid stacking PC definitely Overkill right again uh again there so yeah I just wanted to clear that up for people because I know a bunch of people ask me he's like you know do I need like really powerful hardware for this like you don't right you really don't um and as I've shown before you can run staking or run validators off of nux

like little mini PCS you can run them off of Raspberry Pi's or Rock 5B boards you really don't need a lot of hardware for it the biggest expense for as a solo sticker is obviously that eighth requirement right like 32 8th is still worth even at today's price is around what 33 000 33 33 and a half thousand dollars or something like that uh US Dollars that's not cheap but that's going to be the biggest outlay for you for becoming a solo sticker rather than the hardware cost the hardware costs are very very uh cheap here and also there are other options with um I guess like uh solo staking uh you can spin up rocket pool mini pools as well right so I basically joined the rocketpool Oracle Dell over the weekend as well and I put another picture rpr on on Twitter with

this so you can see here this PC is much smaller the specs I mean the specs again are still Overkill you can see on on your screen here but definitely not as Overkill as my solos taking PC um and being part of the Oracle down something that you have to get voted in to be part of so not just anyone can be part of it but it doesn't add that much overhead to running like things like mini pools like I spun up a couple more mini pools over the weekend I have three running off of this box right now so you don't need something like extravagant right uh to do this and spinning up a mini pool only costs you 16 8 plus about I think it's 105 RPL or something right now which isn't uh which which isn't too expensive there as a bond and then you

earn rewards you earn the normal staking rewards but you also as part of the smoothing pool and you also earn RPL in inflation rewards on top of that as well so there are various options here for you now I've had a lot of people ask me for guides on on getting started with solo staking or staking with rocker pool I'm for me to do a guide maybe one day in the future I will like do a full process run through of it but honestly guys like there are so many good guys out there right now and what I followed for my solos taking PC uh because I actually changed from Windows so my old soul is taking PC with Windows I actually changed Ubuntu I followed summer esat's guides which I've um highlighted on the radio feel before you can just search summer ESAT so

s-o-m-e-r-e-s-a-t it's his full name uh medium so he's medium blog on on Google and you'll find guides for pretty much like every combination of an elcl client and I just followed that to basically the letter and it was fine like I I got spun up really well really easily on Linux it didn't take very long maybe maybe a couple hours to get everything going like I synced a fresh execution consensus I I started from I started from basically zero again all I did was import my existing uh validators but you can create uh sorry my existing validator keys but it shows you how to create Keys it shows you how to lock down your you know do some basic security stuff and on top of that I supplemented with the um those guides with guides from eatstaker so if you search eatstaker GitHub there are guides

on there and they were really helpful too particularly with getting the dashboard monitoring set up so they use grafana dashboard um same as Rocket pool but I don't think summer has a guide for that for mainnet he's got guides for that for testnet so I just looked at the East Decker guides and that was really easy to set up as well so if you just use those you you should be fine I mean you can literally just copy paste in the commands into your own terminal you don't need to learn the the terminal you need to learn the command line in order to do it you can just copy paste things now obviously if you want to maintain it if you want to um be more self-sufficient with it it's worth learning but it's not too complex and on The Rocker pull side of things I mean their documentation as

I've mentioned before is very very easy to follow I followed it like starting from basically zero to spin up a mini pool spin up and you know basically create everything like a node account and also joining the Oracle Dow it was very easy and if you run into any issues at all the rockapool Discord is extremely active there's a support channel in there you can go in there and ask any question and there'll be someone there to help you with it so those are your options basically and as I said the guides that already exist are very good but maybe in the future I will do a video guide and you know step by step for people to follow along with uh but yeah it's going to get easier over time as well to do solo staking to stake with rocker pool and and generally obviously

