Stablecoin chat, Dencun testing and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #644 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of delivery review welcome latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is honor and it's the 22nd of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today we have news out of the coinbase and circle ecosystems so you can see here that I guess to the surprise of no one coinbase and circle have announced a few updates to usdc and one of those updates or I guess like the major update is that coinbase has taken a stake in circle of a company now the reason why I say this shouldn't necessarily be surprising is because coinbase and circle have worked very very closely together on usdc for some time now so definitely don't think that uh that as I said should be a surprise to anyone now they've also

announced that they're going to be expanding usdc to six additional blockchains they didn't specify which blockchains these were but I think that based on an old announcement they would include the likes of polka dot uh and Cosmos and optimism honestly don't know why it kind of make that I I don't know I don't think it really makes sense to focus on like polka dot and Cosmos and other ecosystems other layer 1 ecosystems I feel like they should really be focusing on layer twos and especially right now with usdc Supply kind of dwindling I really feel like they should be focusing on the ecosystems where the money actually is uh but yeah I mean that as I said like this is just based on old uh kind of I guess like news and I don't know exactly which networks they're going to be

supporting but I'm sure they're going to be supporting all the l2s generally anyway and also you can always Bridge these things to these l2s and if there's enough demand for it there'll be liquidity there and then you know that'll all be all the good stuff there so those are the two kind of like major updates there um you know generally I think when it comes to stable coins it's kind of a funny thing right because we've had an evolution of stable coins specifically centralized stable coins over the last 12 to 18 months I think the major one a major um uh kind of things have been busd or binance USD being shut down by the SEC because paxos is the issuer of that coin or of that stable coin and they are in the US so there are obviously regulated by the SEC uh and that was shut down

because apparently binance broke uh I guess like the terms of service or something that were minting uh busd on a chain that they weren't allowed to mince it on or using it on a chain they weren't allowed to use it on or something like that so that was shut down and busd supply has gone from I mean if I go to Queen gecko here and go to busd it was very dominant actually it was uh its market cap was uh was pretty high if I'm just bringing up the market cap now on Queen gecko yeah it's market cap was around 23 billion and now it's down to about 3.2 billion and obviously that will continue to dwindle as time goes on so that was a major shake up obviously we had all the stuff that happened with usdc and those banks that went under and then usdc depeged to I

think it went under 90 cents because of that a lot of fear in the markets and since then usdc uh supply has been trending down uh usdt or tether it's Supply turn it down for a little bit but then trended back up and I think that its Supply is basically at all-time high uh it's at an 82 billion dollar uh kind of market cap right now uh which I think is close to all-time high yeah all-time high is around 83 billion which happened in May of 2022 and then after that usdc Supply bottomed out at around 65 billion and is now back up so I think what happened that usdt not usdc so tether Supply so I think a lot of usdc obviously got uh I guess like converted into usdt for one reason or another and

there are a bunch of other centralized stable coins out there but they're definitely smaller so those kind of three major ones I guess have been shaken up over the last 12 to 18 months uh and it remains to be seen what happens from here because obviously people are also pulling out money from from stable coins because they're they think to themselves well if I can get like a four or five percent risk-free rate on my dollars on my actual US dollars in a bank account then what's the point of keeping it in crypto what's the point of keeping it as a stable coin so I think there's been a lot of that going on as well obviously no one seems to be in a rush to buy crypto right now uh and I've said before that I think the crypto markets are just going to Trend

sideways for the rest of the year or even a little bit down and more down from here and then next year will be hopefully a better and more positive year uh but yeah that's kind of the state of the centralized stable coins right now so I'm hopeful that uh Circle and coinbase can can come back here and can get usdc growth going again I think that will just naturally see stablecoin growth happen in a bull market anyway because there'll be a lot of people wanting to come on chain and they want to be they want to be able to use dollars on chain it's very easy just to Mint usdc on coinbase and then obviously withdraw it to your ethereum address or layer 2 address and play around with it on chain there so I definitely think that that's going to be happening uh in

the bull market but for now I guess uh things are very quiet as we all know but yeah I guess kudos to coinbase and circle for uh these updates today all right so a funny little kind of announcement that came out of the block yesterday which actually ended up getting them a community notes on their um on their tweet here so they basically had an article that uh had the headline leaked database of 101 000friend.tech users links their eth addresses now the reason why this was misleading and why they got a community notes on on here is because there's no leaked database uh you can view this on etherscan the league database as I quote tweeted Here is known as the blockchain or the ethereum blockchain because

