Grayscale wins against SEC, Polygon CDK and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #649 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is Hunter and test the 30th of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so obviously a lot of exciting news over the last 24 hours uh and I'm going to go through it all uh but just actually before we get into it just wanted to quickly say that tomorrow and Friday there will be no refuel I've decided that I'm going to do a Refuel on Saturday to make up for it because I'm pushing the podcast with Eric the daily grade drive through that with Eric that was due this week to next week so there will be a Refuel on Saturday to make up for tomorrow and Friday and I'll cover all the news that happens over the next

couple of days but on that note let's get into the news from the last 24 hours the biggest of which was greyscale winning their lawsuit against the SEC now of course there was a bit of confusion around this people not not knowing exactly what uh the victory was for what grayscale actually won here you know what the implications are and I'm here to to kind of run you through that so basically their lawsuit was basically uh for the SEC to review the grayscale's ETF application so grayscale basically said the SEC denied our application but it made no sense they denied it based on uh basically nothing and the judge agreed with grayscale here as well the judge basically said that the SEC had no real Merit to deny this ETF approve uh

this ETF application and grayscale won in court so now what ends up happening is that the SEC has I think 45 days or something to appeal or to kind of I guess like um uh uh hit back at this and also they have to uh revise their I guess like decision of the grayscale ETF now oh the the grayscale application to convert its trust its existing trust into an ETF now I need to make it clear that this does not mean that the grayscale conversion for its trust into its ETF has been approved that's not it at all but the reason why this is very bullish and the reason why people got so excited about it is because it's just another signal to I guess like the world that U.S based BTC and and I guess even

eight ETFs are coming sooner rather than later and as I've been saying on the refill for quite a while now I believe that they're going to come maybe in q1q I'm probably q1 next year at or even maybe Q2 but it could even end up potentially happening later this year I I think it would be more bullish if it happened in q1 next year obviously it's always good to start off the year with some some really positive news there um but this is stuff that I've talked about for a while now and it's funny like about an hour after I put out the refuel last night or not even an hour I think it was like half an hour after I put out the refuel last night this news came out and I was just like okay well the refuel's now outdated I have to wait

24 hours before I can I can cover this but yeah very very exciting news um out of out of the the US overnight now of course Jake Stravinsky has a great thread covering exactly why this is a big deal from the legal perspective you can go check that thread out and also James cyphrat here who has been covering this stuff for for a little while now has also put together a thread um uh going over the kind of implications implications here and reading through the judgment and he also shared a pretty amazing kind of I guess like excerpt from the um the Judgment here from from the judge so uh the judge said yeah all the judges said here uh we agree the denial of grayscale's proposal

was arbitrary and capricious because the commission failed to explain its different treatment of similar products we therefore Grant grayscale's petition and vacate the order so the reason why this is so like cool to see is because it's very strong language it's basically the judge saying or the judge is saying to the SEC you had absolutely no reason or no reason based on Merit or based on fact to deny this application and that's why they're basically reversing the decision or I guess in this kind of uh terminology in in legal speaker it's vacating the order which I'm not a lawyer obviously but I take it to mean that they're basically for enforcing the SEC to uh um to basically revise their decision uh and and and revise it all

again and come to a new one and the reason why I think that this is bullish and why people consider this bullish is because for the SEC to come back and just deny it again with the same reasoning we'll just open themselves up to another lawsuit now if they came back and denied it for another reason there's a chance that they're going to get sued again uh and one of the reasons that someone I saw someone talking about on Twitter would be that the SEC came back and said oh well with denying at this time because we're concerned about the custody of the BTC and as you guys know uh the custody for pretty much all the ETFs is going to be handled by coinbase and the SEC obviously he's suing combat coinbase so there is kind of a conflict there and it just depends how hard they

