JPMCoin News, Uniswap/Maker drama and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #13 - 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 11th of december 2020 all right everyone let's get into it for today so some big news out of jp morgan today not sure if it's ethereum based news but basically what they announced was that they have executed a blockchain based repro transaction using jpm coin now for those who don't know jpm coin has been this thing that's been in the works for quite a while uh basically like a stable coin for like interbank payments and things like that it was announced quite a while ago i might have even even been announced last year uh it's yeah i i it's been around for quite a

while uh but basically they announced that they had executed this uh this repo transaction uh and apparently it plans to make the product available to external counterparties as well uh people you know other companies like goldman sachs and things like that um but i don't think it actually mentions what blockchain they used uh i don't think they use the public chain they would have used a private implementation and jp morgan has you know toyed around with private ethereum in the past they built like an entire kind of um a private ethereum uh implementation called quorum for those of you who might be familiar with that um i think consensus ended up acquiring that um a little while back i might be wrong there maybe i'm

misremembering but that was like what they had done so they're not like unfamiliar with ethereum and if i had to guess this was probably built on something like quorum but they don't really go into specifics here from what i saw uh so hoping to get more kind of specifics there but i guess this is pretty cool it's basically these bigger institutions getting comfortable using this technology you know they're not going to start on the public blockchains right they're not going to start with public ethereum for example they're going to start with private implementations do all their testing do everything and then eventually come to the public blockchains but there are still quite a few issues before they can make that leap obviously scalability is a big issue privacy is a huge issue for them uh you know getting familiar with the tech

getting it adopted in these different companies you know the network effects just aren't there so it's going to be a slow grind i think uh and it'll happen over many years to come uh i don't know when they'll start talking to public ethereum it'd be really cool if they did it uh you know sooner rather than later but as i said there's a few critical issues there that they need to kind of iron out before they can do this uh but you know it's it's always funny seeing jp morgan in the news when it comes to crypto obviously their ceo is famous for saying that uh you know bitcoin was worthless and and wasn't a big fan of of bitcoin but you know that's just the i guess like he is the ceo but at the same time jpmorgan's a large institution they will definitely have obviously these i guess

innovation arms where they look at this sort of stuff and if it means that they can improve their processes and they can have a cheaper you know more efficient system then they're not just going to be bogged down by you know comments that the ceo says sort of thing they're going to actually pursue this stuff so really great to see that i know that you know this might go against like you know we need to dismantle the banks right you know we need to decentralize them and everything like that and yeah you know maybe eventually we get to that reality uh but for the time being i think having the banks play friendly with this sort of stuff and integrate into it is much better than them trying to you know dismantle it or like you know ban it or or or or have it kind

of like um or like lobby politicians abandoned and things like that so yeah great to see that jpmorgan is kind of making strides here i think you can get more website about what they're doing with j sorry get more information about what they're doing with jpm on their website uh and the website is uh what jpmorgan.com i mean there's a slash here if you just search jpm coin on google you'll be able to find this and it's got a bunch of kind of uh information here um and there's a faq and everything here so definitely go check that out if you want some more context around all of this all right some drama today in i guess maker and uni swap so basically what happened was that uni swap governance is considering a

proposal to restore uni farming but cut the dire rewards uh but but keep the other rewards for the other pairs the same or higher now because of this uh nick from maker dow who is the head of oracle's there and works on the back end there basically said that in light of the on light of this kind of proposal make a governance should reconsider adding uniforms lp tokens in favor of sushi swap lp tokens now this is quite funny right this is just like governance wars i guess you can say uh where it's basically you know saying to unisop governance hey if you don't keep the dire awards the same as the other pairs or make it higher you know make your governance uh might not do unisop lp tokens as collateral like

and put it into maker like i discussed on the other day's kind of update um you know so i mean nick's just one person at maker like he doesn't speak for the make a governance process he doesn't speak for like anyone else except himself he's just giving a suggestion here but it's always funny to see this because we haven't really seen governance wars play out like this in the past i think we're going to see it as time goes on as more of these protocols become intertwined and like they want to have influence over each other's kind of governance process and things like that i mean you can see here that that hayden adams of uni swap uh kind of replied here and said that uh die rewards are currently zero so if this proposal were to pass it would be a

