Ethereum's social layer, ZKP2P update and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #718 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of delway refuel very latest news etherum EOS system I'm your host and this is sign 23rd of January 2024 right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today we have an update around the case that Roman is facing here with regards to tornado cach now as you guys know Fielder developers of tornado cash were arrested and charged with a bunch of offenses such as money laundering uh in relation to tornado cash and today we have an update from Roman he shared this tweet here on uh on Twitter said 2024 is the year that will Define the rest of my life honestly I'm scared but also hopeful that this community cares with a passion please donate towards my legal defense and you can donate at wew want justice.org so I mean if this is something that you're

interested in donating to um uh you know you can go ahead and donate I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I want to explain why I think that donating to this cause is obviously a net positive for the entire ecosystem so when it comes to tornado cash and it comes to I guess what Roman and others have been charged with they've been char charge with things like moneya laundering right and I think that there's been a lot of discussions around you know what constitutes money laundering in the context of onchain mixers you know are they actually guilty of it considering that they weren't in control of the uh the protocol itself uh there were arguments made that they had some control over it because there was a token uh there was a dow and the team earned a lot of the token so all of this

stuff is going to get hashed out in court and the reason why I think it's worth donating uh to this cause and obviously don't feel obligated to donate I'm not saying that you know you should or shouldn't I'm just saying that you know giving my opinion on why I think it's a noble cause to donate to is because Raman is not just fighting for himself yeah he's fighting to set precedent around a bunch of different things within crypto at least set positive precedent about about about a bunch of different things within crypto that affect all of us I mean the right to privacy is something that is always under attack always from every government around the world basically even the ones that we consider to be free governments right even the even the ones that we consider to be like the Western Nations that we say oh we live

in a free country I mean if you don't have privacy especially Financial privacy at all then I wouldn't consider you to be able to be living in a free country I wouldn't consider you to be a free person if you weren't able to have Financial privacy uh here and you know not just Financial privacy but just encryption generally privacy of your uh of your Communications via messages uh you know governments around the world have been trying to outlaw this stuff for decades right they've been trying to fight against it for decades but luckily for us and not so luckily for them it's extremely hard for them to Outlaw it because it's all based on math right they they they'd have to try and Outlaw math and you know it's funny there was a there was something that I believe a former prime minister in Australia said

uh a while ago where they said you know the the laws of um math don't apply or something the laws of Australia apply it was something something silly right and it just shows like how out of touch a lot of these politicians are uh with with technology and especially when it comes to things like math that powers the technology right like at the end of the day encryption Powers all this stuff which is basically just math you're right if you break it down to its its core Primitives there and that's exactly what is being fought for here and now of course I think that Roman and the others that were arrested should get a very fair trial and if the charges actually you know you know if the charges actually are something that they did and they knowingly did and they knowingly uh you know did whatever they're being

charged with then regardless of who thinks they're guilty and who doesn't they should get a fair trial to determine that I believe strongly that everyone should be entitled to a fair trial but unfortunately most people don't get it because it's expensive right a fair trial is extremely expensive especially when it's the government kind of um Prosecuting you for something like this like it becomes a very very expensive Endeavor so that's exactly why Roman here is asking for donations at we want justice.org which you can check out I'll link it in the YouTube description below um and yeah I mean there's more a lot more information on the page here for you to check out and I definitely uh have verified this myself and it is not a scam or anything like that it is not someone trying to just kind of drain uh drain money from from you and fish you

whatever this is a legitimate site it's a legitimate donation you know place to donate and you can see already in the comments a bunch of people kind of donated uh you know Ryan Sean Adams from Bank list says that bank list donated $10,000 here there is a I guess like kyc when you're donating obviously flies in the face of what I was saying about privacy but uh like that's an unfortunate consequence like kyc is just a plague on I guess like the traditional Financial system and it is something that every kind of uh I guess money transmitter as they're called needs to do kyc AML whether it actually helps in anything or not doesn't matter whether it's just security the theater or not I know if you believe it's security theater like I do then yeah I mean that's uh that's what it is there but