want to go it depends how hard go against the ones to go here but as I said before I think the aetfs are inevitable at this point I think they're going to happen and the reason why they're so bullish is because it's going to bring in a lot of fresh money but also the narrative guys like I've said this so many times before on the refuel and I think that people are still kind of like mid-curving this as we call it it's not about the actual reality it's about the narrative and when it comes to markets right and The Narrative of the ETFs is huge it is by far the biggest Market related narrative maybe outside of the Harmony in crypto that we have right now and of course the ETFs seem to be lining up with the hardening which just makes it even more bullish and this

is from a pure narrative perspective if we're talking fundamentals if we're talking reality that's a whole different discussion guys I'm literally just talking in the context of narrative here and that's what most people get excited about because that alone is going to bring in a lot of fresh capital that is probably what's going to kick off the bull market to be honest especially because the timing just is lining up so perfectly it's uncanny how well the timing is lining up here with the four year cycle with the hardening you know all that stuff that's happening there it's just great and obviously you know the prices pumped overnight on BTC and Ethan a bunch of other assets look don't be surprised if we sell back down as I said before I didn't expect anything uh really kind of like fireworks worthy to happen this year you know we could go to

2K Ethan and and 30 plus kbtc again but we could just sell down um towards the end of the year as I said before um I I feel like we're going to be stuck in this crab range for longer than people think we are even though we have this hyper positive news and even though a lot of the crypto natives believe that the ETF is inevitable at the end of the day it's all about the narrative uh and the narrative needs to permeate out into the the tradify world out into the the distance and I think once the ETFs actually get approved that's when the narrative really kicks into high gear and everyone starts chilling it and being like Oh my God you know the ETFs here there's gonna be so much new money coming in and even if the reality is different where there's not that much

new money coming in that is that was anticipated it doesn't matter because by that point the bull market is already going and the money's already coming in because prices are going up and it just feeds on itself until obviously we top again and go into another bear Market that's just the way of the world in crypto but yeah I just figured I'd explain the bullish side here because I saw some people just being confused and basically saying you know uh there are already products in Europe like ETP products and they haven't seen that much demand I think on that point I would also say that the U.S capital markets are absolutely massive they they they pretty much be the biggest in the world and there's a lot of money in the US there's a lot of money in the U.S tradify system and there are also a lot

of uh there's also a lot of money that has already gone into similar products if you look at grayscale's products gbtc and ethi there's already billions of dollars that have gone into those products right um and obviously once the conversion happens people will be able to to redeem but I don't really think we're gonna see much redemptions there because the premium on these things will close there's really no reason to redeem unless you actually want to sell the assets and I don't think there's going to be that much selling I think there's going to be very much like people fighting ethereum staking withdrawals right so when you look at it from that perspective and you take it all kind of holistically here that's how people are getting excited about these these ETFs but yeah the um the win against the SEC here is a big deal it's the second major

loss that the SSC has suffered in recent weeks obviously the first one being the Ripple case and I I hope the next one or one of the next ones is them losing their case to coinbase that would just be the the cherry on top and that would be the best thing uh to happen for I think like not just uh BTC and eth but the longer tale of assets as well because it basically just gives the market more confidence that the SEC is not going to win their cases of being able to uh of labeling the the things that they say are securities as Securities um uh like that but yeah anyway enough rambling about all of that you can check out these threads that I referenced I'll link them all in the YouTube description below right speaking of coinbase they have teased something uh on Twitter

inadvertently I think I don't know if this is going to actually result in anything and maybe I'm putting on my like conspiracy theorist hat here a bit but they announced today they've partnered with Twitter I'm not going to call it x uh I I'm never calling it exercise I'm just going to call it Twitter I hate The Branding but I'm just gonna I'm gonna call it Twitter for simplicity's sake here um but they they announced that they're they're partnering with with Twitter on the launch of a shiny new hiring feature directly in coinbase's profile so you can explore drop opportunities while you scroll Twitter on mobile desktop and Beyond and you can go to coinbase's profile and I don't know if this is rolled out yet because I'm not seeing it on my on my screen just yet maybe it's not available to people in Australia