huge subsidy to die liquidity where there is none right now um and he goes on to say he gets where nick's coming from um and he didn't create proposal himself but in his opinion in hayden's opinion this post is unnecessarily hostile and inflammatory which i mean uh yeah i mean i get that right i get that it's a bit of a a big like i mean not a big reaction but like a kind of a little bit of a hostile reaction right where it's immediately going to you know let's cancel lp tokens going into maker because they're not going to subsidize die with unifarming um you know that that's a bit of a scorched earth kind of approach there so i kind of kind of get that uh from hayden's point of view

but at the same time this is how you make people pay attention right this is how you get people to um you know think harder about these things right because you know nick's got hayden talking about this he's got the community talking about this he's got me talking about this right i didn't even know that this was a proposal on unisop's governance obviously i knew about the makeup proposal but i didn't know about this uni swap one so by nick kind of tweeting out i guess maybe not in a hostile way but in a in in a way that's kind of like you know a bit sensationalist he gets people's attention so it's worked uh so you know i actually think what nick did was a good it gets more people talking uh people are getting involved with the conversation they're gonna be more involved with governance right there's

gonna be more people replying in the threads so this sort of stuff is how you get attention on things and this isn't like anything unique to crypto right like drama always gets attention um but yeah it's good to see that and it's funny that he mentioned kind of sushi swap pr because you then have xerox mackie who is kind of like the lead dev of of sushi swap who who comes in and says that you know we can help right so she can help and you know just another protocol entering the war right it's like you know uh nick suggesting maker and sushi spot for form an alliance against like the uni swap enemy for example uh you know that's just my my spin on it but we're going to see more of this happening i mean rick burton here says it says it says posted a really funny comment

here like he says heating up the protocol wars are and they are this is we're going to keep seeing more and more of this happen especially uh i mean as i've been discussing how iron has created its own kind of ecosystem uh that kind of challenges the incumbent d5 protocols right you know you had cream under iron challenging compound and rv you have sushi swap challenging uni swap things like that so there's just going to be more of these wars going on and more of these battles being fought over time i think so something to keep an eye on something to to think about you know if you're one if you want to like get involved with these governance kind of things and and you know peruse the forums again and have tokens that you'd like to vote with definitely something you should be considering going forward

right an announcement out of dydx today about some institutions adopting defy so this was basically the announcement from curve now that's c u r v curve not c u r v e that could not curve the stable coin protocol but this is curve uh they're basically trying to bring uh defy to institutions so like you know big centralized institutions trying to kind of bridge them into to d5 here so the announcement is basically that curves partnered with consensus to launch uh these solutions um and basically uh i mean what they're trying to do is they're trying to integrate every d5 protocol into these institutions and

make it so that they can actually use these things i mean you can go to their website and see that you know they basically allow institutions to onboard really quickly into d5 uh basically give them enterprise level controls and protection across things uh you know get the on-ramps going for institutions uh and adopt any d5 protocol essentially so i mean they're using metamask to do this i mean they're working with consensus uh this i think this is gonna be big right because the i mean the the default ecosystem is is big already within crypto but outside of it it's like a blip like you think about you know let's be generous and say there's 15 billion dollars locked in d5 right now the traditional finance system is just

like that's a rounding error for the traditional finance system that's that's nothing it means absolutely nothing outside of crypto so you know to get more growth and to to kind of like you know embed ourselves into these traditional finance systems we need these institution adoption and of course you know this stuff isn't going to be decentralized right the institutions are going to have uh control over the funds that they're investing in these things but that doesn't matter because they're actually using the protocols still uh what matters is that the protocols are completely transparent there's more liquidity in the ecosystem there's more users uh there's there's kind of like more things going on in terms of interoperability between all the protocols and institutions and things like that so i think that that is the the benefit here

um and i think you know centralized kind of i guess like interfaces through these institutions are going to be the main kind of window into d5 that most people interact with i mean for better or worse like i would i would personally love if everyone just you know was self-sovereign ran their own full node used metamask right whatever but that's just not reality uh most people aren't going to do that most people are going to go through these centralized kind of intermediaries to access d5 which i think is fine it's all about having the optionality there uh you know you have the option to either do it on your own or go through a centralized service to do it and things like that so great to see you know curve doing this here uh with working with consensus who's obviously got a lot of enterprise