friend.tech when you sign up you create a new new address but you need to fund that address right so a lot of people would have just funded it with their um uh their public address right that's what I did I funded it with sasol.eth and then you can just go on etherscan and see that so there's no leak here right and then people said oh well people are linking their Twitter profiles to their addresses it's like yeah but sasol.heath is already linked to me like it's literally my Twitter name and I I would assume that pretty much all the people that signed up here uh at least all the the big name people knew that it would all be connected because everyone knows that the ethereum blockchain is not uh is not uh private right and he's very transparent uh but

yeah calling it a leak database just just doesn't really make any sense because anyone can go on to etherscan and view this for themselves right or an ethereum block Explorer in in general then you know the reason why I bring this up is because it takes me to kind of I guess like the the Privacy stuff again obviously I spoke about friend Tech yesterday so I'm not going to talk about it again um but when it comes to apps like anything on chain right whether it be friend Tech or some other app you don't have any privacy guys and I feel like I keep needing to reiterate this for people because I think sometimes people forget this in that like at the end of the day these blockchains uh most of them are not private they're immutable so uh the I guess like record of your

transactions or record of anything you've done is there forever basically if the chain runs forever the record is there forever uh and there are obviously things you can do to protect your privacy such as using mixers if you're in the US you cannot do that with tornado cash but if you're outside of the US um depending where you are actually you you could potentially still use it there are other mixers out there as well but outside of uh using on-chain mixers like tornado cash people also use centralized exchanges as mixers because when you deposit into a centralized exchange uh and then withdraw uh it withdraws from their hot wallet so it is used as a mix mixer for a lot of people of course you're not going to have privacy from the centralized exchange itself they kyc'd you and everything as well so

definitely no privacy there but if you're trying to get privacy from people looking at your addresses on chain that's one way to do it obviously other ways are just like starting a new address right just finding a new address from a centralized exchange so there are a few different things you can do but but as I said like uh the the rule of thumb is anything you do on a chain that isn't something like Monero where it's private by default uh zcash obviously has shielded transactions but you know these networks are very limited because they're really just uh you can really just only send Z cash around or Monero around uh it's not like ethereum where you've got smart contracts and and tokens and nfts and stuff like that uh just yeah good to keep in mind that pretty much everything you do is exposed

forever and hopefully we get to a point where that's not the case but right now as it exists today that is definitely the case all right so we are all in on dencoon testing for the next couple of months I think so I've gone over this a bunch of times before about how we have the dencoon devnets have been happening over the last few weeks we're at devnet 8 right now uh and their test Nets are you know pretty close obviously we have whole ski test net going live on September 15th but in terms of forking them over to dencoon it's uh it's coming up uh very very soon uh then you've got this uh I guess like ethereum cat herders episode uh Peep and EIP episode from um Abuja here that is premiering today I

think August 22nd yep today at 18 30 UTC it's going to have a bunch of people that are involved with testing out these things such as parathos who I've talked about a bunch of times on the um the refill before they're going to be talking about dencoon testing so you can go check that out uh for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below and one other comment that I wanted to make about dencoon was that I saw uh Alex from Mata Labs who who have created ZK sync tweet today that um the 4844 throughput is not going to be as oh well the scalability is not going to be as great as people have said it is and he used the example of it costing like 800 uh bytes or you or taking up 800 bytes

or 400 bytes for a token swap on an L2 which would quickly fill up the the new blob space um I I feel like this was misleading this tweet because if a token swap on your L2 is costing 800 or even 400 bytes then you're doing something wrong it shouldn't be costing that much because you can compress the the um the transactions down so much that from what I've seen it shouldn't be higher than 50 bytes it should be even considerably less than that so this is what this is why I've said before that it depends on how the l2s operate and and that's what kind of scalability gains they're going to get from 4844 because they all have their own way of doing things like compression they'll have their own way

of timing how they pay fees obviously they've got different architectures between optimistic webs and ZK Roll-Ups so they could get a 10x Improvement on their fees or they could get 100x improvement from from 4844 it really just depends on I guess like what uh what you're looking at as well like is it just a simple send of ether a token is it a swap is it an nft mint uh what kind of compression are they doing right are they actually getting the most out of the scalability that they're doing at L2 are they a roll-up or are they um are they kind of like using off-chain data availability and only posting uh a very compressed version of the data to the chain once a day or something like that like there are different things here that I guess like different l2s do

and it's good to keep in mind that there's going to be these differences here so that's why I've been saying there's a range rather large range between 10 to 100 x in terms of scalability gains here and it's not going to be instant either unless these l2s are set up so that they can start taking advantage of blobs as soon as 48 44 goes live it's not going to be instant what you're going to need to wait for is for these L2 teams to upgrade uh their end or whether it be on the infrastructure side or the contract side of things in order to take advantage of the 4844 new blob style transactions so I just wanted to clarify that for you guys there because I saw some people talking about it in the Discord Channel today but anyway you can go check this out uh this then

testing video are these people in ARP video I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right you're all aware of Diva at this point the new ethereum staking protocol that is uh using DVT from day one for for staking here so they've put out a new blog post today titled ethereum diversity and how a DVT can help so if you're interested in learning more about DVT or distributed validated technology and how uh diva is using it within their stack this is a highly recommended read here um and I'll link it in the usual description below for you but I love this as I said before I love the differentiation that each of these kind of staking service providers are using obviously DBT is a big one and there's

been a lot of DVT work happening over the last couple of years between opal and SSV Network and a few other initiatives out there and now obviously with Diva so so yeah if you want to learn more about that I just wanted to put this on your radar I'll link it in the YouTube description below and another thing that I wanted to put on your radar was a great tweet thread from bar Tech today all about ZK proofs uh and he says here you know so if you've heard about ZK proofs how cool they are and how using them uh with ethereum can verify computational Integrity of some off-chain programs ranging from custom apps to full-blown layer 2zkavms but how do we know what is that program that is being verified and bartek runs through this little thread here explaining exactly how this all works so definitely

go give this a read as well link this in the YouTube description below uh but uh yeah that's it it's probably interesting to you because I mean I guess all of us are into zero knowledge proofs at this point into ZK Tech and we want to learn more about that there okay all right so I spoke a bit about speculation gambling yeah in yesterday's episode in the context of uh friend Tech and I put another tweet out today because I I woke up and I was kind of thinking uh I was scrolling through Twitter and I was kind of thinking to myself uh I'm reflecting on a lot of the conversations that I had yesterday with people around uh speculation and gambling whether that be on Twitter on the Discord Channel and a lot of the stuff that I said on the video yesterday and I thought to myself uh you know what

D5 summer was was pretty much this and I put out a tweet today where I said a lot of what happened in D5 summer was speculative or basically gambling gambling with many people getting wrecked but it pushed the industry forward and showed everyone the real power of Finance built on crypto rails I'm a strong believer that we can harness this degeneracy for good now you guys know the the slogan that I use all the time turning djans into Regens when it comes to things like public goods funding but it's not just limited to that degeneracy I guess like as as a as a concept within crypto is very subjective right like you may not consider something that someone does to be you know a d-gen behavior but someone else

may consider it that but if we want to just look at something that most people agree on as being djm Behavior we can say stuff like gambling or like just pure speculation for speculation's sake things like meme coins things like uh roll bit right that casino that literal casino right on chain Casino these purely speculative things right those things while uh as I said purely speculative or gambling can still be harnessed that degeneracy can still be harnessed for good in various different ways I think when it came to D5 summer what ended up happening was that we had liquidity mining we had yield farming we had tokens launching and that brought a lot of money on chain and that also basically showed a lot of people who

weren't paying attention to D5 before that because D5 wasn't new in in D5 summer in 2020 if I had around for quite a while actually on ethereum really I mean day five been around since 2017 with the likes of ether Delta and maker going live in its original fashion there but it's not until 2020 or the mid-2020 that a lot of people outside of the ethereum bubble started understanding it started getting it because they started using it they brought their their liquidity on chain they they understood that yes okay A lot of it was speculative but these were new rails being built these were new rails to do uh Finance on essentially and that's since then that's what a lot of the ecosystem around defy has been building towards basically improving that infrastructure making it less

speculative and more I guess like um I I guess like more focused on everyday Financial applications right like payments and things like that and I think the same is true for any other application that exists within within ethereum or crypto generally obviously when it comes to like on-chan casinos they're not going to be uh you know pushing anything for in terms of in terms of D5 or in terms of anything that is non-speculated by their very nature Casino will always be speculative but what it does in that context is that it basically shows people okay well we can have casinos on chain now like literal casinos not things that just look like gambling but literal casinos on chain

and they work and we can make them better like I'm not endorsing roll bit here I don't really know anything about it I've seen people write tweets about it and write threads about it whatever but the the idea of building like an on-che Casino or on-chan lotteries that's just gonna happen right that's gonna happen and it's going to be built out and there's going to be more and more of that stuff going on it's not new but it's definitely going to happen right so in that context those things kind of push that that industry forward or that part of the industry forward same thing with like friend tech for example not to rehash what I said yesterday but I spoke about the tech stack that it's built on right I know it's not a brand new tech stack pwas are not new right having apps that exist

outside of the app store isn't new friend Tech is a concept as a the concept isn't even new we had bitcloud before right um a player 2s are not new but what frenttech does is it shows people the possibilities here it gets people on chain like I've been hammering on for ages about layer twos and to see people finally bridging to them and enjoying their time on them uh makes me really really happy and that's what gets me most excited about it and I think that even though uh frantic is probably just going to be some speculative thing that might not last very long uh to be honest I it has a very high chance of not lasting very long at all it's going to lead to more Innovation I believe and it's going to push the industry forward

so that's why I think that when you just look at the speculation and the gambling in kind of I guess um you know vacuum or in or any kind of like a bubble you miss the the forest for the trees as I like to say right uh because there are things that push the industry forward and a lot of the time they do take the form of speculation of gambling but as long as they're in my mind there is a net positive or a net good that comes out of it it I think that uh that that is good overall for the ecosystem but as I said I'm not endorsing any of these things personally I'm not um putting my weight behind things I don't believe in when it came to friend Tech it was just like a fun little thing for me to play around

with and as I've said plenty of times on the on the refuel um don't play around with it if you don't know what you're doing and I also donated everything that I made to public goods because I didn't want to profit off of that uh at all really I mean I I saw the the trading phase I'm like you know what I'm just profiting off of like pure speculation and gambling here I don't feel comfortable doing this so how do I harness this and and do whatever with it in in the most kind of like Fair way possible and I just donated to the protocol Guild you guys know I love to do that so so yeah um but anyway enough about that enough about me on that note um I know you guys have your own opinions on this sorts of stuff you don't have to agree with me on this

sorts of stuff but generally when it comes to crypto speculation gambling that's just gonna be here forever right and I mean it's not just crypto it's just it's just humans in general the amount of I guess countries around the world that have tried to ban gambling or regulate gambling it always just moves on the ground if you do that uh and it's kind of funny some of the links that countries go to in order to con I I guess like control gambling or at least at least kind of put up the veil that they're trying to control it I know that in Japan the I think this is how you say the Pachinko uh kind of machines uh are very popular uh and basically uh gambling is technically illegal or something so you basically play the machines in one building and then in order to get your winnings you have to

go to a different building uh so there's like that separation there but that is like regulation theater doesn't really make much sense so as much as you would like as much as people like don't like gambling don't like speculation and maybe uh governments want to ban it uh or try to ban it it's not going to work right it's definitely not going to work because it just pushes it underground uh and at the end of the day people are always going to find a way to speculate and gamble no matter what it is doesn't matter if it's a stock market Casino crypto people love doing it and that's just the way it is right uh and as a related note here to the friend Tech stack uh Nicholas put out a great kind of um uh tweet today about the crypto app stack that is now here so the

features include an instant install all so that basically the installing that app outside of the App Store one click transactions because of the the preview wallet infrastructure that that is being used by friendtech notifications on IOS and Android cheap L2 transactions your keys your crypto because the privy wallet is non-custodial secure cloud backup with Apple account recovery and no app store limitations and and he's also calling this the peps stack which is pwa or Progressive web app web apps with mobile notifications embedded wallet or account abstraction signing permission pass keys with end-to-end encrypted backup and single sign on with apple Google Facebook or SMS here so this is exactly the stuff that we need

for Mass adoption guys I know as I've said before the ux of ofrintech is still quite clunky but it's better than what we're used to and if we keep iterating on that it's going to push the industry forward it's going to get us to a point where we can get to that one to two click uh app experience that I've been talking about for a while on the refuel and again this is what gets me excited because we are not going to be able to level up this industry and reach the new audience uh without doing this because I think we each bull cycle we kind of saturate the amount of people that we can reach in terms of like bringing them on chain um and then we need to build out during the bear Market in order to level up the amount of people that we can on board

again and get on chain again so that's exactly what's going to happen this is all going to lead to better apps being built uh more more user-friendly apps being built the UI ux is going to get so much better and then by the time the next bull market rolls around I think we're going to have like a really nice robust uh set of apps and ecosystem for people to play around with in a much easier way than they would have in the past uh and until that stops happening every cycle I'll be bullish on crypto because I I I just love seeing all the Innovations happening all the the um the things that push the industry forward and push things forward to the point of just onboarding more people because let's just say there's a million people using on-chan products today which I mean I think that might be a bit higher

but let's just for argument sake a million can we 10x that can we 100x that in the next bull market probably not 100x that would be that's a tall order but potentially we can 10x that and we can get 10 million people using on-chain products and having a great experience doing so and and if we do that if we 10 exit each and every bull market you know maybe in the next 15 20 years we've onboarded the majority of the world which would be awesome because that would be relatively fast it would have taken us what 30 35 years to go from nothing to a booming industry that has replaced traditional finance and everyone is using crypto rails and uh for different things whether it be Finance or other things I think that is the success case there but obviously a lot of building to

do a lot of work to do uh and I'll let you guys kind of comment on that if you would like feel free to comment on YouTube but in the Discord Channel if you want to as well we can have deeper conversations about that there all right last up here just a nice little thread from connects describing what superfluid is doing with uh their cross chain streams so they said here built with connectors SDK users can stream money to a bridge contract on a network and then receive a stream from a bridge contract on a different networks so you can transfer value every second between chains this is really cool and I've talked about these cross chain applications that can be built with connects before and with their stack before so essentially just to give you a concrete example of what this would look

like you could stream money to someone um from from arbitrim right but then it pays out to them on optimism because you're using this bridge to stream that money so this is I guess like again another app that can or another I guess like a piece of infrastructure that can abstract away that fragmentation of liquidity that we've been talking about a lot uh for years now within the ecosystem and this is the sort of stuff that makes it so that we can have that seamless experience for for people when they on board to it to basically stop them from having to choose which network to go to and they just basically uh well which data to go to based on liquidity and stuff like that and they just go wherever they they want to go wherever the app is and then eventually get to a

point where they don't even have to choose the network the interface itself will actually just choose a network for you depending on what you want to do depending on which app you're using and connects is definitely at the heart of this uh with their cross chain applications here and it was just cool to see that they highlighted super fluid and how this could work because I guess like asset streaming is something that I still think is very underexplored and doing it in an automated way was quite difficult on L1 because the gas fees were so high so obviously doing it in L2 and even an L3 where the gas fees are basically negligible is a bit much better way to do it because you can do automated streaming and then you could potentially have it so that it actually pays out any gas fees out of the

streamed funds and have it all automated in the background back end and the user just gets the money uh deposited into their into their account sort of like what happens with um the stripe payouts right now from Twitter it's kind of funny because um I'm signed up for Twitter payments uh for like what their ad sharing or whatever it is and I got paid a bit into my stripe account it's taken like four days and I still haven't got the money by the way which is just Trad fire right in a nutshell um but essentially it's the same thing where they've just sent me the money it's going through those systems I'm not paying any any kind of fees for it and it just lands in my account if we can do the same thing with crypto rails that is a huge level up and that is the step to

get us towards people putting like payrolls on on crypto rails people doing uh more Commerce related stuff on crypto rails and beginning to replace that kind of use case that the traditional Finance seems to have a monopoly on uh at this point there but anyway you can check out this connects thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so or I lost up here just to shout out I'm gonna be at another meet up in Melbourne this week uh this is going to be at upside down in cremorne uh you can just check out this tweet I'll link in the YouTube description below the tickets are sold out unfortunately so I'm just highlighting it here because if you did get a uh if you did did manage to get a ticket I will definitely be there I'm going to be talking all things ethereum

I think I'm going to be answering questions as well again so yeah I'm hoping to see a lot of you guys uh there this one is uh being Koran uh co-run by Stables uh Stables is a an app that you can download on your phone that lets you uh basically spend send and earn with stable coins I actually recommend going and downloading that app if stable coins are something that you usually play around with it's very smooth I actually really like the app myself there uh and that's not a paid endorsement or anything like that that's just me saying that because I downloaded the app after the Meetup I went to last week I actually wasn't aware of this app I downloaded it after the Meetup I went to last week and I was really Blown Away by just how smooth it is so yeah you can go

check that out for yourself if you would like and I hope to see a bunch of you at this meet up in Melbourne uh on Thursday night but on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone