Regulatory drama, OPCraft game released and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #471 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host tanneness asano and today's the 19th of October 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so an interesting tweet out from Scott Lewis today and I'll read out the Tweet first he said ftxt is spending money to push a law through Congress that may Force defy protocols to operate like centralized exchanges The Proposal is called the digital Commodities consumer protection act a better name would be the digital Commodities FTX protection act um and FTX obviously is founded and and run by SPF who has been a character that's for sure over the last I guess two three years in particular um now I want to start this by saying

that I wouldn't normally cover something like this if it was just one person saying it but I have heard this from multiple people now so it leads me to believe that there's truth to this it's not just some random rumor it's not just some random fun it's there's actually truth to this and I it got me thinking like I've been hearing this over the past one to two weeks I actually and only now that Scott went public with it like this uh that I figured okay there's enough people talking about it I'm going to cover it on the refuel um but the way I'm thinking about this is okay well I don't really see how it makes much sense for SPF to do this right like SPF has been a profit maximalist his entire time that he's been in crypto he's made a lot of money

right he's made tens of billions of dollars from this industry um but when I think about what he's doing here by pushing this through like doesn't this harm him doesn't his harm his ability to make money and at face value it does but then you can think deeper about this and think exactly what he's trying to do here what I think he's trying to do is just self-preservation at the end of the day because the way I look at it and the way I see it and this is just pure speculation on my behalf but I mean you connect the dots things start to make sense what he did was he made a lot of money and he made a lot of money illegally now depending on what nation you're referring to is is what's illegal in some you know Nations what's not illegal in others but a lot of the stuff that he

did was not legal by Financial regulatory standards now of course most of crypto is unregulated so what he did at the time I guess maybe wasn't illegal and and there's obviously going to be a new legislation that comes through that maybe makes what he did uh you know illegal and codifies it but we all know what he used to do right and we all know the casino he ran we all know or still runs right he has a I mean so basically the The Playbook generally is invest in a new protocol right get a you know an early stage kind of token allocation uh Farm the token list the perps on the exchange be the market maker as well because they have a market making firm Alameda uh basically do all of that and create like this again s feedback loop where they basically win no matter what

and it doesn't matter if there's vesting on the tokens what they can do is they can just short the perp on their exchange which they control right and then just cover the short one once their tokens are vested and at the end of the day they have a lot of connections a lot of big money connections that they can do this with and usually those people were in on this game as well so there was a lot of dodgy stuff that has happened with SPF over the last few years and that's where he's made the majority of his money okay well what does that do well that puts a Target on his back right Regulators look at this industry and they think okay well who are the big players of this industry who are the biggest players and they are centralized exchanges that is the on and

off ramp that is where the most money runs through uh through crypto right okay what are the biggest exchanges well coinbase okay what coinbase is fully us regulated already so there's not much really to look into there uh a kraken right same deal binance binance is uh I mean they've cleaned up their act a lot lately but still they've done a lot of dodgy stuff too but they're offshore you know they do a lot of regulatory Arbitrage uh CZ is not a US citizen and then you look at FTX right okay FTX has a us-based uh exchange as well used to be in the US I mean SPF uh until recently until maybe the last I don't know six to 12 months was in the US operating out of the US uh he's worked

in the US I believe he's a U.S citizen so you look at that and you're like okay well this is the kind of guy that we should go after right so to speak or go in question you know I think what SPF anticipated this and he's front running it by basically presenting himself as this I guess what you call a good guy to the politicians to The Regulators being like hey you know I'm here I'm an open door come ask me whatever you want I'll tell you how this industry works I'll tell you you know where all the dodgy actors are I'll tell you how to regulate it essentially so as I said I believe this is self-preservation even if it hurts he's maybe short to medium term profits that he can make I think it it increases his long-term chances of one staying in business two not facing

massive fines uh three potentially you know not going to prison which I didn't think would happen but I mean there's always a chance right so I think he's just protecting himself by doing this because that's the only thing that makes sense to me because at the end of the day he's made most of his money from things like D5 from farming those tokens from doing lots of Unchained stuff and if he crippled that then he would his Revenue Source right but if the if the point of crippling it is to basically be a friend of regulators as and we know that he's donated to politicians we know that he plans to donate hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions of dollars to politicians in the U.S yes well you only do that if you're doing it the self-preservation strategy right and he probably believes long term this will be