experience um and working to bring to onboard all these kind of companies into d5 so i'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out so another announcement from yam and i guess uma today so they basically have teamed up for something called degenerative finance uh so basically it's a collaboration where uh i mean they describe it here this new suite of dj and derivatives will begin with uma's recent u-gas contract and expands a variety of speculative and hedging products catered to the d5 ecosystem so basically i mean it's it's basically going to be yam having like uma uh the ugas token under its umbrella

so uh ulabs will pass over the ownership of you gas to the yam finance team and then the yam kind of ecosystem will manage this u-gas token and enhance the user user experience here so i mean this is you know it's funny because you know they're saying it's a collaboration right whereas maybe if this was uh a wire and thing it they'd say you know it's a merger or something right whereas i think collaboration or partnership is the right word for these things because obviously uma is not merging with with yam here right they're just like synergizing um and and and kind of like working across protocol here with with different communities uh you know it's funny i i just i just thought of it now i've talked about yam a lot on

on the on the deliberate refuel so far and it's funny because i don't as i've mentioned before i don't own yam tokens anymore i mean i was big on yam when it first kind of came out and i still follow it very closely i think i still think it's a really great project they're doing a lot of really great things i i kind of view yam as like this glue for the for the kind of like um the d5 ecosystem where they're going to end up partnering with a lot of different not partnering with like collaborating with a lot of different protocols and they have like a really tight and and and awesome community that's going to be pushing these things out so you're going to see yam pop up here and there and they really are doing it for community is for the community as

well i mean like their treasury does a lot of good work you know they donate to get coin through their treasury and things like that um you know i i think that one the one thing that lets the yam project down is that their token has like a rebasing mechanism and i discussed on yesterday's daily great refuel why rebalancing coins are problematic um especially simple uh sorry rebasing coins are probably problematic especially simple rebasing uh you know there's more complex systems like empty set dollar and things like that that are trying to improve the model whereas yam's model is basically i guess a slight improvement on ample fault's model um so you know maybe i don't know what yam's kind of plans are there i think it kind of lets the project down so hopefully they have plans to fix that

as well because i really do think people are overlooking just how good this community is and i wrote about the importance of communities in in the daily gray newsletter today and that's what's kind of got me thinking i was just like thinking about you know what are the best communities in d5 and i'd put yam up there definitely that every time i go into that discord i i'm like so happy because i just see people like genuinely building things that they care about and it's not about like token price speculation or any of that stuff you know it's the same feeling i get with wire and when i go on the for the governance forums and i see people talking to each other and and you know adding tons of value and there's a there's a lot of projects like this but i think yam is something very very

special because it was you know the way the way it came to be was just so such a big event right for people that were around back when when it happened uh when yam came out it was it was basically uh you know the biggest thing since since wyon um and then after that we obviously had the diminishing returns of all the all the food ponzi as they came to be known but yam is kind of like battle hardened battle tested born out of that kind of error and i think they're gonna they're gonna go far so definitely a project that you should be keeping your eyes on i don't suggest you know i'm not saying you should go buy the token or anything like that but you should definitely keep an eye on what they're doing and how they're doing different things within within d5

so a new d5 project closed a seed round today called swivel finance they raised 1.15 million dollars from a bunch of i mean investors that a lot of you would be familiar with it was led by multi-coin capital which i'm sure a lot of people are familiar with electric capital cms holdings divergence ventures and defiance capital um and also our angels including stani from ave um and and a couple others here like imran khan from the defy alliance and uh alex pack from from hobby uh he's an advisor there so yeah i mean what this i guess uh protocol is aiming to do is it's basically i mean i i was looking into it before

basically a protocol to facilitate interest rate swaps uh at least that was the first version of it called swivel v1 um and that allowed lenders to lock in guaranteed yield and speculators to level leverage their rate of exposure i think as part of you know what what's kind of coming next for this protocol they've got a lot in the pipeline i think when i went to the website if i can find the website here um basically fixed rate lending and interest rate derivatives is what they're kind of targeting here um these are these are pretty exotic financial products actually uh these exist obviously in traditional finance but they're not products that retail investors usually play around with

uh they're products that you know professional investors and traders and things like that we'll play around with but i think just like with all of these other products that we have coming out with defy uh we're going to have um i guess we're going to have like more and more people getting exposed to these exotic products that they would not have been exposed to in the traditional finance system and that's just great overall right we have more players it's it's fairer because it's in d5 it's obviously non-custodial and things like that um and it means that we get to expand the amount of people that that kind of like play in this area and and of course overall education goes up as well