maybe it's us only um but yeah you can see it in the screenshot what this actually looks like the roles basically end up uh kind of right on the the coinbase profile here right uh above the fold which is pretty cool now the reason I bring this up uh and why I say I've got my conspiracy hat on a little bit here is because I think yesterday there was news that came out that uh Twitter had gotten a kind of I guess like approval for a money transmitter license which means they can enable payments on the platform now are they going to do crypto payments I'm pretty sure that crypto payments will be part of that right they'll definitely do just the tradify payments like they're doing with stripe already for uh for ad sharing and stuff like that but does

that include you know crypto payments as well I think it will okay so what does that include well people will say Elon loves Doge so he's going to do Doge payments I'm like you know what maybe he does it for the meme but I don't think anyone's going to use Doge as money I don't think it's going to go anywhere so he's not just going to do Doge I think that um you know he loves the meme he loves just uh piss fighting around with it but I think they're going to go beyond that so they'll probably integrate those somehow I don't know how they'll do it but they'll do they'll probably do it just as I said for the meme but I think they're also going to potentially partner with coinbase on a payments platform and maybe even use base to do it which would be very

bullish and very cool now as I said this is pure speculation on my behalf very uh tinfoil Hadi here very conspiracy hat but uh I think that'd be really cool considering that coinbase is already working with Twitter on other features here uh it would make a lot of sense especially when it comes to payments so yeah just something I'm keeping an eye on and something that I wanted to bring up with you guys because uh if I call it now and then I'm right I can I can reference back to this video and say hey guys I I told you so and then collect a little bit of a clout right but anyway moving on so uh just one update out of the core Dev ecosystem today so Sam Wilson one of the ethereum researchers shared that the official release of the ethereum execution layer specification

has now been published so the tldr is that uh this is this what they published today which is e-els is is an execution layout reference implementation in Python it's up to that with mainnet it fills tests and passes existing ones and there's an example of an EIP implemented in eels below so obviously it's supposed to be said ills that's why there's a picture of an ill here um but yeah this is one for the developers out there it's one for the people who are very interested in obviously working on core protocol stuff uh this has been a long time coming from from what I I can tell it's been worked on for for quite a while now and and as I said it is a specification uh implementation of the execution layer in Python so if this is interesting to you if this is something that Peaks your

interest just generally not even just as a developer you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so I figured I'd just remind you guys a bit about what off-chain labs is building with stylus so there is a criticism of ethereum that that kind of gets made from time to time that oh you know ethereum is only limited to the evm which only which is only limited to solidity which basically um I guess like forces people to learn solidity and all the other developers out there can't use it unless they use solidity and that couldn't be further from the truth it's true full ethereum L1 but when it comes to l2s it's a completely different story we already have l2s that are live today

that aren't evm starknet for example is not an evm chain they do not use solidity they use their own language Cairo and it has usage right um and now with stylus or I guess like this was announced a little while ago from off-chan Labs what they're doing in the arbitrim ecosystem is that they're upgrading the system to allow for support of any and all programming languages including popular favorites such as rust C and C plus plus while maintaining evm equivalents so the cool thing about this and one thing and one big thing it enables is uh potentially safer uh contracts uh faster executing contracts and as a consequence of that lower fee smart contracts across the board as well so you aren't just limited

to solidity anymore and the really cool thing about this is that they're using webassembly to enable this or wasm which was actually originally part of the ethereum layer 1 roadmap when we had execution sharding in the roadmap and I've explained this before on the refuel but the whole idea of execution sharding was basically the same as what we have with layer 2's today where each Shard would be a different kind of world so you could have a Shard for like wasm and there was there was actually going to be a wasm Shard and you can have a Shard for something else you know a shout for payments a shot for defy and it starts to look a lot like what the layer 2 ecosystem is today right so we basically abandoned execution sharding because we believed that the roll-up Centric road map was a better path forward for this