you can go check that out for yourself if you're not comfortable with kind of doxing yourself I believe that there are other ways to donate I don't have them handy right now maybe there is um something in a means thread here uh where you can donate uh basically yeah by buying limited edition nfts yeah there is something in a means tweet here which I actually uh didn't didn't share today so I'll share that in the YouTube description as well he linked it in the replies here there are other ways to donate if you did not want to dox yourself or kind of like give up your your privacy here in order to donate to this course so you don't have to donate um just through the we want justice.org there are other ways and I'm sure if you maybe reached out to Amin if you were

you know considering a a donation and you didn't want to kind of dox yourself he would probably have other ways to do it as I mean is a very trusted and respected member of the Ean Community uh and he has been you know one of the most outspoken people when it comes to this stuff is is definitely a true Chad as we call them when it comes to this stuff so yeah you can go check all of that out but as I said this is something that I believe people should support uh you know as I said like it's totally up to you there's no there's no you know it's not you're not being forced to support and at the end of the day it's up to you how much you want to donate and honestly even if you don't donate money you can just help spread the word like that's

honestly I think that's a big deal if you have like a community that you want to share this with if you just want to RT it on Twitter go ahead and do that just keep sharing it keep this top of mind for people because this as I said is very serious not just for Roman but for obviously the future of a lot of the things that we uh enjoy in crypto such as self- custody Financial privacy uh uh you know privacy of communications as well because there are a bunch of crypto protocols working on that identity all these sorts of stuff right this is definitely critical for the future of all of that anyway you can go check these out I'll link them in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so we have update with the SEC versus binance now I covered a tweet

from meta law man last week uh or a few days ago maybe on the SEC versus coinbase update uh and it's interesting the binance one is a bit different because the judge is uh focusing on oh not the judge sorry the case is also focused on B USD and B&B so as you guys know B USD was shut down by the SEC the binance and stable coin and B&B has long been thought to be a a security or an investment contract whatever you want to call it here so that's a topic here but what stuck out to me in this and I'll link this tweet in the YouTube description below for you to check out is that this SEC is saying something completely opposite in binance's cas case in court against binance than they were against coinbase when it came to Securities and what tokens uh I guess

like apply or what what things apply to Securities and you can see Austin Campbell here replied and said you know correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the BD argument basically apply to all gift card and reward programs um which which you know I guess like is the point of what the SEC is trying to get across here is that everything's a security everything's an investment contract so there's a lot of kind of I guess double speak here there's a lot of hypocrisy there's a lot of just contradictions here and there are a lot of great replies um in in the in the comments and and a really great overview from meta law man here which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to check out but yeah just seems like the SEC is grasping its straws here it seems like their lawyers aren't really arguing

in good faith aren't really arguing uh to the letter of the law and honestly like as I said I think my the chances of them winning the coinbase case are quite high with binance is a little bit trickier only because binance has already been uh you know charged and settled with the Department of Justice so that makes I guess like their case a bit harder to defend even though it is the same CA very similar case not the same case but a very similar case to coinbase they still have things like B USD and BNB right so it is it is kind of a difference here but as I said like I I I still believe that Queen base has a really good chance of winning when it comes to binance they may like win in that they settle some way uh because honestly it's probably worth their time

to do that rather than fight it out in court because they've already had to deal with the Department of Justice but we're going to have to see how that all shakes out there but anyway you can go check out metalor man's tweet I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so I guess as you guys have seen over the last 24 hours especially client diversity has been the hottest topic on TW on crypto Twitter really I mean on ethereum Twitter uh it's been everywhere and I think that what really kicked it off was that DC investor put out a tweet where he basically tweeted at coinbase saying hey I'm removing all of my you know eat that I had stake with you uh because you guys are running basically 100% gu as we assume they are and this is bad for the network because

it's bad for client diversity and of course off of that there was a bunch of people talking about it Brian Armstrong actually replied to the DC investor and said that they're looking into it and then a bunch of coinbase protocol Specialists also said this and then eventually we got an updated update thread from coinbase cloud themselves where they said that they obviously believe execution client uh execution layer client diversity on ethereum is is a critical concern and they said they're going to have more of a I guess like update by the end of February uh this year so probably I guess like a month from now or so they're going to have more of an update there and more of a road map but they are planning on moving off gu uh as soon as they can here and the fact that Brian knows about it means