uh so yeah i mean they describe themselves here as the decentralized protocol for fixed rate lending in in interest rate derivatives of the top of my head i can't think of any other major protocols doing this just yet i'm sure there's a bunch of them in stealth as well i mean i've actually been looking lately and doing a lot of research around you know what projects are out there kind of have a twitter account have like soft announced in the past but aren't really making noise yet because they're still building out their protocols which you know is normally referred to as like stealth you know projects um you know projects that just like like literally in stealth aren't making much noise and there's a lot like i i came across a lot of projects across like every vertical within d5 whether that be you know options

products uh perpetual products uh stuff like this fixed rate lending and interest rate derivatives and derivatives in general there is so much coming to defy uh it's just gonna be like this massive race between all of these teams building these protocols to basically scale up to billions of dollars and to become a dominant player and i think that's another reason why the wyoming ecosystem is forming you know its own little thing with different protocols is because the competition is just going to get more and more fierce and you want to have allies during this you don't want to be a lone ranger during what's coming you know what what's coming for d5 over the next couple years uh it's it's i mean as i said i've i've done a lot of research into this and it's a lot i i was surprised by how many

projects are spinning up um you know it's gonna it's gonna make things kind of like harder i guess in general to kind of cut out the wheat from the chaff because there's going to be a lot of scams as well unfortunately especially as the bull market heats up but you know in general i think paying attention to what's happening across all these projects is good from i mean out of general you know genuine curiosity or if you're investing in these markets you definitely want to know where you know all the all the kind of interest is and you know what projects they're growing what aren't growing you know i've kind of at this point i mean i spend so much time in ethereum and i've already lost track of like all the projects in the ecosystem like i come across projects that have been out for a few weeks and i have and

it's the first time i've heard of them um you know even though i spend every day you know looking through it all and that's simply because there's just too much happening and you just won't come across everything which i think is is pretty bullish right it means that kind of we've reached this kind of escape velocity with ethereum and d5 where you know it's just going to get like a a life of its own and no kind of one person has like a whole view of what's happening uh and that's you know really healthy going forward i think so as i spoke about yesterday or the day before there was this ether fund going live on the toronto stock exchange which went live today or yesterday depending on where you are in the world right now so you can buy this if you're in if you

have access to the toronto stock exchange with your uh brokerage account or registered retirement accounts you can basically basically get exposure to through your retirement accounts in this kind of jurisdiction here uh similar to what i spoke about yesterday uh or about like the e3 product from grayscale i'm pretty sure this is a similar product um but you know they claim it's the world's first regulated and major exchange listed eath fund so i think it works differently to those products i think with the e3 product there's no redemption feature where you know once you're in you can't kind of sell um or like exit sort of thing at least i think that's how it works whereas with the this fund i'm assuming that you can like actively you know buy and sell it at will and there is a redemption feature

there uh but yeah if you want to go check that out it'll be linked in the show notes you can check out more details about that one all right i think that's everything for today everyone that i that i had um you know a bit of a slower day today actually noticed there wasn't as much news coming out as as other days uh maybe we'll see some some fireworks over the weekend uh or maybe into next week i know that we have those pending regulations still where there's those rumors about i guess you know banning self-hosted worlds or doing more kyc more regulations i think we're going to get clarity over the next few days around that i think that's why the you know the markets are the way they are right now where markets hate uncertainty so any kind of uncertainty kind of puts pause

and people like you know i won't buy now because uh there's this kind of thing that's coming we'll see what happens there i personally think that it's gonna be a kind of like sell the um rumor by the news like i think they're going to come out with these new regulations and it's going to be you know what i think i've said it on the on the on the kind of show before where it's just going to be like tightening kyc regulations and also making it so that you're limited to how many withdrawal addresses you can have or crypto withdrawal addresses you can have on centralized exchanges so i'm expecting that we'll see how it goes uh i'll keep you guys updated with everything of course uh and if you haven't yet definitely subscribe to the youtube channel give the video a thumbs up i subscribe to the newsletter and join

the discord and i hope you have a great weekend and i'll see you all next week thanks everyone