and now off-chain Labs is taking that on board and basically saying well we're going to do not just the evm but we're going to do the the wasm VM as well and we're going to make this all compatible with each other so this is a huge deal guys this is something as I said it's a criticism of ethereum but you can only use solidity or I mean solidity is the main language you can use other languages at layer one but solidity is really the vast majority of um of the code that's written there but on Layer Two it becomes much more expressive and you can pretty much use any language that you want really which is which is very cool but anyway uh of gen Labs did a whole thread on this which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh for you to check out

all right an exciting announcement out of the polygon ecosystem today so they've uh announced something called the polygon cdk or chain development kit so I guess like to use an analogy here this is very similar to what optimism has with their op stack where essentially you can build your own chain using polygons technology and connect it and connect it to all the other chains that are built using the same technology for an interoperable design you can see in this picture what this actually kind of looks like so there's the ZK powered layer twos that live on ethereum they share proofers they share virtual machines they set share data availability and sequences and that way they're interoperable and at the heart of it of course is the new I guess not

the new but like the poll token which is the uh the token um of the the polygon ecosystem that's going to be converted from Matic you guys know I announced this the other day that Matic is going to be doing a one-to-one conversion from Matic to pole and that's going to basically be responsible for uh staking on all of these chains and potentially if the change want to use them as gas space and stuff like that so that's all in there and also also restaking so with this chain development kit developers can do the same thing that they're doing with the op stack today basically build their chain using polygons technology and connect it into all the other chains including in the future the polygon POS chain the current polygon ZK VM uh the immutable ZK VM as well which is built on polygons technology so to create a

unified uh a kind of like interoperable ecosystem very similar to the I guess like optimism super chain that they're building right so very cool to see that this is what the generalized platforms are focusing on I've said it before I think the generalized l2s need to focus on basically giving the tools and making the tools for people to develop their own app l2s because they're they're only going to be a handful of successful generalized l2s and there's going to be a plethora of app chain l2s I'm not sure how many of them will be successful but the analogy I use is that a a generalized L2 uh or is it's kind of like a big shopping mall for example right whereas an app layer L2 is a single store right a single store

whether it's maybe a boutique store maybe it's a chain store right where uni swap for example will have like an app chain but but unisop will also be deployed in all the generalized uh layer twos out there but then you have something like DIY DX which isn't uh deployed on the generalized l2s it's its own L2 right so that's the kind of analogy that I use here and I think you know polygon optimism uh ZK sync and a few of the other generalized l2s out there are going to go down this path and essentially um enable this for people to build on enable it for developers to build on which I think is very cool so you can go check out the polygame polygon chain development kit for yourself I'll link all the information in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of ZK stuff uh there

is a new etherscan Explorer Explorer for scroll uh for Scrolls testnet so this is basically etherscans answer to uh to a Explorer for scroll itself obviously just test net right now but this is one of the final things I guess before we St to go live before we see mainnet obviously this has happened for pretty much all the l2s out there so Scrolls main that shouldn't be too far away from now I know a few months back I said that it was potentially coming in August but I think that may have been delayed or pushed back since we're at the end of August and doesn't seem like they're going to be launching maina anytime soon but it could be coming in the next few months and I know that scroll is one of the the hotly anticipated ZK VMS out there we already have a few others live

on mainnet right now uh but scroll definitely has a lot of hype behind it and I definitely should disclose that I'm an investor in scroll I mean I I it's funny I mean investor in all these l2s uh and and I have to disclose it every time because I feel like I I should considering that I'm I'm sort of Shilling it here um but I'm I'm super excited uh for what scroll has been cooking because as an investor I get unique insights into into what they're building what they're building um and I have Closer Closer close relationships to people who work there um and it's nothing that you can't find publicly it's not like I'm getting Insider information or anything but I basically uh get to get to get kind of like the um the inside look of of of essentially what's happening in the back