that there's probably some pressure being put on as well which is great to see so really I mean we did our job I think you know I went on that long rant yesterday about how I believe that coinbase needs to obviously get off GE but not just them Li as well and there were some discussions around Lio and how Lio is planning to you know obviously reduce their Reliance on gu over time uh which is great great to see but coinbase did bring up some interesting points and some relevant points in this thread here they basically said that up until recently and maybe recently the last 6 to 12 months uh other execution layer clients probably weren't up to spec for someone like coinbase to run because they were further behind than gu and I do sympathize with that argument you know I actually have a blog post from

July 2020 that I wrote on the daily way substack so this is what three and a half years ago now where I wrote about client diversity uh and you know I mean that's a very long time ago this was pre Beacon chain even being live the beacon chain went live December 1st 2020 obviously Prem merge a very long time ago and I was talking in that post about how hey you could use nethermind you could use Bas you could use Aragon as a solo Staker or as someone who at the time was just running a full node um and if you weren't mining you know you couldn't stake yet but as a solo Staker uh at that point you were taking minimal risk running these things because it was really just you and your validators and most soloers probably don't run a lot of validators right so when you think about

it from from that kind of perspective there was minimal risk there for you but for a large staking operation there is a lot more risk involved so they want to wait until these things are relatively stable until they've been out for a while until they become much better clients and over the last 12 months they have definitely uh have become much better clients and and definitely ready for for coinbase to kind of use now I think and that's why they're basically putting this tweet thread out and this these kind of updates out and putting that signal out there but at the end of the day I don't think this would have happened nearly as fast as it did if it wasn't for the social layer push and I actually quote tweeted coinbase's tweet where I said this is ethereum's social layer at work don't let anyone tell you

that the social layer isn't important the social layer is the most important thing in ethereum as I've banged on about for years now but I do want to kind of cave out that with Sam that there is limits to the social layer I have said in the past that I think that the social layer is limited in what it can do with regards to staking distribution obviously we put a lot of pressure on on Lio and there's been a lot of talk about Lio being a large part of the network for a very long time now and hasn't really moved the needle there and the only thing that's really moved the needle in terms of stopping Lio from from growing more on a on a relative basis they've still grown on a real basis but on a relative basis their growth has basically stalled was because

there was more competition from other protocols there was vampire attacks going on right there was uh incentives going on all that sorts of stuff there uh and that's why you know we've seen a big kind of uh a shift over to these other other protocols here but and the social layer reinforces that by basically acting as a marketing vehicle and basically saying hey you know you should stay with other providers here the other providers here's how you do it you know here's how you sol stake if you want to here's how you set up a rocker pool node all these sorts of stuff right but when it comes to actually affecting large scale kind of direct change it's very hard for the social ler to do that with staking distribution but it is very easy for the for the social ler to do that with client diversity we have

precedent for this we did it with consensus layer client diversity where we basically push these other the providers to get off majority prism and it was easier back then because the clients most of the consensus layer clients were basically basically built around the same time which means they were up to spec at at around the same time and coinbase Cloud actually even mentions it in their Twitter thread here where they said that when they switched to Lighthouse they actually needed the lighthouse team to implement a feature called remote signing in order to allow for them to switch over and then the lighthouse team did that and coinbase Cloud was able to switch over there so we as I said we've had precedent of the social a having real and Lasting change here and we're we're doing it again now if coinbase goes from 100% gu to like 0%

gu and goes like fully to nethermind or Bas or whatever else this I believe would bring uh gu's super majority down uh sorry gu offer super majority it would bring gu's market share down below 66% I think I think just doing the rough math in my head it's kind of we guesstimating here but I think that should along with some maybe lter not operators getting off getting off gu that should bring us down to below 66% which is the super majority threshold now as long as we're below that even by you know 0.1% that is is great now obviously we want to get that even lower like ideally I've gone through this before ideally we don't want any one client being o over 50% but let's start small right let's start with that first goal in mind is getting gu below the