it's it's still like the easiest way to stake is still with like a centralized exchange or just buying like our eth or St for one of these tokens on on Market but it's very very different to being a solo Staker or a rocker pool Staker right like they're very different things it's not even worth comparing them I mean there is solo staking and staking via a mini pool and then there is just buying a uh LSD but there's also you know decentralized lsds like R8 and then there are centralized lsds and then there's even just putting your eth in in the centralized exchange directly and converting it into an LSD I guess but still keeping it on the centralized exchange so there's different tiers here and the reason why it's so easy to do on a centralized exchange like literally they it's like one click staking is

because they do all of this stuff for you but you're taking on custodial risk you'll take of both your funds and with your validators themselves and you're taking on uh eggs at risk too I mean post uh pre-withdrawals you're taking on that exit risk because these lsds traded a discount to uh to eat but I guess post withdrawals is probably not a big deal but really the biggest deal is that that custodial risk and as we've seen with the FTX Fallout and the Celsius Fallout and all these other clipses custodial risks are real guys like it's not just something that people say just for the sake of it they're very very real so if you have the ability to solo stake or you have the ability to uh spin up a mini pool you should definitely look into it especially solo staking I mean as I said you don't need beefy hardware

for less than 500 of Hardware 500 US Dollars you can get a pretty decent or pretty good setup going uh with either a a a rock 5B board or a Raspberry Pi mucks are a bit more expensive I guess it depends where you are in the world but still I mean if you've got the 32e that's worth it and and you can get spun up with that the guides are out there for you to do so and and you should be fine there but anyway I'm going to leave that one at that I just wanted to talk about the the two things that I did over the weekend here because it was a lot of fun and I just love watching the reward like the dashboards watching the rewards roll in watching how my attestations are going and and if I propose any blocks and things like that so yeah just

exciting times for me as an e-staker and I hope some of you join me on this journey all right so speaking of the ethereum core protocol Tomas here from nevermind I put out a screenshot saying 2023 incoming lots of goodies from Alexi and the team at nevermind so this is a screenshot of a bunch of command line interfaces with Alexei saying Geth and prism another mind together have survived withdrawals and 48 4 44 forks and process blob transactions smoothly in a local version It's remarkable because time stamp based forks and withdrawals and 4844 uh and a new setup shows a positive results so basically what this is showing is that all these you know major upgrades that are coming next year working in a private test net that Alexei has spun up here using some

of the most popular clients on ethereum get prism and never mind right and the fact that this is working so smoothly as he says and showing positive results is remarkable because these are major upgrades it's definitely very new things to um to ethereum and for those of you don't know 4844 is actually mostly a consensus layer upgrade where these blobs uh kind of get stored or get processed by the consensus layer are rather than an execution layer so that is it is a pretty major change to how things work on ethereum but the fact that we've got it working in these private tests now it's got them working on devnets uh it bodes well roads very very well for a next year delivery as I've said before we can expect withdrawals in q1 Q2 and we can expect uh 4844 in Q3 Q4 I would say Q4 more

likely for 4844 uh but it seems March April I mean we're on the edge of q1 Q2 there for withdrawals uh coming then as well so yeah just the great to see an update here from Thomas and Alexei and speaking of 4844 Terence from prilose put another thread out over the weekend where he said how does erp4844 change the current scheme where the validator outsources block construction to the Builder through relay as an Mev boost so as I just mentioned this is uh 4844 is it's got to do mostly with the consensus layer if you want to learn about how that affects things like relays and Mev boost This Thread from Terence is uh the one for you so I'll link that in the YouTube description below all right so speaking of those upgrades uh that I I just spoke about I put out a

tweet over over the weekend where I said most exciting end user-facing ethereum upgrades coming in 2023 staking withdrawals which completes ethereum's long time coming rollout of proof of stake and unlocking a world of freedom for stakers and as I said that's due q1 Q2 now the reason why I say this completes ethereum's POS rollout proof of stake rollout is because I don't believe that proof of stake is fully deployed on ethereum until we have withdrawals right now we have as I mentioned before like about about 90 of the way there but we need to close that loop with withdrawals and contrary to popular belief I think that with withdrawals being enabled is going to get more each staked than there otherwise would have been because it's again another massive de-risking event here even though we're in a bear Market even though you know the price is doing