good for him because what will end up happening is that he'll have FTX uh gets a preferential treatment right because he's friends with The Regulators they'll regulate FTX they'll give them all the necessary licenses everything that they need in order to list these things to trade these things to be that kind of place to do all this sorts of stuff and then the other exchanges and the other services will maybe get those licenses eventually but they'll be I guess handicapped by the fact that they'll come later right and then everyone just gets funneled into FTX that's probably the master plan here so as I said I've seen this from multiple people now so I'm not I don't think this is fun uh and if you know anything about SBF and the FTX ecosystem you know that there have been very profit maximalist driven for the entire time that they've existed I

mean it's the only way SPF was able to make so much money so quickly uh and now I guess the chickens have come home to roost and he's probably seeing this and being like I need to get ahead of this I need to front run these regular regulators and this is the way he's doing it again this is just speculation on my behalf here but I think it's very um prudent to be aware of these things from what I've heard there's not a super high chance of something like this passing uh obviously the political landscape is quite complex in the US uh but still uh this thing is being pushed through or trying to be pushed through uh it seems that SPF and the FTX I guess ecosystem is trying to push it through because they think it's going to benefit themselves we have to fight back against

this uh I personally can't really fight I mean I'm not a U.S citizen I can't vote in elections right I mean the midterms are coming up next month I can't vote in those obviously not much I can do on the lobbying side of things unfortunately I'm not a billionaire so I can't I mean even if I even if I don't think you need to be a billionaire to lobby but I definitely don't have enough money to be spending on lobbying uh not maybe it's not even legal for me to do that as an Australian citizen to to Lobby us um politicians I'm not even sure about that but I do do think there's probably people on the other side of this either they're part of you know massive VCS and funds like a16z for example or they're the coinbases and the Krakens of the world uh because I think those exchanges

are definitely on the side of crypto especially Kraken Kraken has always been very friendly to crypto um coinbase has been warming up over the last uh maybe one to two years a lot more than they traditionally have been in terms of the crypto Mission values ethos and ideals and all that sorts of stuff and because those two are proper us-based right us-based companies especially coinbase that's public I definitely have a lot of sway there and those big VCS and funds have been in the political Arena especially some someone like Asic or something like a16z they've been in that arena for quite a while so yeah but anyway I uh as I said I think it's prudent to be on top of these things not much we can do as individuals I mean if you're a US citizen you can obviously vote for various politicians that

support or don't support this depending on what your view on things are and you can also write to the politicians right you can express your concern right to The Regulators you can make noise about this but even as non-us Citizens you can still make noise about this right you can spread this on Twitter make sure people are aware of it and I guess make YouTube videos about it like what I'm doing right uh but yeah anyway moving on from that one to uh some I guess ethereum protocol related updates so uh well I mean this is an ethereum protocol related but I think it's it's relevant here because moloch Dao now this is something that's been around for a while while it was launched in the last bear Market uh and for those of you who don't know what molok Dao is it was basically

the first big instantiation of public goods funding on ethereum other than Bitcoin grants and what it tried to do was slay this demon or devil uh called moloch right which is the um the god of coordination right so basically the um the problem was at the time during the last bear Market there was uh uh problems with funding especially for core development so Mohawk Dale was launched and bunch of eat whales got together they put eat into it and the thing was is that at any time someone could quote unquote Rage Quit from the Dow and take their eat with them but there was no guarantee you would get the same share back depending on what you know what eth was already donated or what it was already given to these

public goods but it was this kind of big first attempt to that that uh of funding those public goods on ethereum now Morlock V2 uh is it might be deployed might be deployed to Stark net here so there is a link here of uh moloch on Stark net MVP so implementing most of moloch V2 features adding new functionalities and running on starknet so it's already running as an MVP which is really really cool so this site you can check out all the details um I'll link it in YouTube description below but yeah I just wanted to hide this because molok was definitely a big thing back in that last bear market and it influenced a lot of the ways we thought about public goods funding and it influenced a lot of the community around values and

around how they looked at coordinate Nation issues because at the end of the day when I think about issues not only within crypto but worldwide issues it always comes back to coordination and Kevin I'll walk you from git coin is a pretty big advocate of this like if we can't coordinate right if we don't have the tools to coordinate uh in a certain way then the outcomes of the way we do coordinate dictate our reality so for example if all we have is really shitty ways to coordinate like you live under a dictatorship or you live in um you know you live under a um under a country where democracy is not observed well you don't really have great ways of coordination your coordination is basically someone telling you what to do like the government basically telling you what you can and can't do uh from