super majority because then we get rid of the critical risk then we get B you know get rid of the biggest issue right now which is the fact that if there was as I explained yesterday a bug in gu uh right now we would finalize on that bug chain and it would be a show to enact the social layout and to do a social coordination fork and you know when it comes to the social layer as well I think that there are two aspects to it there are the there's the aspect to it where social layer can affect out of protocol change which is client diversity stuff which is um which is staking diversity stuff which is kind of setting the mission and goals of the ethereum network you know censorship stuff like that but when it comes to direct in protocol stuff such as social

slashing as I've discussed before such as potentially rolling back the chain after like a bug on a super majority client that is quite literally the nuclear option that is the last resort we should never ever enact that option unless we out of all other options and I've gone through this before about why that's the case uh you know it destroys ethereum's credible neutrality it it destroys ethereum's value prop it just is really bad for ethereum and we are building ethereum as a network to basically make it so that that social layer while you know that social option while it exists should never have to be used because at the end of the day as I said like if we use it uh a lot of ethereum's credible neutrality goes away which is the main point here so as I said the social layer is extremely

important it does have its limitations but don't let anyone tell you that it's not important because it's very important without the social a without ethereum social a putting pressure on coinbase and others to change over it probably wouldn't have happened for a long time if ever you know maybe maybe it wouldn't happened at all we don't know the fact that we put pressure on it and and it's happening now is a testament to ethereum's uh social a here and a testament to the ethereum community so kudos to everyone who made noise about this big kudos to DC investor for finally getting you know Brian Armstrong's attention I know there were other people at coinbase some of the protocol Specialists out there they definitely had attention on this but at the end of the day they're part of a centralized company Brian's at the head of that company he's the CEO so if he's

actually pushing for something it's more likely to get done much faster than than otherwise so yeah just wanted to say big kudos to to DC there but also a huge shout out to Super Fizz who has been banging the consensus sorry banging the client diversity drum for a long time probably even longer than I have honestly like I think even longer than I have definitely probably and definitely been a lot more active and louder about it than I have on places like Twitter and on Reddit uh and speaking of Reddit superf shared today basically a post that he put on Reddit all the way back in I believe it was February 2022 so over two years ago now uh he put a put a post on here just giving a brief history of client diversity on the beacon chain so this obviously just applies to the

beacon chain just applies to consensus layer client diversity but still obviously a lot of these things translate over to execution layer client diversity so if you want to go read that you can I'll link it in the YouTube description below but yeah super fears and the East egga community at large as well have been instrumental in getting the word out about client diversity but also about staking diversity as well they've been a really strong uh I guess like part of ethereum social air for a very long time so huge cros to them for all of that but as I said you can go check out that for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below I think I've ranted enough about client diversity over the last two episodes hopefully we have a break about that for for a little bit here but really I think

the main takeaway from this is not so much got to do with client diversity but more got to do with ethereum social layer where we need to keep in mind that ethereum social layer is the most important and most valuable thing that ethereum has and we need to keep uh keep on banging that drum and we need to keep rejecting people who say that it doesn't matter like I will like anytime I see see someone say it doesn't matter on Twitter I kind of hold bite my tongue a lot because I don't want to get into like Twitter fights I hate getting into Twitter fights these days uh you know it just it doesn't really end well for anyone but really uh we should just keep reinforcing the importance of ethereum's social layer but anyway end rant there for now moving on to a tweet from Steven

goldf today so just another tweet I covered another tweet for him from him yesterday I've seen a bunch of comparisons on on Twitter today around uh TPS between between chains or transactions per second between chains and I want to say that TPS is an extremely flawed metric I think I've said this before it's a flawed metric for a number of reasons so in Steven's tweet he basically brings up that comparing L2 activity to ethereum L1 using TPS is like counting the number of bills in your wallet but ignoring that some are sign singles some are 20s and some are hundreds a much better metric is gas per second and arbitrum 1 alone is already processing way more than L1 and this is because not all TPS is created equal right and I've explained why before I'm not going to rehash it all here but the trdr is basically that

especially when it comes to to l2s the TPS that you see on there uh because because there's different kind of gas metering on there it's very different to ethereum L1 and it's very different to other networks out there and then when you're looking at other l1s like if it's a cheap ghost L1 it can fake a lot of its TPS I mean I replied to Steven's tweet and I said you know we've known about this since at least 2018 during the early EOS days uh and we've known that TPS is one of the most useless metrics in cryp useless metrics in crypto and I'll expand on that by giving a bit of background for you here for those of you who weren't around back then EOS back in 2018 was advertising that they were doing millions and millions and millions of transactions uh per day and x amount of transactions per

second and that you know they were saying you know we're killing ethereum we can do this really cheaply blah blah blah whatever one it was because they were a ghost chain two it's because they basically centralized the entire chain right there were 21 block producers that controlled the chain back then uh and I I don't what it's like today I mean EOS isn't really relevant today but and and obviously the cost was borne by the token holders as it usually is in these scenarios here so they weren't really doing and the thing is because it was so cheap these transactions were basically just all Spam right it wasn't real user activity it was just spamming the chain and this happens today on other l1s too there's just just really just people spamming the chain with crap and it's not real user activity now I've also

said before that I think measuring real user activity is extremely difficult I know that Jesse poac tweeted recently that coinbase is looking into how to actually measure real user activity on on on the bass network and then expanding that out to other l2s but it's very very difficult and you know it's kind of funny because sometimes people say that well you can kind of tell by uh The Vibes of the chain about like you know the Vibes of arbitrum or The Vibes of optimism or The Vibes of ethereum and I don't necessarily think that's a silly argument to be honest like people say oh that's silly you know what what's Vibes I mean it's very subjective there's no real metrics to point at but it's more about the energy of the ecos system the organic energy of the ecosystem obviously in ethereum and even in

Bitcoin you can feel the organic energy in that ecosystem but then you go to others and you can feel a lot of it is just very mercenary very kind of like nonorganic or inorganic very like airdrop farmer heavy kind of activity right and you you kind of get a sense for that just based on your own intuition so yes it's not based on any hard metrics it really is just a based on Vibes but that's actually a pretty good signal at least I believe it is uh and it's actually probably better than a lot of the hard metrics that we use because Vibes is very hard to fake you can't really fake organic activity because by very definition of the word organic in that you know in that sentence there is that it it's natural it happens naturally it doesn't it's not forced you know people aren't forced to

do this they're not here for the quote unquote wrong reasons right they're missionaries not mercenary sort of thing so when it comes to actually measuring activity maybe the best metric we have which isn't really a hard metric is is Vibes and I know that's it sounds a bit silly but I I think it's actually quite well I mean at least for me it has because ethereum to me has always had the best Vibes I've stuck around in ethereum because of the Vibes and Vibes can you know mean just Community here uh and you know developer Community just just um General Community the Enthusiast Community it's always been really strong and that's translated to the l2s you know I feel that from a lot of the L2 some of them I don't feel that from but you know a fair few of them I do feel

that from I feel that organic activity happening there that mission that missionary kind of style happening there and people being excited about things for the right reasons or at least what I consider to be the right reasons right or wrong reasons here it's a very subjective thing but that I mean it is a subjective metric this is not something that has a hard fact that you can point to in saying all of that there are other metrics out there that I believe are definitely better than TPS you guys know that one of my fa favorite metrics is fear revenue and I'm not talking about people spending like lots of money on fees I'm talking about total fee revenue for that chain because it means that there's actually real kind of demand there for that and I'm not going to say that all of that demand is quote unquote

organic right A lot of it could be things like people air drop farming stuff like that but the fact they have to pay for that the fact that there's actually a cost incurred there and it's it's it's it's it's um adding up to a lot of fair revenue for that chain to me is a pretty good measure of activity that is very hard to fake because it's actually there's a cost there to do that right there's a large cost especially on eth L1 for example where the cost is quite large per transaction um and then obviously as you go to to l2s it becomes a bit easier to fake because the the the fees are cheaper but still there is that kind of cost there whereas if there's basically no cost if it's basically free then it's very easy to to spam because it's very cheap to spam uh and and you

know you have all these kind of metrics get inflated and we've seen this play out not just on ethereum L1 and l2s but on other chains as well like metrics get inflated all the time that's why you guys know that I prefer looking at long-term metrics over short-term metrics and longterm here is years it's not like a month versus a week it's literally years worth of metrics and honestly the best long-term metric if I'm going back to it is Vibes because uh an organic Community stays around and sticks around for a long time the missionaries stick around for a long time The Mercenaries the inorganic Community you know the people who bring the bad vibes right and when I say Vibes I should say Good Vibes but people bring the bad vibes they're usually locust-like they don't stick around for very long they they're gone as quickly

as they came and they're usually only around when things are going good like when the Market's going out and people are making money right all that sorts of stuff there so when you think about it from that perspective I think the Vibes is actually a totally legitimate thing to look at when address when kind of uh looking at different chains but at the same time there are also a bunch of hard metrics you can look at but you really really do need to contextualize them you need to look at them over the long term and you need to realize that no one of these metrics is perfect they're basically like the least worst things we're basically trying to get to the least worst ones that we can get to there anyway enough on that topic moving on to an update from ZK P2P today so you

guys know that ZK P2P is uh a trustless P2P feat onramp powered by ZK proofs using venmo in the background so today they announced that their UPI integration in ZK is is live on the ZK P2P Alpha users can now swap peer to-peer from Indian rupees to usdc on base without trusting in any intermediaries this is our first launch internationally and where alternative options for swapping Fiat to crypto are solely needed so I think that um this is obviously not using uh venmo it's using HDFC uh which is I guess what UPI kind of support so they support HDFC bank accounts users will have the ability to swap 100 usdc every 12 hours and you can onramp your Indian rupees

here and there's a guide here in in the Tweet thread I'll I'll link that for you guys to check out so if any of you are based in India here and you want to use this you can um as I said I'll link it in the YouTube description but great to see this is expanding I think ZK P2P is one of the most exciting things that I've come across over the last few months within the crypto ecosystem because it's distinctly different from a lot of other things out there it is not a fork of anything it is not something that we've seen before it is pretty much totally new I don't think I've seen any other team do this before any other project tackle this before um and I know that there are limits to obviously there are limits of how much you can onboard

per day uh and obviously there are limits in that you have to kyc for something like venmo and HDFC well not like I guess traditional kyc but like there there are kind of I guess fingerprints there as I should say where people can kind of identify you but it's I think like that's the same thing as any fat on ramp and I think that the doing a fat on ramp without any kind of kyc is basically impossible from what I know unless you do it like PE top in person via cash which is the worst way to do it because the security is so low like I'd much rather just go through the kyc road than ever do a inperson peer-to-peer swap you know with from cash to like eth or something like that I just there's just too much that could

go wrong in that situation right like so I'd much rather just put up with the the kyc but at the end of the day like obviously I'd much rather not be kyc but that's just not how that traditional Finance system works there is always going to be kyc there and you do have to go through that in order to onboard but at the end of the day like that's uh I guess like that's the only blocker because once you're on board and once you're on boarded onto uh a crypto Network there's no need to kyc to use Bas to use you know etherum L1 and l2s out there uh they're fully permissionless you can bridge between them and you can basically stay there for as long as you want I know that usdc obviously is a centralized stable coin it is fully permission uh permission

stable coin where at any moment the circle could freeze your funds for whatever reason maybe there a government order to freeze your funds but if you wanted to be fully self- Sovereign you can just on board uh via usdc then trade that usdc to eth on a decentralized exchange like unop for example or C swap uh and then you're able to just go and use that eth uh with to do whatever you want with it yes obviously e is volatile more vol you know more volatile than um than a lot of things out there but if you're trying to basically protect your capital and protect your wealth you go into eth you don't keep it in usdc at least that's my opinion like I would never keep large amounts of money in um usdc or any kind of like centralized stable coin I mean I'm a bit different