end of what they're building and the technology that they're building is very very cool uh so yeah definitely look forward to to Scrolls main net uh going live hopefully in the next few months but great to see that etherscan put the block Explorer live here which is called scroll scan you can check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so Euler Labs is teasing a comeback story for Oiler Finance so you guys remember that Euler Finance was unfortunately exploited for most if not all of its tvl uh back a few months ago they did end up recovering a bunch of uh of their tvl uh because the hakka returned the funds uh and then they returned it to people I know there was a bit of drama around that originally but I'm not gonna go over the drama uh but

they are teasing a comeback here so I guess this would be oil R Finance 2.0 or something like that so I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what they have cooking under the hood I know that people are going to be wary of putting money into their contract just because they've already been exploited and that's totally fair I don't think uh anyone should be blamed for being weary here um and I think that people should let it bake for quite a while before putting money into really any contract to be honest I mean personally when I test out apps it's with really small amounts of money it's not like I'm putting my whole net worth into these things and you know what even with each staking I was the same when I so I set up one validator originally when um I originally deposited it before no November 24th

which was the final date to deposit if you wanted to have a validator go live at Genesis on December 1st 2020 and then slowly over time I added more and more as I got more confident in it I didn't just put all my money in at once and of course now you guys know that most of my eth is is staked um with with both um uh solo stacking and rocketpool and it actually took me a while to put money into rocketball as well so I'm very cautious very conservative and maybe I've missed out on gains by by doing that I mean I definitely missed out on games by doing that but I take the more conservative approach of okay I missed out on maybe this much gains but I also saved myself from losing everything sort of thing and the potential worst case so always good

to keep that in mind when interacting with any contracts but I will understand if oil of Finance 2.0 I guess I can call it will have a bit of a slower uptick just because people are more cautious since they uh since their original contracts were exploited but still huge fans of the project obviously you guys know I'm an investor in them but I think they're building a bunch of a really cool thing so I'm excited to see what they release when it's time to do so all right there is a brand new multi-sig that has been announced today so you guys know that the one and really only popular multi-sig in uh the ethereum ecosystem right now is the safe multi-sig from gnosis uh and obviously it's not great to just have one multi-sig there was another one back in the day or the original one the parody

multisig but that got exploded twice obviously once a multi-sig has been exported even once it's pretty much dead um but second time yeah you're like you're like more than dead it's like you came back to life and you were killed again basically uh but no there's a new one that's come out of the instadap ecosystem and they're calling this the avocado multi-sig so they're advertising it as a secure and user-friendly multi-sig the ultimate solution for individuals teams and institutions alike and you can see the nice little interface that they have going here for you um and on all the description about exactly all the apps that they have and everything that they're supporting and their audits of course and you can go check that out for yourself but I guess like the the same stuff I was just talking about when it came to a general

generally putting money into smart contracts multisig same thing guys I mean if anything in crypto is like the biggest honey pot for hackers and exploits it is multi-cigs besides Bridges bridges are a pretty big honey pot but besides that multisig's a huge honeypots guy like they're massive and obviously you need to wait a while for them to bake before you can even trust that they uh are secure but there's always a risk with it now I think we're safe uh with I guess like nurses safe they've been around for quite a while now I I have struggled to kind of like still trust these things I do have a lot of um a lot of addresses a lot of multi-cigs here and there um but multi-seeks can be argued to be

generally even more secure than Hardware wallets because you can obviously set up multiple signers so you can actually set up multiple Hardware wallets assigners so instead of uh for example splitting up your your seed phrase with Shamir Secrets sharing or some other thing you basically just split up your Hardware wallets um and then uh basically give those higher wallets to different people now of course you run the risk of the hardware failing and then you in the seed phrases anyway but it just adds another layer of security there and it allows you to to basically have better peace of mind but the trade-off is that as I said you need to wait for these new multi-6 to bake for a while before you can even trust them with money because if they're exploited that basically drains everything and I actually do