like a very very top-down centralized approach right whereas in democracy you at least have the option of of coordinating by voting right by voting for different politicians and changing uh changing the guards so to speak every few years in in most countries uh so it all it literally all comes back to coordination uh when thinking about these macro Level Society level problems and the same is true within crypto the funding issues came back to coordination uh once more lockdown was spun up more things got funded then get coin grants was ramping up more things got funded and we have things like the ethereum foundation support program as well and there's a bunch of other initiatives too so uh but when we can coordinate a better we can coordinate Capital better and then we can get it to the places where it needs to be and that is that's

basically the whole point of Bitcoin grants with the quadratic funding as well is that we want to be able to coordinate better but we also want to make people's donations have more impact so let's do quadratic funding which has obviously been very successful over the last few years but cool to see molok V2 live on starknet I'll link this in YouTube description for you to go check out all right so stakewise has a great thread out today about decentralization on ethereum so they started this thread by saying decentralization of ethereum is not a given every wallet that's staking eat is responsible for where we land on the decentralization axis so how do we tip the scale in favor of more solo operators a thread about the mission of stakewise V3 in the staking ecosystem and you can grade these straight I'll link it in the YouTube

description below but I did Cover what stakewise V3 was a few weeks ago how they're trying to be uh to basically be a fully decentralized liquid staking protocol uh like rockapool for example and they're going to be using DVT technology to to achieve this but I want to focus on here uh for for a minute the first part of this tweet where they said in a decentralization of ethereum is not a given this is so very very true it's not a given guys the only reason that decentralized blockchains exists and can continue existing is that social layer that I always talk about right and the social layer influences the technical layer and also influences the distribution of things like steak that's why they say yeah you know how do we

scare tip the scale in favor of more solar operators because the more solo validators there are the better the decentralization for ethereum is it's not totally one to one in black and white like that but it is mostly like that because at the end of the day if you're a solo unaffiliated uh operator right and you operate uh various validators whether it's one or one hundred it doesn't matter you are adding a whole lot of decentralization to the ethereum network now of course not all solo validators are created equal you know maybe you are a bad solo validator and you only keep your no uh your validator online 50 of the time right uh or maybe you um you are a solo validator that is using a censoring relayer for example you're contributing to censorship on the ethereum network so as I said not all solo validators are

created equal if I had to pick like the perfect solo validator it would be one that's running uh just a validator no Mev boost right because you're by running Mev boost your uh giving up a bit of decentralization by Outsourcing your block building uh duties to flash Bots not flashbots to uh um the different relays depending on what relay you use so if you want to be a good solo validator I'm the perfect seller validator essentially what you want is 100 uptime or is near to 100 uptime as you can get which would involve having a UPS or an unintopable power supply backup internet in case your internet goes down in order to keep that validator online 100 of the time you'd have the necessary Hardware um and you you know you'd make sure that

everything was up to date and and everything was running smoothly and you were just using the the and you were using maybe a minority client right as well so like there's a lot that goes into it and that's why I said not all solo validators are created equal but a solo validator uh is much better for decentralization right you as an individual as a solo operator I should say is much better for this the decentralization of ethereum than uh any of the staking pools I mean even rocketpool like I love rocket pool it's you know it's decentralized it's great but I mean you can like in terms of what adds more decentralization to the network being a solo validator you can't beat that right but in saying that there is a spectrum there is a very broad spectrum where you have centralized

exchange staking on one end solo validating on the other end rocker pool is like just behind solo evaluating it's very very close closed captioning not available to solo validate right we build better

uh um staking pools are ideally decentralized ones and we move people towards that end of the spectrum rather than the centralized exchange and operator end of the Spectrum which is I've obviously not ideal but in saying that they're always going to exist and as I've said before I don't think that any one I guess like entity should have more than 10 share on the beacon chain ideally we would have it at five percent or less but I don't think that's going to happen just based on the laws of um of distribution there I think that if we can get to no operator having more than 10 share on the network or no entity I should say um that would that would be killer right that'd be absolutely awesome that would be the ideal world uh but in saying that that's nuanced as well because what if

we have you know for example we have 10 entities with 10 each on the network but all those entities are centralized well that's no good because it's basically just centralized then right so you have this that's why I always say when looking at the decentralization of ethereum the things like distribution of stake and and all that sort of stuff around that there is so much Nuance to it that you can't just boil it down to a simple uh narrative a simple fud tweet that all these people like to boil it down to on Twitter it just doesn't work like that right so yeah anyway I'm gonna leave it at that because if I keep going and go way over time here I've got a bunch of other things to get through uh but yeah good thread here from stakewise definitely go give it a read I'll link

it in the YouTube description below all right so speaking of staking uh chainsafe uh the uh Team behind or I guess like the developers behind the load star consensus layer client has announced that they've raised a 18.5 75 million dollar over subscribed series a round so congratulations to them on this round it was uh back they were backed by a bunch of uh well-known names within the ecosystem such as consensus uh fambushi Capital uh ASG iosg Ventures and more I'm not sure which Angels participated in this round if any uh I don't know if that's in the blog post actually that's not the blog post this is the blog post um but yeah for those of you who don't know chainsafe not don't only build the load stock client on ethereum and

related infrastructure they also build on other networks as well they've always had a multi-network multi-chain vision of crypto and they've stuck to that uh they currently build on polka dot and filecoin and some others out there so it's just great to see them you know I guess like still sticking to their roots of what they believe in but uh you know obviously also working in ethereum and investors are seeing this which is very very very cool so congrats to them on this raise this will give them the money they need to keep building what they've been building all right last thing on staking is Big the beacon chain website here has execution rewards that are now displayed on the validator page so validator history is in way instead of eth daily income chart distinguishes between

execution layer and consensus layer rewards API and income does not respect the El reward for now mobile app will include ER rewards soon so essentially what you can see here now is a breakdown of what reward you're getting from transactions or Mev uh so transaction fees I should say uh and Mev such transaction related um related tasks and also what you're getting from the consensus layout which is those block rewards for proposing a block and also for a testing to blocks and also being part of sync committees right so really cool to see this I'm sure a lot of you use the beacon chain website to monitor your validators I know I do and it's just a really really awesome tool so you can go check this out uh on your own on your own validators all right so I think this was one of the

biggest announcements over the last 24 hours uh out of lattice here so I did talk about this yesterday a little bit about this uh op stack that optimism brought out and also uh around gaming and how I believe that the next era of crypto gaming isn't just going to be slapping nfts on uh on games it's going to be building what's called autonomous world and fully on-chain games well we already have one of those that's live right now for you to play called opcraft so let us introduce this today so they've said over the last few months we've been working on an exciting technical collaboration with optimism using our mud on chain game engine which I spoke about the other day and optimism's op stack we built a 3D autonomous World which is basically a clone of Minecraft called opcraft and I have a treat for you I have it loaded up

right here on my screen if it wants to load there we go so you can see it is a clone of Minecraft I I haven't really done much I kind of like mined some blocks and started building something that doesn't really resemble anything you are um but essentially every action is actually on chain so you can't see it but in the bottom left when I do this right when I I kind of like mine something or break something it will say on the left hand side mine transaction for grass and that'll actually be fully on chain so all of this all the player actions everything happening on here there's 28 other players in here right now it's all happening on chain on a chain that's using the op stack which I think is absolutely awesome because if we can get like fully unchanged scalable you know global scale games then we can

have those fully decentralized autonomous worlds that we've always wanted from crypto gaming like I don't want crypto gaming to just be defined as slapping nfts on something and slapping loot boxes on something and that and calling it a day I want to see what new things we can do with this technology with gaming because you guys know I'm a big gamer uh not as much these days but I used to be a lot bigger as a gamer I think these days a lot of games actually suck so I'm excited to see what comes out of the crypto gaming space but not the crypto gaming space where they're just adding nfts to stuff I don't think that's enough of a differentiator between what we already have um what I what I would like to see is more of this sort of stuff this fully on chain games

yes okay it's a clone of Minecraft but still it's just a proof of concept right it's showcasing the technology here that this actually works on a layer too and you can see here that uh I can't even build online on some blocks because the chunk of this block has been claimed by uh this address here and when I say block I mean like um this grass block I don't actually mean like a block on on a blockchain right it's a bit confusing when you think about Minecraft like that oh that's what I was building over there before you saw I was building a blockchain oh someone's uh someone's uh spelled out something here uh Shin Shin oh I guess it's Shin uh maybe someone's name um but uh yeah you can see the op logo here as well so I don't know as I said

guys I think this is just really cool nice little proof of concept you can go check it out for yourself as well all you have to do is verify on Twitter and you can get started with it um I'll of course link it in the YouTube description below you can go get started uh but there's a few things built around here I don't know if people have built these or if this was in here um to begin with but uh you can see select okay yeah yeah I'm just going around and just walking around right now looking at things but you can see uh there's just tons of tons of blocks there for you to mine for you to do stuff with I did see some people before uh actually um doing stuff uh and there you can see someone's built something there um but I

don't know where they are right now this world is obviously huge Minecraft worlds for those of you who don't know are absolutely massive um but yeah I don't know where the people are right now but I have seen them and on my bottom left it shows that there's 33 people here right now uh hopefully I see one before I move on no it doesn't look like I will oh there's some water yeah I haven't played much of it because I just got kind of got into it before and then obviously I need to do the refuel but yeah anyway you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so I talked about fire the other week actually uh there was this new kind of app that you could sideload with your metamask wallet that would basically give you a more detailed

breakdown of what's happening with your transactions apparently they're going to be launching to the public next Monday so there was over 10 000 people who signed up for the waiting list uh and you will be the first to get access if you have signed up to the waiting list and they're still giving access throughout the week so yeah next Monday this will be publicly available for people which is really really cool uh I'm not sure if this is open source yet so I don't know if you should trust it just yet but uh if it is then you should go check it out and see if other people have commented on it or anything like that but if you have been in invited to the beta and have been have had a chance to play around with it maybe let me know how that was in the Discord Channel I'd

love to hear about it but yeah just wanted to give you guys a heads up this is going to be available to the public next Monday and you guys know I gave this a lot of Praise a few weeks ago because I thought it was just a much needed tool for people to be able to see what their their transactions are actually doing um because metamask doesn't give you much information there there uh uh you know For Better or Worse um but yeah you can go check this out next Monday once it launches and I'll I'll hopefully have to cover it next Monday to remind you guys but just in case maybe set a reminder for yourself as well all right so Josh Stark here has put together a Twitter thread uh catching up on the Devcon six talks part one which is the layer two talk so these are

Joshua's curated talks about layer twos from Devcon so if you're looking for layer 2 talks to pay attention to to watch well these are the ones to do here and for those of you who don't know Josh Stark has been working within ethereum for quite a while now he works at the ethereum foundation he writes the uh yeah in ethereum review with Evan Van Ness so a very long time a long time contributor to the ethereum community and I trust his opinion on these sorts of things so you can go check out this thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below our last stop here we have a big announcement out of a16z a crypto today they are announcing the launch of their new accelerator called crypto startup school this program will include investment from a16z of 500 000 or up to 500 000 mentorship from leading Founders

advice from domain experts and a network of fellow Builders you can now apply at this link here which I'll link in the YouTube description below a16z isn't a you know isn't just a crypto I guess like VC right the a16c parent um company they've got the a16z crypto Division and a bunch of other divisions out there but they've been around for a long time they've a fund that has a lot of money and uh they're probably I think one of if not the biggest funds in the US right they get also invest in a lot of things and they also tend to take a little bit of a shotgun approach to investing in crypto uh in in and but what I mean by that is that they invest in a lot of things in crypto and unfortunately I mean a fair bit of those things are actually just garbage right

but in saying that I still think you should give credit where it's due and them doing things like crypto startup schools you know investing in teams mentoring teams and getting people connected to founders of their portfolio companies and things like that I think that's really really cool um yes maybe they're doing it for selfish reasons as well because by investing in these teams really early on they get their first check in right and normally obviously as a invest as a VC how you want to be as early as possible especially if you're open to doing as early as possible deals um at like you know pre-seed sort of thing but still at the end of the day like they're going to give you access to a network that you just wouldn't have access to otherwise and as I said the network is absolutely massive inside and

outside of crypto they've been around for such a long time now I mean it's got to be over 20 years at this point because I remember a16z uh they got they made a lot of money during the incident era because they funded a lot of successful internet-based companies and now they're doing the same with crypto but as I said they have funded a bunch of crap in crypto especially layer ones they love layer ones they do have this thesis around block space being the most valuable thing in crypto I don't necessarily agree with that thesis because we've already seen like there's an abundance of block space but I mean most of the tokens aren't that worth very much whereas eth has the ethereum layer one has the least amount of block space right but has the most valuable block space and also if is obviously the

most valuable smart contract relay related token by far smart blockchain related token by far so I disagree with that thesis but in saying that they've also funded optimism and I think some other layer twos so they recognize the importance of layer twos as well and I've talked about how I think investors even the big ones lag the crypto narratives by six to 12 months as well but that's a discussion for another day or maybe I'll bring it up in the future again but I just wanted to highlight this for anyone who was you know wanting to be part of a crypto startup school or crypto accelerator you should check out this from from a16z crypto I'll link this in the YouTube description below but I think that's going to be it for today so thank 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