what it's doing who really cares right I think that people are going to continue stacking eth they're going to continue staking it after they stack it and withdrawals really does de-risk that for people so and this is an end user-facing thing because as I said the merge wasn't really an end user-facing thing right the the merge didn't really affect anything for people using the network uh didn't affect anything for stakers themselves besides having to obviously make sure that they were running the correct uh node configuration having an ER and cl locally and running their running the correct flags and worrying about Mev boosts and stuff like that but in terms of uh them actually doing something on chain you know through the execution layer uh that you know there wasn't anything different there but with taking withdrawals there are and end users are affected by this especially if

end users want to play around with D5 and and hold on to these LSD tokens that are risky out to hold now because they can trade at a discount whereas uh post withdrawals you wouldn't really expect them to trade at much of a discount if anything because there is that Arbor Loop there that can be closed uh so you still will see them trade at discounts or premiums based on a variety of other factors but the biggest factor and the biggest reason why there has been a discount or a premium is due to this R Loop not being able to be closed with the beacon chain itself so it's kind of acting like a closed-ended fund right now right where I mean it's similar to kind of grayscale gbtc wear or ethi where money can go in right b2c and it can go in but it can't come out uh

that's what that's what's happening with the beacon chain right now Heath can go into the beacon chain but it can't come out uh uh with staked teeth I mean obviously execution layer rewards are unlocked but staked eat and consensus Lair rewards can't be unlocked yet but once they are you're going to see those uh those uh you know the the um staking be the risk de-risked and you're going to see those premiums or discounts on the lsds uh collapse basically and secondly here I said uh Proto dank sharding slash erp4844 stands to reduce roll-up fees by 10 to 100 x which is Dooku 3q4 now I will caveat this by saying that to take advantage of this the layer twos need to upgrade themselves as well so some of them or I I expect like a lot of them will be ready by the time 4844 rolls out but

then some of them will have to still add these upgrades in add these changes in for users to be able to take advantage of it but this is definitely the biggest user-facing upgrade to ethereum in quite a while like this will be felt by everyone on layer twos right and run on specific quickly I mean there are other like things that people call layer 2 such as validiums which won't really be affected by this too much because validium is already store a lot of their stuff uh although their data kind of like off chain right uh whereas uh Roll-Ups don't they store it on chain and that is like 97 of the costs for them there's a proofs and then there's the core data and then we can replace the they don't have to use call data anymore they will be using uh 4844 blob

transactions so end users will definitely feel this the most out of and at anything in a very long time that's come to ethereum so I'm looking forward to that more than anything I mean but probably not as much as the merge but like in terms of of hierarchy here definitely 40 out 44 over withdrawals even though I believe withdrawals uh should come first and they are coming first and it's necessary for them to come first and I understand that but in terms of like an end user-facing upgrade and something that excites me the most 4844 or Proto dank shining is definitely up there so I just wanted to highlight those two things and some reasons behind why I'm excited about them and why end users should be excited about them as well all right so the biggest news I think from the last few days that came out of

Visa is that Visa is actually experimenting with uh account abstraction so I've talked about account obstruction before and how Argent wallet has been uh building with account extraction in mind for quite a while now has been a big champion of it as well as the starknet ecosystem while Visa announced that they've actually been exploring using account abstraction uh techniques on stockware using Argent wallet so and they're actually not just a kind of um uh this isn't just a research thing they're actually implementing these things from I guess the thread here you can read and from their um their blog post actually implementing these things and working with them within I believe kind of like private or test networks for themselves rather than on public ethereum but this is obviously a stepping stone towards that and as Paulina correctly points out