wonder sometimes that I think gnosis has like a hundred billion dollars in their multi-cigs if that was all exploited and stolen would we have another the Dallas situation where the chain the chain doesn't get rolled back but we have another irregular State change where the entire ethereum Community comes together and says well okay everyone is pretty much destroyed by this exploit we need to reverse or at least like change this um this uh what what happened to you I I honestly don't know I said before that I think that in pretty much like all cases there would be no I guess you could call it a bailout whatever you want to call it but when it comes to something that is potentially systematic for the ecosystem like like a multi-sig being exploited of of of significant size then

it becomes a different question because essentially the community decides what the real ethereum is and if the community comes together and says well we need to reverse this or we need to change what happened here because the majority of the community is wrecked then it makes a lot of sense in that and that's what happened with the Dow basically because the majority of the community was wrecked because they all put some sort of some amount of eighth into the Dow so that's what happened there obviously it would be extremely messy and I'm talking about something that has a very very low chance of even happening but at the same time I wouldn't rely on that either right if you put money into these things and they get exploited I definitely wouldn't rely on ethereum social consensus saving you um because there is a chance that that

it doesn't as well especially if it's a smaller scale thing as I've seen in the past there's been plenty of hacks and exploits on ethereum and not one of them has been changed except the Dow and that was so long ago now and that was very early on in ethereum's life ethereum was only one year old it was only on in um live for one you're at that point when the Dow hack happened in 2016 or in 2023 it's been seven years since then so yeah I think that when talking about that you should uh you should definitely consider all of that but anyway you can go check out at the avocado multi-sig I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last up here just a shout out to farcasta their dau's uh have been growing up only for a long time now so

daily active users have been going up only they're exiting open a closed beta and entering the kind of like a public beta I guess you could call it very very soon I don't know exactly when that is but it's going to be very soon here I don't have any invites left so they disabled the invite so please don't ask for an invite um you'll be disappointed since I have none left but once it's open to the public as I said all new users will register and have to pay five dollars a year which as I discussed I think yesterday or the day before that's like a bargain honestly guys like firecaster is an awesome platform I've been using it more and more lately um I've been enjoying using it as well which is the main factor of course I've been using warpcast as my main interface

into it but there are other ones out there that you can use as well uh but yeah great to see that the Dau is has been up only and I expect that to continue honestly I could see fire Caster potentially having hundreds of thousands of users uh daily active users uh relatively quickly once they open up publicly especially in like a crypto bull market we have all this influx of people that want to try out these these new protocols uh yeah so you can go check this out sorry you can go check out focus the once it's open uh but yeah I've got no more invites left unfortunately but now speaking of invites you guys really got me to the top of the leaderboard here so besides the founder Dan Romero of farcasta who sent out 3 200 invites to users I was number one buy a long shot I

invited 146 people all I think daily gray uh fans so kudos to all of you who reached out for an invite here but yeah I invited 146 people to the firecaster platform which puts me at the top of the leaderboard besides the founder um and the SEC of second place was 96 uh so I was basically 50 invites ahead of a second place and you can see it on the chart here I was just well in ahead in first place but that's got really nothing to do with me that's what that's got to do with you guys you guys being engaged on the platform engaged on the on watching the videos and reaching out to me and asking for an invite and then obviously redeeming it and getting on there you won't have to pay five dollars for the I think the first year or

something like that then you then you'll pay that um on going there so you get that benefit as well and you're also an early Pioneer and early user of a cool new kind of like technology here with fire Caster but yeah I do have to shout out and give you guys thanks here for for this I really appreciate you all uh and yeah if there's any other stuff like this in the future where I have invites and stuff I'll definitely be sure to shout that out on the refuel all right so I guess that's it for today uh I'm gonna go off and record a a weekly roll-up with Ryan Sean Adams now for bankless I'm filling in for David again this week he I don't know what he's doing I think he's a burning man yeah so he's not climbing mountains he's like at

Burning Man so I'm filling in for him with Ryan um so that should keep you um kind of I guess like tied over till Saturday because I think the weekly roll-up will go out on Friday uh but yeah just a reminder again no refuel tomorrow and Friday so Thursday and Friday but I'll be doing one on Saturday to make up for it so yeah 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 on Saturday thanks everyone