because for me keeping money in USD I expose myself to currency risk because I obviously have taxes and and bills paid in AUD in Australia um I so and I also incur taxable events when I go between things I go between USD and AUD which is an annoying kind of headache so I don't usually sit there and I also think that if I'm going to sit in cash I'm just going to sit in AUD in my bank account because like I actually would more I trust the local banks here than I do kind of hit my money in usdc on chain where it can be frozen for whatever reason by Circle uh and you know and as I said I'm exposing myself to currency risk so it's a bit different there but if if we're talking about uh basically just you know the easiest way to to

onboard trustless uh I think ZK P2P is fast becoming one of those so yeah you can go check this out link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so I just realized I'm almost at time here so just wanted to quickly uh kind of cover this update from axom so they announced today that axom V2 is now live on the ethereum main net axom V2 allow smart contracts to trustless compute over the entire history of ethereum including transaction and receipts and you can learn more below this is one for the developers out there you can go check this out I'll link in the YouTube description below but I'm not going to spend too much time here I just wanted to highlight it for the developers out there this is now available to you axom is a really really cool project using a

bunch of uh cool technology to basically enable developers to do trustless computation uh do things like offchain computation co-processing all that sorts of stuff so you can go check this out as I said I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last up here just a bit of I guess more markets talk from yesterday I know the markets have been relatively weak today and everyone's pointing to things like the gbtc selloff I think that got confirmed yesterday the the FTX estate ended up selling $1 billion worth of gbtc uh because obviously they're in you know bankruptcy proceedings and they want to return th those funds to users um but I put out a tweet where I said always remember that the SEC green lit gbtc one of the worst crypto products to ever exist but held off on approving BTC

spot ETFs for a decade the SEC does not exist to protect you so two things on this one I wanted to expand on one the reason why I say gptc gbtc is one of the worst products to ever exist prec conversion to um to an ETF was that it was a close-ended fund and that meant that it traded at a premium or it traded at a discount and that meant that it wrecked a lot of people now if you actually and I've mentioned this before on the refuel if you actually look back and this is the second thing if you actually look back and see what ended up being the Widowmaker trade and what ended up being the kind of thing that blew up a lot of uh people in crypto it was the gbtc trade where people went into gptc to do some carry trade and

then the gptc stuff started trading at a premium and then at a discount and then all the leverage blew up and everything else blew up like Terra and FTX and all that and you can actually trace a lot of that back to gbtc so in reality the SEC protected no one with this product they green lit a vastly inferior product to an ETF they let it exist for a very long time they let it get really really big and now we're still suffering the overhang of this product because a lot of people don't want to be in gptc anymore even as an ETF because the fees are really high and also people were just prep playing the discount trade where they maybe bought gbtc at like a 40% 30% discount and then when Once the discount went to zero because obviously got converted to an ETF so now it's not

just a close-ended fund it's it's a it's a normal ETF where you can redeem people are doing that and we saw FTX do that indiscriminately $1 billion there's been more than that outflowing we don't know exactly where it's outflowing to we don't know if it's being um you know if gbtc is being uh the BTC in that is being sold and then people are going and buying BTC in another ETF I'm sure there's a bunch of that happening but it is an overhang on the market it is something people are speculating on and I think that's it is a main reason why we've seen some why we've seen weakness lately in the markets but again I go back to the SEC green lit this and let it exist for a while while denying spot BTC ETFs on the basis of they thought that the spot B BTC ETFs were too risky

but gbtc wasn't when in reality it was and it is one of the worst products in crypto Trevor exists pre ETF and there are still other products out there like gptc like eth for example and others that grayscale still has that they hope to convert to ETFs when in reality it's probably only going to be eth e converting to an eth ETF eventually and you know you're probably going to see those outflows or similar outflows of ethe because of that so really the protected no one they were actually the ones that caused the most harm here uh yes obviously the people who went into gbtc recklessly and blew themselves up are 100% to blame but I think the SEC is a bit is a bit to blame here as well because of the fact or a lot to blame here as well and and very hypocritical

because they let this product exist which as I said was one of the worst products to exist in crypto uh and we still suffering the overhang from that but I think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone