Gridplus Lattice, USDC updates, yEarn updates & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #12 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 10th of december 2020 right everyone let's get right into it so some big news out of bitwise today so for those who don't know bitwise is basically a uh crypto index uh company that basically does you know all sorts of different crypto indexes they have a famous one called the bitwise 10 which tracks the 10 largest cryptos by market cap or crypto assets by market cap mind you uh the the kind of news out of them today was that they have listed their index funds on uh list it's sorry it's index crypto index fund

on otc markets and the shares are now tradable by via people's brokerage accounts so this is basically just another example i guess of these crypto products or crypto based products making their way into the traditional finance system for those who don't know brokerage accounts basically you know exist within the traditional finance system uh as such as fidelity as listed here and they are very popular in that system uh i think some of them may be tax advantaged and that's why they're so popular but yeah i mean you know i i personally haven't really played around with this stuff uh i i guess i you could call me like a d5 native i grew grew up in d5 with a lot of the um that you know in crypto in general with a lot of the stuff that

i've done with my money but there's still like a massive world i guess outside of d5 like i mean d5 is tiny compared to the traditional finance world and uh getting these products into the hands of these people and these kind of like avenues or or you know trading on a more traditional system is is going to be very healthy for the growth of the overall kind of sector and market and all this sort of stuff so as i mentioned the bitwise 10 crypto index fund is going to be on uh on available through these brokerage accounts traditionally it was only able to be bought via private placements uh now uh the funds listing uh as the block notes here now the funds listing on otcqx

a market offered by otc markets group will make it shares publicly traded so it's a pretty big step here for bitwise i mean they've had this product for quite a while now and i'm sure they've tried to been trying to work on this for quite a while there's a lot of different i guess regulatory concerns when it comes to these things uh definitely around whether assets are considered securities or not i don't think any of the assets that they have in the index would be considered a security as lots of them are basically i guess you know ether bitcoin litecoin xrp chain link tazos things like that um you know i can't guess maybe tazos would uh would would be considered a security uh you know maybe sometime later down the line

it's probably a bit more of a gray area there uh but definitely things like you know litecoin ether uh bitcoin i mean chain link connects up here maybe on the fence about but not not as much as tazos uh definitely don't think they're going to be considered securities as well and even if they are i don't think that's a that's a big deal here since this will be trading on the traditional market um and it's it you know it's a centralized product and what have you there's obviously going to be kyc there and everything so i think this is this is fine here but great to see uh just you know bitwise getting involved here obviously grayscale is a big player in this area that has been offering a bunch of different products for people to get exposure to through their

retirement accounts obviously the biggest ones being gbtc and e3 which you've probably seen them talked about how they always traded a premium to their you know that the assets that they're tracking so i remember a few months ago if e actually went up to two thousand dollars a share uh which i mean sorry yeah two thousand dollars a share i think which put like eighth at like i think it's like 20 000 or something like that something ridiculous um and it's typically traded like at a much higher valuation than uh than east you know kind of net price net asset price or net asset value uh same with like gbtc as well um but i mean those products are different to to i think what bitwise is offering here

and um but they're still both in the traditional system so good to see that playing out for for bitwise and uh you know getting them on board with fidelity charles schwab e-trade all these traditional platforms that we they i guess kind of have a large user base but don't have access to these products yet uh we're just moving in that direction basically all right some news out of grid plus that i didn't cover the other day but i really did want to cover they finally got their lattice one store open for business so for those who don't know what the good plus lattice is it's basically a i mean it's a i mean it does a lot of things right it's i mean once i load it up here uh it's basically a dedicated anti-tamper

uh super secure uh crypto i guess wallet if you or hardware wallet if you want to call it that uh but it does it does a bit more than that i think uh it's i mean it's been in the works for quite a while this is from the grid plus team uh they've been uh i don't know how long they've been working on this for definitely for for quite a long time and they've really focused on security you know making this tamper resistant um being able to detect tampering having different having these things called safe cards which allow you to um you know safely access and and store sorry store and then access your your crypto um it comes with like a a touch screen display which is uh fully protected by the lattice one security system as well there's a bunch of different features

here you've got a secure mailbox uh secure computing environments uh it's an internal secure enclave for those who kind of don't know what a secure enclave is um you know from my understanding it's basically a place where your kind of private keys are kept separate from the rest of the system this is kind of how a ledger hardware wallet works where your private keys are kept on a separate chip right to the rest of the the kind of um the hardware so that it's basically i mean it's not impossible to kind of you know extract the private key out but it makes it incredibly hard to do so so yeah uh definitely if you want i mean this is open for order right now you can uh pay with usdc die ethan btc through coinbase commerce

uh credit cards coming very soon you can use grid tokens and redeem those to get 150 off a lattice so at the us dollars so they're usually for the base model it's 299 so you can get basically a half price off that if you order it here so definitely go check that out if you're in the market for something that's super secure to keep your crypto like you know obviously um incredibly safe and an alternative to the hardware wallets that we're used to like you know the ledger nano s or ledger nano x or you know there's a bunch of others like trezor and i'm sure there's a there's a bunch of others there as well so definitely go check this one out from from goodplus an announcement from jeremy alaire the co-founder and ceo of circle today

so circle uh for those of you who don't know is one of the companies behind usdc along with coinbase they basically manage and issue it and kind of uh you know grow the usdc ecosystem uh there today he announced that they that circle is going to uh basically have this new platform that you know i guess expands the circle ecosystem the usdc ecosystem to do much more than just payments so they have a bunch of things here they want to be able to do kind of payouts digital dollar accounts so i guess like bank accounts for usdc marketplaces i mean there's a full press release here that you can go read i'll link it in the show notes but basically expanding what usdc can do i mean ustc has been on a tear this year

it's grown to over three billion dollars um the second largest stable coin uh to i guess usdt um and now i want to take this a step further with all these different things so what really caught my eye was this marketplace i guess thing that they want to do and what they want to do is they want to obviously create a way for you know buyers to accept payments uh sorry to use usdc for for payments uh and and and make payouts to sellers in in doing this uh and you know in both usdc and fiat have like a way for them to manage their accounts kind of things like that right uh this is i guess all part of this you know banking the unbanked narrative that's been around for a while getting these people who don't usually have access to the us dollar

you know giving them really easy access you can imagine countries like argentina for example that have a lot of currency controls in place and don't have easy access to us dollars and have controls around that you can imagine them being people being able to leapfrog that by using usdc for example um and this was in the news recently as well uh there was another country i think was venezuela where uh circle stepped up and basically said that you know they're going to be offering this usdc uh to to people to the citizens to use and they can use it for buying and selling and things like that and i think this is what they want to expand out with this new announcement today uh so it'd be really cool you know there's people in maybe third world

countries who are like i want us dollars i don't want you know my own local currency because it's hyper inflating or because it's not worth much or because there's currency controls or any of that sort of stuff i want to transact in us dollars so you know imagine a merchant setting up an account saying we accept usdc here and then you can just pay with your ethereum wallet where obviously you know if you have a smartphone anyone can set up an ethereum wallet and as long as you have access to the internet you're good to go um so that's what this is this is here and i think you know this is an underappreciated thing that doesn't really get spoken about much when we talk about you know crypto and defy and and you know you know i guess like disrupting the existing financial financial system and things

like that you know we're not only disrupting the financial system in that we're building better products than what they offer we're also expanding the reach of these products we're bringing them to more people than you know ever before as i just mentioned all you need is like a smartphone and an internet connection you get an ethereum wallet you get some crypto and then you can go and use all these d5 protocols even if the front ends have barred your country from accessing them due to you know i guess regulations you can still access the ethereum network through other means right there's the the front ends are just like basically windows into the smart contracts on chain and those smart contracts don't bar people from different jurisdictions they they can't um i mean there might be a

way to do it but that would require centralized control and i mean i think that would actually be really bad if a project did that um that would introduce a host of different issues there but basically yeah you can just access these incredibly complex products as well um obviously you can put put up your money as collateral and borrow more money against it uh you can do lots of different trading that you probably wouldn't be able to do in your own country it's just creating this whole new system that basically just exists in cyberspace right totally digitally native doesn't rely on any of the old traditional systems besides a fiat on ramp you know in and out but you can kind of leapfrog that by basically making it so that you can earn crypto as well right and then you can like buy and sell using

crypto so that basically closes the loop where you no longer need to use you know fiat on ramps to get in and out um yes usdc is a centralized stablecoin but i think what they're really trying to do is trying to go for that neutral kind of um stable coin where they're not barring anyone from using it um but on top of that it's not just usdc right it's it's other stable coins like dye decentralized stablecoin or you know any number of the other ones and all the other assets on ethereum so any decentralized asset is just you know available for these people to use so yeah you're really cool to see circle doing this i mean they're being so progressive with this i really love it and i kind of like get scared sometimes because i'm like they're really they're doing a lot here and i i'm

surprised that the us government or the regulations in the u.s are allowing them to do this to this extent um i was especially surprised about i guess the venezuelan news but i think that actually benefits the us um and for those who aren't aware i mean from from what i know that news was basically that they were allowing uh people to use this currency that their loc that their government that was in power wasn't uh allowing them to use uh and was like those currency controls and things like that around that that's that's what i kind of understand from it but i'm sure if you google it you'll be able to find exactly what that was um so yeah interesting to see how circle keeps expanding here i mean you can see here that they want to do like yield accounts they want to

they want to obviously do a lot with visa i mean i spoke about the other day that they've partnered with visa to do different things here there's just there's just so much coming down the pipeline for this stuff and it's all built on ethereum like usdc i mean i don't know if it exists on other chains but if it does it would be negligible the amount of usdc on that so it's all on ethereum uh so it's really great to see to see this coming out and expanding beyond i guess the uh the d5 natives and into the the traditional system as well some really cool news from tyler winklevoss today and i wrote about this in the daily grain newsletter today so if you want to get more context around it definitely go check that out but basically he mentioned i mean this was yesterday

he said the ether fund by three iq corp uh will list on the toronto stock exchange tomorrow uh with the ticker q q eth um uh tomorrow i think that would be today uh this fund has already raised 75 million dollars apparently and the eighth is going to be custody with gemini which obviously tyler is the co-founder and ceo of um so yeah i mean i was just talking about how bitwise is bringing their current crypto products to the traditional system and now this three iq corp is doing the same thing where they're saying you know we want uh uh eth to be listed on i guess like or our a fund to be listed on the stock exchange the toronto stock exchange you know let's just do it right and they have they're they're listing it 75

million dollars is is huge for for something that is just starting out i'm sure we're going to see a lot of inflows here uh this could end up being uh you know a competitor to something like gbtc uh sorry e3 not gptc but you know those those kind of line of products from my understanding and i think we're going to see more and more of this listed on different stock exchanges uh i hope that i mean i don't know too much about this particular one but i hope that it's actually buying physical ether not just like some kind of derivative i think it is buying physical leads since it's going to be custody with gemini so that's just more by pressure on eath right that's just more heat being gobbled up by these funds i wonder if they're going to do something with the ether are they going to yield fun with

it are they going to stake with it i doubt it i don't think the the um the regulations will allow them to do this i think it's just going to sit in gemini's custody um maybe gemini is able to do stuff with it i don't know but from what i assume it's probably going to just sit in the in the cold wallet there uh which is which is quite crazy when you think about it i mean i wrote about this in the daily gray yesterday about how you know there's going to be eth basically gobbled up by all these different things and you know there very well might come a day sometime in the future where there's a quote-unquote sell-side liquidity crisis for eth where there's just lots of buy pressure but there's not much each supply to go around because it's been gobbled up by

things like staking defy like locked in defy these kind of um funds you know putting them into custody people holding it as like a store of value people using it uh you know to do all sorts of different things so pretty crazy when you think about it right uh but it's still early days here i'm curious to see how fast this fun grows because we'll be able to see the appetite from i guess traditional investors if e3 you know uh grayscale's product is anything to go by i think there's going to be some pretty big appetite for this coming in so i'm going to keep my eye on this for sure right a really cool little report out of uh why earn today so i think this is the first kind of defy

quarterly report uh so obviously these are done for public companies uh all the time any public company i think is pretty much required to do a quarterly report d5 protocols obviously aren't required to do it but wyan has gone ahead and done it so what they've listed here is they're basically listing you know their liabilities their balance sheet you know the the i guess like the net income and things like that all the things i guess you would see in a normal quarterly report for a normal company uh they've gone ahead and just done this for the young protocol itself uh you know operating expenses you know where they're going sort of things you know who they were paid to all sorts of things like that which is you know quite quite insane right this is uh i guess like the maturation of d5

that we're seeing right now and this is setting the bar for all the other d5 protocols to produce this now this wasn't produced by you know i guess like any central party wyoming is a completely decentralized ecosystem this was actually produced by the community and they um basically got together and and put this report together and you know i mean they listen things like you know salaries being paid and stuff like that like it's fully transparent here which is which is quite crazy i mean if i zoom in here so you can see the table on the left side here you can see how much has been paid for like the month of october september august uh i'm assuming this is in uh tens of thousands so 21 here would be 21 000 us dollars i think um and then they also have a bunch

of different things here and then you know uh team members that have left me members that have joined recently all that sort of stuff so yeah this gives you a way to check out their operating expenses and see kind of like what the profit is as well based on that um they have like a breakdown of where all the grants went i mean it's just pretty crazy right when you when you look at this stuff uh this is like a fully decentralized ecosystem with a decentralized community of of um of people like contributing getting paid for their work and it shows up in this report here so kudos to the wyoming team for putting this together uh i think that as i said this sets the bar we're gonna see more d5 protocols do this in the future i mean i would love to see

this done for uh for some of the top protocols like may car and uni swap and compound right um because i mean when you really think about it this is just like i mean i'm sure this is this took a bit of effort to do but i mean it's it it's a pretty short report right and it's got like it pays a lot of dividends if you show this and and show this to people and it it basically helps people to evaluate the value of the wyoming protocol and of course the value of the wi-fi token so yeah i mean the high high return here for something that you know probably didn't take too long to do um and you know it's just a nice little report that people can talk about and link to

to show the health of of the network basically all right so i've been talking about these i guess rumored regulations that might be coming in the us around uh i guess like self-custody of crypto or self you know self-hosted wallets uh it seems that warren davidson who is a us congressman uh for ohio uh is a bit worried about this and has uh kind of uh banded together with a few of his colleagues to put together this uh i guess this letter to congress um pleading with them to not introduce too harsh of regulations and to not stifle innovation here now i won't read the whole letter out i'll link this in the show notes you can definitely or the youtube description

you can definitely go read this for yourself uh but yeah the gist is is that they're basically asking for them to not go too far here so i mean it's good to have a congressman in our kind of like end of the court here or outside of the court here because there's not many in in the government that actually understand crypto let alone have a favorable view of it right i guess the surface level view of crypto and of bitcoin and of ethereum is usually uh i guess whatever the media kind of says and the media loves to hop on about things like you know it's used for drugs it's used for money laundering it's used for terrorism financing all this sort of stuff right when in reality i mean they mean it's used for so much more than that

and that's just like saying you know reporting on cash and saying you know cash is used for buying drugs and all that all this all that sort of stuff right so i mean obviously garbage things out of the media as usual but uh you know that's the things unfortunately that people aren't clued into this ecosystem we'll see so we need people like warren in congress to educate the other congress people about these sorts of things uh and not just them but also i guess uh the house and uh i guess lobbyists in general like i'm not an expert on the us political arena but there's obviously a lot of moving parts there so we definitely need um more of this in in the space so you know kudos to

warren here for doing this i hope that he gets some traction with this i hope that uh steve munichen who is the treasury secretary and the one rumored to be announcing these regulations i hope that he reads this and sees this and understands um as i said as i've said the past couple days i'm holding out hope this that this isn't you know these regulations aren't going to be too brutal i mean i speculated that i think that we might just see exchanges tightening kyc laws uh and with and maybe having to limit withdrawal addresses for people so that they don't have unlimited withdrawal addresses they can only have a few um which wouldn't be world ending i don't think it'd be i mean i don't think it would do much damage at all to be honest i do think it's unfair though so i hope

that there's nothing like that but if it is just that then i mean we can breathe a sigh of relief but if they do go as far as banning self-hosted wallets or you know or something like that that's gonna cause like quite a stir and that's gonna be pretty much like scorched earth i think where you're not allowed to withdraw from a centralized crypto exchange to your own kind of crypto wallet um uh you know at any time which to me would just like basically force a lot of these centralized exchanges to go offshore because i mean obviously a lot of people want to be able to withdraw to their own wallet uh for numerous reasons right whether it's to do stuff in defy to self-custody you know all that sort of stuff um or i just yeah i just don't see that

happening uh unless you know the people putting in these regulations i have absolutely no idea and no one has told them otherwise um and you know that's always a risk as well so we'll see what happens hopefully it doesn't happen uh you know hopefully that doesn't happen but you know there's always a risk there so good good to be aware of that for sure all right the ethereum foundation put out an update today or yesterday sorry about their their supported teams uh basically so what this is is that the ef gives out grants to different teams within the ecosystem within the ethereum ecosystem and they do a kind of i think it's a quarterly update or maybe it's a monthly update no i think it's definitely a quarterly or a half yearly update actually

on where that money's going you know who they're funding how it's being used what they've delivered so as you can see here on this list they're funding a lot of different things the ethereum foundation and for those who don't know the theorem foundation has uh quite a war chest um i think last time i checked they have 330 million dollars worth of eth left still and they also have a a sizable fiat balance which isn't public but they did sell 80 million dollars worth of eth at the near top in 2017 um so they yeah they definitely have a lot of money here to to to kind of like splurge on a lot of these projects which are very critical i mean you can see on this list here they're funding a lot of zero knowledge proof research which obviously does a lot for layer two scaling they're

obviously you know funding the eth2 effort funding eth1 as well uh funding a bunch of different things around solidity making sure that people are upgrading that and making that easier to use uh all these sorts of things so this is rather long update from them and you can obviously go read through it if you'd like i'm i won't read through the whole thing here but it basically gives an update on each of the things that they're funding what they delivered some some kind of like milestones and things like that uh and like things going forward that they're working on as well so i mean you can see me scrolling through here this is quite lengthy so definitely go check it out yourself if you want to learn about all the teams that the ethereum foundation is supporting and all the exciting work that they're doing as well i mean you know

it's not just eth2 and i guess i guess eth1.x as it's come to me known as there's a lot of different things being funded and worked on outside of that as well so definitely go check this out to get more context around that all right last thing to talk about was a really good tweet from asari today that basically shows that ethereum is on track to process more than one trillion dollars in real value transfers this year one trillion dollars this is more than bitcoin for the i mean like for the first year ever and in a big way if you look at the previous years here so for those who are listening to the podcast you won't be able to see this but in the previous years 2016 2017 2018 2019

bitcoin was always ahead of eth and by by a pretty large margin as well i mean in every year almost double the amount of volume that the ethereum network was doing sorry so this year the tables have kind of like completely changed where i guess bitcoin's total value kind of moved on chain has actually stayed kind of stagnant from 2018 2019 and 2020. in 2018 it was 849 billion dollars in 2019 it was 772 billion this year it looks like it's going to be 800 billion so it's kind of stayed stagnant there whereas if in last year ethereum was 297 billion this year it's over a trillion as i just said

that's a huge three times increase of value transducted on the chain in in a year now for those who i mean maybe went around in 2019 or weren't paying attention that was it was a pretty brutal year for for ethereum in general it was i guess like a ethereum-centric bear market where d5 didn't really exist ethereum was kind of like you know viewed as as this dead platform because eth's price was very stagnant there wasn't much activity happening until maybe i guess like towards the end of the year uh and things like that and it was it was pretty brutal right and on the backdrop bitcoin was increasing again uh you know it was outperforming eighth and things like that and and it felt like everyone had turned into a bitcoin maximus or something again

whereas 2020 has been a completely different tune like basically a total 180 where ethereum is is not dead d5 has exploded its price has gone up a lot right the ethereum network is being used more than ever before record high gas fees i mean i could go on forever about all the metrics that have just exploded in 2020 for ethereum but i think this one here is just the simplest way to show that ethereum is the dominant blockchain today the only thing that it is losing in right now is market cap to bitcoin and i really do think that's just a function of bitcoin being first and the inertia that it has behind it but ethereum is just doing so much more and this is not to say that bitcoin's bad or anything like that but when you really crunch the numbers here ethereum is just delivering so much more

value to so many more people than than bitcoin is i think i mean bitcoins good and all for people who want to buy btc you know store their value in it or maybe they're using it to escape currency controls or using it as a as a as a currency itself which i mean less and less people are using it as that these days but when you think about what ethereum's enabling you know just within d5 you have all these other tokens that people can use stable coins have been a big i mean 2020 has been the year of this stable coin as well uh and that's happened predominantly on ethereum so i mean there's so much to be kind of like bullish about here and i think this is going to continue into 2021 this value transacted i mean d5 just keeps growing which means the

value transacted just keeps growing ethereum is the beneficiary of d5 but also you know a lot of stuff's moving to layer two now as well so maybe next year we'll have to include both layer two and layer one ethereum and i can only you know imagine what layer two is gonna look like when it's in full force because of the scalability gains right and the efficiency gains there we're going to see a lot more volume being transacted across so really looking forward to seeing that uh great report out of masari here definitely go check out uh their full report i think this came from their eth2 report uh which is linked here which obviously be in the in the show notes for you to check out as well all right that's it for today everyone thank you for listening and watching if you haven't subscribed to the youtube

channel yet be sure to do so give the video a thumbs up and i'll be back tomorrow for another episode thanks everyone