here they say more of this please an application clearly defined with surveyed market demand that he's done best on blockchains and he's using the best tech appropriate for the task no ponzis no token shield no conspiracy theories just a real world problem with a viable solution and there can completely right like this is what we want to see more of we want to see real businesses adopting this technology using it within their own network and also uh experimenting and working with the existing Technologies such as account abstraction Stark net or stockwest technology and Argent wallet which has been around for for a while now so I think this is just really cool it's a huge announcement and it's a huge I guess like vote of confidence to see Visa working directly with ethereum or continuing their work with ethereum they have done stuff in the past they bought

the um I believe I think they bought a crypto punk I believe it was and they and they kind of done some did some stuff around uh creating a roll up or a layer two on ethereum I believe that was Visa it might have been another company but I believe it was it was Visa they're all experimenting with payments networks using crypto so they really do have I think this uh I guess like research and development arm of of Visa that is looking into all this stuff which I think is very positive as I said before D fires exists today is awesome because of the infrastructure that it's providing for people to use it's not awesome because of the ponzis or because of the high IAP wires you can get during bull markets or anything like that I believe those things are fun and whatever but they're not what I regard

as Finance it's more what I regard as kind of like a casino when I think of Finance I think of payments right I think of uh loans you can get I think of exchange like foreign exchange of currencies or exchange of different assets and that's why the most I guess resilient and longest lasting and most used and popular default Protocols are those ones that do that like uni swap maker compound are there right uh these or and payments I mean payments hasn't really taken off yet because I think their lack of scale has definitely affected our payments on ethereum I think that's pretty much the number one reason uh because obviously if you're trying to do payments you know you want to I don't know the classic example is buying a cup of coffee say it's going to cost you like four dollars or something

like that and if you're doing that on layer one ethereum even that the fees where they are now it's still going to be that the fees are still going to eat into that right and then to move that around on ethereum layer one to consolidate it and everything like that and to cash it out if you're a merchant adds more fees so fees really hit into a debt but if you're doing it at Layer Two especially if you're doing payments on something like a validium where you can actually store the data off chain at least until 4844 comes in you have basically negligible fees which is exactly what we need for a Global Payments Network you can't I mean I know that visa and and MasterCard and other I guess credit card companies or uh digital payments uh uh I guess like providers they do charge a fee I believe

in Australia at least visa and MasterCard on fpos transactions not credit transactions so like out of your savings or your bank account directly they charge like a 30 Cent fee and that's charged to the merchant unless the merchant passes it on to you but that's a 30 flat fee it doesn't matter what the amount of of uh I guess like you're sending is and it works similarly to ethereum where you can send like a million eight dollars worth of eighth or a one dollar worth of eighth and it's going to cost you the same in in gas fees but the problem is the volatility as well like even in this low fee environment it's still uh it's still all not great right for these payments and also when because of that volatility on layer one fees will can go up really easily and then you have this kind of

thing where I guess Merchants would have to do like load balancing and things like that whereas you don't have to worry about these problems on layer too they're easily built around or or create you can create different Technologies to deal with this so anyway very cool to see Visa experimenting with this I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out for yourself all right so speaking of layer twos a Declan here from uh consensus who's the product lead on the consensus zkbm put out a thread where he started with multi-prover ZK VM is the fastest route to a no training wheels roll up a roll-up that gives businesses and consumers confidence to deploy protocols and dollars a roll up that accelerates web 3 adoption so if you're interested in learning about a multi-proving and

how that applies to ZK Tech specifically ZK VMS This Thread from Declan gives you a brief overview of that so I just wanted to hide this for you guys which you can go check out in the YouTube description below uh but yeah it's a very short thread so definitely you recommend giving it a read uh moving on staying on the layer 2 topic here we have a new blog post from arbitrim which is called which is part of a series called The Block Explorer so they dived into something called the delay attack problem and discuss how it was handled in various versions of the Almond uh arbitrine roll-up protocol and this was written by Ed Felton one of the co-founders of Chandler people behind are arbitrim here so a bit of a technical read uh not no fancy math or anything like that but if you're

interested in in I guess like reading about how arbitrim Works under the hood this new series looks like the place to be so I'll link this as well in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right so we have a thread here from uh Liam who starts off by saying make a recently experienced an increase in revenues over November driven by the real world asset category let's explore what's happening here and this is 11 tweet thread uh looking at how real world assets integrated with maker is leading to increased revenues now I've talked about maker and their approach to onboarding real world assets before and what I mean by real world asset series basically assets that are not natively on chain so for example like a like a house right or real estate generally uh gold for example uh you know Deeds to to

um I mean I guess like the Deeds of the house would probably be the thing that gets brought on chain and you could have like an on-chain representation of it but like anything that can come on just Commodities generally anything that exists within the real world that is not natively issued on chain so for example eth is obviously natively issued on chain yeah I see 20 tokens are natively issued on chain if they're part of a project like you can issue an erc20 token for something like a stock but that stock is not native on chain it's native to where it was first issued so was issued in the U.S on to the New York Stock Exchange then it obviously only exists as like an IOU in erc24 it's not native whereas something like the and I speak of random erc20 here the link token for example exists natively on

ethereum uh and so does obviously things like eighth and then that goes for other things as well that um that don't fit into the native category like right to bitcoin for example that's not a native asset on ethereum that's uh IOU IOU that has been issued uh by um BDC that's backed on bitcoin so if the beat the BTC on bitcoin is backing it but if for some reason that wallet was to I don't know if they lost the private keys to it and it came out that they no longer had the BTC backing it up then wbtc would logically go to zero because there'd be nothing backing it so that's what I kind of mean there but I think and as I said I've said this before I think Maker's approach here to onboarding real world assets is one that I can really get on

board of and I know America has come under criticism before with a centralization vectors around die because of this but I really think that if we want to build a robust uh you know strong uh very much used and and value-driving ecosystem for millions of people tens of millions of potentially billions of people and uh we want to bring like the defy stuff to them we're going to need to integrate with real world assets right like you can't just rely on the stuff that's natively on chain you need to bring real world assets on chain and the the biggest success that we've had so far with that is stable coins I believe stable coins is probably crypto's killer use case at least right now and that falls into the money category as well of of what blockchains can do but cryptos I mean the most used thing right is is stable

coins like you can see that in there they used in centralized exchanges they're used within defy they're used for payments at least for many different things and the fact that we brought them in and they became so popular is is due to the fact that they integrate with things very easily uh people want US dollars right but it's still a real world asset so we need to bring more of that stuff on chain and yes it's not going to be decentralized yes it's going to lead to centralization uh in part of defy but I think the point is is that there is not going to be a world where all of defy and all the assets within D5 are decentralized we don't live in that world today and I don't believe we're going to live in that world in the future it's just not how it works

because there is no way to have a decentralized registry of uh real estate assets for example because at the end of the day if you have like a detour house what is defending that deed right the government that that house is uh I guess so the nation state that that house is part of and then ultimately it's the government of that nation state right the ethereum uh chain is not uh defending your house for example whereas the ethereum chain is Defending Your native ethereum assets but it can't defend something in the physical world so there are limitations here and the physical and digital worlds uh definitely need to come together but by coming together that it's all going to just be some some form of centralization because there has to be an ultimate source of Truth there ethereum can't be

the ultimate source of truth of your house deed because your house deed uh wasn't issued on on ethereum and even if it was issued on ethereum it's not defended by ethereum because it ultimately defended by the ishua which is the um the nation-state that you're I guess like uh that your real estate belongs to essentially I mean it not belongs to but like lives in so in this in their scope of influence and I've gone through all this before but I feel like it's worth kind of reiterating here why real world assets are so important and why they can't just be natively issued on chain there has to be intermediary there there has to be a kind of uh someone managing it there has to be someone to go to uh because if you lose the you know say for example this is this is a classic example people

people use say you have your house deed on ethereum and you lose that access to that wallet or does that mean you don't have ownership of your house anymore no it doesn't the ownership of your house the deed exists in Meet space first and you've just got like a digital representation of it on chain but that digital representation can be reissued to you if you in the event that you lose it whereas if you lose your eth on chain if you lose access to that eighth uh say you lost the access to that wallet that was holding in the eighth there's no one to go to because ethereum is that ultimate source of Truth you can try to go to ethereum ethereum chain you could try to start an EIP that says hey I lost my eighth can can we you know do an irregular State transition to give

giving my eth back but no one's gonna before that you're not gonna get that through it's not gonna happen so there's not really anyone that you can actually go to whereas if you lost access to the the digital deed to your house you can just go to the registry office and be like in in the real world and be like hey like I need another deed right or I need a physical copy of my deed because it exists physically first and then digitally second there hopefully that is clear for people but I'm going to move on from there uh you can go give this thread from Liam a Reid I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so a few defy related upgrades over the weekend so Perpetual protocol has introduced fee sharing so the launch of usdc fee sharing AKA Lazy River 2.0

you can lock your perp tokens for a real yields here this is pretty cool that uh this is basically being distributed uh oh sorry the trading fees here is being distributed via usdc instead of uh per the perp token itself I think one I mean that's a it's a better way of doing things just generally from what I've seen because if you inflate the token then obviously the token is going to be down only but two it may have been done for regulatory reasons as well as we've seen like fee sharing can make your thing look like a security um but I mean I'm not going to wade into that for today's discussion but I think this is really cool uh I I really hope that I see where we can see more projects doing this like basically having people lock up their tokens or

having people stake their tokens and getting fees distributed to them in another token such as usdc or maybe even like die or eth or something like that but uh but yeah this is really cool you can go check out the thread explaining how this all works I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so unisop announced today the unisob foundation's second wave of Grants now I remember I covered their first wave a little while ago this is the second one they've awarded uh almost a million dollars to 19 Grand so 946 000 to 19 grants covering a bunch of different categories such as protocol growth research and development Community growth and governance and stewardship here so you can go check out this blog post for a full list of uh the

grantees essentially and check out what they've been working on uh but yeah this is awesome I love these foundations or at least these kind of like projects that have massive treasuries even though they're in their native token giving out these I guess like tokens to projects and actually sticking by what they said when they started their doubt I know there's a kind of a meme right now that these projects they started now they have a token they put like 50 of their token in this Dow Treasury and then it just gets rated and just gets looted by unscrupulous individuals or projects whereas it seems unisop is is doing relatively well with their treasure I must say they're they're doing these grants they're giving them out to legit projects they're vetting them I think optimism is doing really well here and ens as well there's I mean pretty much

every Project's going to be doing this but also it the the size of the treasury since it's a lot of time in the token it's kind of hard to call a a strict treasury because the token price can can vary so much because I guess like uh token prices can go down 90 in yeah as we've seen right so say you issue a token and it's a bull market and you have like 10 billion dollars worth of a treasury and then a year later your treasury is like 500 million because your token price went down 95 so you can't really Market at 10 billion and be like okay we have 10 billion dollars to give away and then a year later you've only got 500 million dollars and this is why some Treasures will actually cash out or sell tokens from the treasury to you know Public Market participants that

put in usdc or put in a stable asset which I think is a prudent thing to do uh but generally outside of that I just think even though you know you're still paying out tokens even if it's the native token or something else it's good to see the love being shared here and good to see the money being shared around the ecosystem all right a small update for you from calstop today but an important one they announced a feature long requested by the community or cow Community as they say here Traders can now swap ethnatively on their favorite mov protected Dex aggregator AKA cow swap without having to wrap it this is really cool uh as you guys know like to use each within most of defy you have to wrap it into uh width or width sorry I should say wrapped ether which obviously

adds another an extra step and obviously adds more of a more of a gas fee here for you but now on cow swap you don't have to do that anymore you can swap with using eth natively so very very cool feature calsop just keeps doing these quality of life features which I love seeing uh but yeah you can go check this out for yourself I'm sure if you're a regular Cal swap user you may have already noticed this but just wanted to highlight it for you guys all right so last two things here just to shout out my talk from nft Fest which happened last month is now live this was the talk I did about censorship on ethereum and Mev boost and all that sort of stuff I think it's a pretty good summary it goes for about 30 minutes pretty good summary of the entire thing

got to do with censorship on ethereum Mev boost of fact sanctions all that good stuff there um you should definitely go check it out if you're interested in that stuff it gives you a nice concise summary it's probably something that you can send to someone else uh to or someone who's asking you about this uh to to kind of watch and and get a feel for these issues that we're facing I will kind of warn that it is like not totally Noob friendly I try to be new friendly but honestly these subjects aren't for noobs to be honest like because of the fact that there's so much Nuance to it because there are so many moving Parts because you actually have to have so much prior knowledge to even understand uh what's going on to begin with it's very hard to dumb it down to a

noob level but I think I did a pretty decent job but still you should show this to people who are asking and then they can ask you questions and then maybe I can answer them for you as well if you would like but yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right to round out today's episode uh I wanted to talk a bit about the binance I guess like uh fud uh I guess depending on what side of the the aisle you sit out here it's fud or it's truth or whatever but anyway I put out a tweet over the weekend where I said a simple way to test binance's solvency everyone withdraw their assets from binance into a hardware wallet right now you get self-custody and everyone gets to see how solvent binance is it's a win-win

now I know obviously has binance has uh withdrawal limits but they're very very generous if you haven't kyc'd on no this is binance not binance us I I don't know if they still allow you to withdraw if you haven't kyc'd I believe they do but it's a very small amount but if you do kyc and you do the the standard um the standard uh verification I think you can still withdraw up to like 100 BTC per day which is 1.6 million dollars per day and I'm gonna I assume that almost everyone that uses binance does not have that much money on there right uh and the whales that do have more than that on there probably are verified Beyond just a standard verification so that shouldn't be an issue for people to be

able to withdraw their funds we've seen a lot of funds actually being withdrawn from binance lately which has tested their solvency but what I'm trying to get across here is a more important Point regardless of if binance is solvent or not I think they're fine by the way I've said this for a while I don't think that their situation is the same as FTX at all to be honest they don't have a d-gen trading arm like Alameda that they were commonly deposits with and and CZ is a is a pretty ruthless operator but he's very different to SPF he's a very different way of doing things so I don't think that there's any cause for concern here honestly like I know I'm happy to say that like maybe I I'll be wrong maybe I won't but I don't think I am on this one I've I would be warning about it if I if

I thought I was wrong but in saying that my number one rule above everything else whether that's someone's solvent or whether a company solvent or insolvent doesn't matter get your funds off centralized exchanges if you are just keeping it there as storage like I've said before if you're an active Trader if you're trying to trade in size that maybe D5 doesn't let you then fine you understand the risks by keeping them on a centralized exchange you're doing it because you're getting something out of it but if you're literally leaving these funds on a centralized Exchange only to just store it as a as a cold storage solution or as a long-term storage solution you're insane I'm just going to be honest yeah you're insane especially if it's a material amount that you couldn't stand to lose which honestly you shouldn't be that invested in crypto in the first place but that's

a different discussion but generally it doesn't cost much to self-custody yes there's a bit more extra steps you have to buy a hardware wallet you have to secure your seed phrase but it gives you lots of peace of mind you don't have to worry about doing verification or you know doing extra verification on these centralized exchanges we just ask for that sometimes like coinbase for example will constantly ask you to verify or re-verify yourself you have to do with any of that you have peace of mind that it's it's in your custody it's on there you can uh sleep well at night knowing that even if any of these exchanges blow up you're not affected by it and it's just a good uh hygiene not your keys not your coins as they say and I think that that is just generally a rule that everyone should follow regardless of if

you think something solvent or not like I honestly I have exchanges that I use very regularly and I've used for a very long time so I've mentioned coinja before which is an Australian based exchange I used them since 2013 since I first got into crypto I haven't really ever left anything material on there but in at the same time I don't think that there's any risk of me leaving funds on there they're fully regulated uh they're they're legit as legit can come same with something like coinbase but still I wouldn't leave funds on there doesn't matter how much I trust them uh at the end of the day I trust myself more and I trust myself to self-cast anymore and I know that self-custody isn't going to work for everyone I know there's a lot of I guess we call them normies right or retail investors that are always going

to use centralized exchanges to cut to do their funds but if you're listening to the refuel and you've been through this year and you've seen all these blow ups then and your funds are still on centralized exchanges in my humble opinion I think that's dumb right I'm not calling you dumb I think that action of keeping those funds there is dumb and I think that you can easily Rectify it by purchasing a hardware wallet and storing it yourself now what however how do I want to buy I personally only used Ledger and uh grid plus lattice one and I don't there's only ones I've used that anyone to have experience with they both work really well they both come in different form factors obviously uh and depending on your needs like if you're a power user and your power on chain user maybe a lattice one would be better for

you because uh it's got that bigger screen for you to sign transactions on it's got better it's got better security uh for like active users but if you are someone who just wants to hold your crypto and not do anything with it then probably maybe a ledger is better for you because it's a smaller form factor you don't have to keep it uh you don't have to worry about it too much you don't have to worry you can just keep it away put it in a in a safe or wherever you want to store it and that's it either option is way better than keeping it on a centralized exchange at least in my opinion here but yeah anyway I'm gonna leave that one that and just my final comment around just buying it specifically and their solvency I I think when looking at the

centralized exchanges you need to really weigh up where they're I guess insolvency could come from versus where it came from for other exchanges with FTX it's very easy to to know where it came from right it came from Alameda it came from uh SPF trying to run a centralized exchange while also trying to run a Degen fund where he just yelled into everything and then blowing himself up in the D gen fun but then having access to this I guess he thought it was a line of credit from customer deposits to cover that and that's how everything blew up right uh and then you can kind of look at everything that was uh that was affected by that by the contagion of that well blockfi right three hours Capital it's uh borrowing from everyone and then getting blown up on FTX and then

obviously Celsius and like all this leveraged stuff going on all these bad trades that were that were happening could finance and CZ be exposed to that I'm sure they could but if you look at the way they operate it's very very different binance from from the outside in I'm not trying to Praise by Nancy I think that um obviously as I've said like CZ is a villain in his own right I don't think that anyone should be simping for him or pray him any of that sort of stuff but when I look at CZ and look at SPF I see two completely different people two completely different operators working towards two completely different goals SPF wanted to uh I guess like inflate his ego he wanted to enrich himself he wanted all the power and you saw from his donations as well to politicians he

much more cared about power than he cared about money and money for him was a means to get that power whereas CZ He does care about power don't get me wrong but it is not his main Pursuit from the last few years watching him watching how he's operated I think and I truly believe he cares much more about just growing binance as a company than he cares about giving himself more power he wants binance to be the biggest centralized exchange which it is and he wants to continue to be that he and he probably wants a monopoly which is obviously bad in of itself but it's very different to what SPF wanted and that leads to different incentives that leads to different uh actions taken by these these different parties here and I think comparing the two doesn't really make much sense right and that's it's the

same with comparing to coinbase I don't think Brian Armstrong cares about uh uh you know money or cares about his own personal wealth as much as he cares about advancing the coinbase mission events in the crypto Mission advancing you know making his company bigger and better and stronger so whereas I don't I think FTX and Alameda was literally just a stepping stone for SPF to accumulate wealth and then accumulate power from there and his personality literally fits in with that to me anyway I'm going to digress and leave it at that one for today uh 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 newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone