Stablecoin regulation, Ethereum metrics and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #22 - 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 24th of december 2020. all right guys i know a lot of you are probably you know taking your holiday break right now getting ready for christmas uh for me is going to be christmas tomorrow um i've already had my christmas eve because i'm living in the future in australia um but yeah i i think the news for the next few days is going to be probably not as kind of active as it has been uh in crypto right there's going to be less news you know projects aren't going to be putting out updates and things like that um throughout this break because it's just less people online less happening and things like that so i will keep doing the daily wear

refuels over the holiday break um but they might be shorter given that there's doesn't seem to be too much going on right now um but still i i still wanted to do them to to give you guys something to you know listen in on relax to while you're while you're kind of relaxing on the holidays and you know i still think there's stuff that's going to happen i think maybe there's just going to be drama because people are bored and when people are bored um they like to start drama right you know cryptos are global so not everyone celebrates christmas and all that sort of stuff so you know those people are probably going to be online nothing's going to be kind of different for them but i guess around new year's there's going to be uh you know a lack of kind of news coming out around then

i don't actually know what date new year's eve falls on but if it falls on a weekday i'll probably skip doing that day for the dailyvee refuel so just a heads up there but i will be putting out a yearly recap uh towards the end of the year probably maybe even just like early january that recaps the entire year of 2020 you know i'll record a whole video about that that'll probably go for you know a couple hours given how much happened so you know i'm gonna gonna get that done over the holiday period because i really think that 2020 was like a massive year for ethereum and especially d5 so i wanted to kind of like give a recap there to kind of give some context into kind of like how far we've come not just with i guess price but um you know that came a long way

right we started the year at 130 dollars we're up at like 580 at time of recording uh and then obviously all the project updates and everything but i'll jump into that properly once i when i do the video you'll be able to see it on that video and i'll be recording that shortly but for now let's get into today's news so i mean there's so much regulation fud or regulation like related news coming out lately which is just kind of like annoying at this point so jake chavinsky put out a tweet today saying that the president's working group on financial markets has issued a statement calling for on-chain stablecoin kyc and open quote stablecoin should have the capability to obtain and verify the identity of all transacting parties

including four unhosted wallets uh and he's taken this directly from a treasury uh i guess press release here um so i guess this follows on from the regulations that we saw play out over the last couple weeks with kind of i guess self-hosted wallets and things like that um but you know this is targeting specifically stable coins now i i think stable coin regulation is going to be a thing right especially the centralized stable coins because it's just an easy target uh you know circle and coinbase kind of you know manage and issue usdc super easy target right uh the other stable coins that are that are much smaller like tusd and things like that easy targets die with make up you know not not a very

easy target right maker is actually you know pretty decentralized there's no like back doors and things like that in there the governance process is pretty slow which is actually good in this case you know obviously we've got tether which is probably raising a lot of flags here as well uh tether is i mean it's not regulated right it's like outside of kind of like the u.s legal system uh there's a lot of drama surrounding tether and things like that so you know i mean i expect stablecoin regulation to come but this regulation just screams like amateur hour it doesn't make any sense really um you know verifying the identity of all transacting parties on kind of the ethereum network when you're sending stable coins and all that

sort of stuff i mean for one it's unscalable regulation like this is just basically going to mean that exchanges will will basically say well no we're not going to let you transact with your stable coins on your own wallets because it's just too much hassle for us to track because it will fall to the exchanges to track this and fiat on ramps and things like that uh because you know the individuals aren't going to aren't going to do this sort of stuff that individuals aren't going to submit their address you know and kyc it to use stablecoins so the stablecoin issuers and the exchanges and all that they're just going to cut it off if this was actually made into law now jake goes on to say in his thread he he doesn't think there's any chance that this becomes an enforceable rule or law

anytime soon um apparently this is just more of secretary munichon's uh personal views coming out on pretty looking stationary before his tenure ends so for those who aren't following us politics i mean i'm sure you all know about the presidential election but secretary mnuchin the current treasury secretary he will be going out when biden comes in in january which means that he's got maybe from maybe another month left i think or less than a month left at this point and then that's it basically and then it falls to the new administration to put forward these sorts of things if they want to or don't want to so it's not a huge concern here but they're coming right the regulators are coming they've left us alone for a little bit but they're here now and i

don't think they're going to be going away anytime soon i think they're just going to keep trying to regulate you know they might come out like really strong but then it'll get watered down but there will be regulations that come into uh you know defy stable coins especially anything that's you know touches like i guess the fiat on ramps in the exchanges like the majority of the time like stable coins are definitely first on the hit list so gonna be keeping an eye on this i think this is gonna be big going into 2021 now that i guess bitcoin is part of the macro narrative right a bitcoin is getting a lot more um i guess like attention which means uh d5 is getting a lot more attention ethereum's getting a lot more attention uh stable coins as well because stablecoins aren't just obviously in the

ethereum ecosystem but they're also within bitcoin too so i think we're gonna see a lot of that play out and yeah i think this is this is gonna be a a strong narrative going into 2021 uh i think that uh we're gonna be seeing a lot of these regulations come forward so i'm gonna be keeping an eye on that for sure all right a new feature from etherscan uh yesterday so uh this feature is is very welcome um you know the etherscan isn't the first to do this there's been a lot of teams uh i mean sorry a lot of our tools come out with this kind of feature and basically what it is it allows you to review and revoke access to spending your tokens from any smart contract now for those who don't know about this i'll

explain so obviously whenever you interact with a new d5 protocol with a token it requires your approval to spend that token so you would have seen you know an approval transaction come up on your metamask or whatever you have to approve that then you can use your tokens within that kind of default protocol um and most of these approvals are what are called infinite approvals so what this means is that you're giving permission to this particular smart contract or defy app to spend all of the tokens that are in your wallet at that time so just specific to the token that you've approved but say you know you have like usdc you approve uh infinite approved on usdc and you have a thousand usdc that smart contract can in theory draw 1000 usdc

from you even without your approval because you've already given it approval to spend your usdc so um and then on the other hand there are some apps like curve that let you do approvals just for the amount that you're trading with so say you're doing a curved trade for a thousand usdc for a thousand usdt for example uh you approve just that transaction the downside of that is that it's costly in gas because every time you go to do a transaction with that token on curve you have to approve again so that's why infinite approvals have been popular because it's just once it's better ux it's better for on gas fees and that sort of stuff but unfortunately it's um it's it means that you know you have that issue and you always have that

danger of a rogue contract being able to withdraw your funds without you even knowing so this tool from etherscan lets you basically connect your wallet and see what i guess like apps and contracts and what they belong to have approval to spend what tokens so you can see in the screenshot here for example the die stable coin contract has the ability to spend unlimited die the wrapped btc has unlimited btc uh on uni swap so on uni swap the wrapped bitcoin um sorry unisop has unlimited permission to spend all your wrapped bitcoin so on here you can basically revoke that by clicking the little button you can see on the screenshot there on the right hand side

this will cost you a transaction to do so it will cost gas um so you know maybe you want to wait till gas is cheap to do this but i highly highly highly recommend going here and uh revoking old kind of contracts that you've approved especially because a lot of us did stuff in d5 summer there's a lot in there that you've forgotten about uh i can't recommend this enough even if it costs you like 50 dollars to do this in gas fees it's it's worth it so yeah i'm really glad to scan did this i i have provided this tool obviously there are there are tools that existed like this before but ether scan is very popular so having it on there is is even better and on that topic ether scan is just such an amazing tool i mean obviously like you've all used etherscan at this

point they're not just amazing because they let you you know view your transactions and things like that and view your addresses but they have so many little cool features on there as well so you know they they let you do things like look at the price of ether at when when the transaction happened so if you put it if you had a transaction that went through and you sent it to someone a year ago they've actually got like a little info uh kind of section there now that tells you what the price was at that transaction point uh so that's really great for accounting purposes as well right um they provide like a ton of different information they let you they have a breakdown of the transaction so you can kind of look at a look at what it's doing they have uh visual cues as well

i mean at this point either scan is just such an integral tool for ethereum that i i i can't believe it's free right uh they have ads of course but it's not you know it's like they charge you to use etherscan every single feature is free uh which i think is really amazing so you know kudos to the ether scan team they've been around forever i mean i'm pretty sure they've been around since almost day one ethereum uh they've definitely been around since 2017 and all that and their uptime is amazing uh they've only gone down a couple times in the last i mean that i've been aware of in in the last few years i think it might be more than that but from my memory it's definitely not very often uh so yeah amazing amazing service and i'm

really happy to see they keep adding these these features that are very important for people right um this this is definitely very important so i'll leave a link to this in the youtube description i definitely recommend going checking it out and make sure that you check it out on all of your addresses not just one because you might have used the other ones during you know d5 summer or whatever and you've forgotten about it uh but yeah i can't recommend this enough so definitely go check this one out so stablecoin on chain volume has crossed the one trillion dollar mark this year uh and the majority of this happened on ethereum with having 83.5 of the share uh the tron and omni blockchains followed next with 14.5 percent uh on tron and 2.1 on omni so

obviously the majority happened on ethereum for obvious reasons right d5 is incredibly sticky people want to do things on d5 with their assets and people want to do a lot of things with stable coins we saw stable coin farming being extremely popular it's still extremely popular right curve has you know stable coin farming ongoing you know why earn harvest finance all the all those things it's just stable coin farming uh stable coins are incredibly great for trading especially on decentralized exchanges you know arbitrage things like that so it's no surprise right one trillion dollars is it's quite amazing though when you think about it right i think last year it was it's actually broken down here so last year it was 248 billion

so it affects effectively four times the the total transaction volume uh for stable coins on uh i guess not just ethereum but like omni and and tron i guess as well uh and then you know you can see back in 2018 it was 100 billion uh and in 2017 it was 13.5 billion so we have come such a long way and i mean i was just talking about stable coin regulations and how they are basically uh coming i mean you know this is why as well right because the growth has been so explosive that it's now on the regulator's radars especially given that tether is the dominant stable coin with 73 share of the on-chain volumes usdc at 15 and diet 7 i am actually curious and i

really hope to see this become more even i really hope to see usdt actually become less than 73 less than 50 basically um probably you know ideally 30 or less and then usdc become you know maybe 30 die kind of 30 percent and then 10 miscellaneous i also kind of think that um you know you might think well why don't we just encourage diet the decentralized stable coin to be you know the majority well there's lots of problems with dye it's not very scalable it loses its peg quite often right um it's not uh i mean because of the fact that it loses its peg it has much less appeal for traders and things like that um but yeah i i i hope that we see that but i just don't see it happening

i think centralized stable coins are way easier for people to use and trust and the peg issues don't really exist with them because they're backed up by dollars uh whereas usdt is funny right because like it might not be backed up by dollars we don't know for sure um you know one to one in a bank account but it still retains its peg uh quite well um which is which is quite funny as well so yeah i hope to see that change but huge milestone for ethereum here one trillion dollars that's that's crazy that's that's really crazy so yeah i guess um you know let's see what 2021 brings can we get this up to 10 trillion i don't think so as bullish as i am that's a lot um maybe we can get it two

to three trillion i hope that it's more than a trillion i hope that we you know just didn't have like a a kind of like growth year this year and then we have a down year next year i mean i don't think there's any chance of that happening but it's always there right there's always there's always a chance so i'm going to keep an eye on this and see what happens in the new year all right well there we go it's refreshing uh so a wiki awoke from git coin uh posted this tweet today saying that they had just passed 10 million dollars in funding for open source software on the get coin platform this is this is great this is really really great 10 million dollars coming from the community coming from different matching partners during the git coin grants rounds

uh going towards funding uh you know basically all ethereum open source software open source media developers all this sort of stuff and you can see the breakdown on the chart here if you look at the q4 2020 all the way on the on the far right you can see that that git coin grants obviously accounts for a lot of it um if not most of it most of the money being raised which makes a lot of sense because you have the matching funds you have people donating right these rounds are pretty popular uh then second it looks like bounties as well so people are using get coin as a platform to get stuff done that they want to get done which is really really awesome and then next after that it seems uh tips and ads are basically almost neck and neck as well and then

you know you have ecosystem and kudos which is some smaller things there uh but this is i mean look at this growth right even this growth from q3 to q4 uh it's not double it looks maybe about 35 40 percent more growth um since since q3 into q4 uh but just in 2020 it's just grown so much and it's kept going up which is really amazing to see so congrats to the git coin obviously i am a beneficiary of this as part of the daily great eth so it's been amazing uh you know some of you might have been as well you might have grants up there uh you know i hope uh many of you have donated to grants in the past on git coin uh i don't see a downside to it at all uh but yeah congrats to get coin on this

and onwards to a hundred million maybe we can get that in 2021 let's let's see how it plays out for sure so i put out this tweet today that there is now over two million eth in the e3 deposit contract now i know i've spoken about eastern staking a lot right um this is just i mean i mean i've said it in the past right we said we were going to struggle to get the 5000 the minimum we got there we blew past it and now it just seems like we're just rocketing up 2 million uh if that is basically worth i mean i don't know off top of my head it's over a billion dollars definitely um i think it's maybe at 1.5 billion or something i don't know i have to i can't do head math on that right now but

yeah it's quite a lot of uh of dollars in there securing the beacon chain um there's i think an over two week validator cue now to get into the beaker chain if you want a stake uh it's been running extremely smoothly speaking of the of the chain you know slashings are going on as they should the clients are running really well uh so yeah really really great to see that don't know how i think it took like 38 days to get to 2 million or something like that um i don't know uh how long it's going to take to get 3 million maybe we'll slow down here i'm really curious to see when it slows down i don't think it will for quite a while uh but yeah so there's two million eighth kind of locked away which is over one point five percent i think of the

total supply of eighth probably closer to two percent the total supply uh the current subtotal supply is 112 million or something like that again not gonna do head math on that but yeah really great to see this uh with eth2 all right lastly an extremely bullish uh thread from lucas uh here so i mean this thread basically goes over what i went over in the daily gray uh uh data pump video that i did you haven't checked that out yet it's on youtube but basically what he's done is he's put together this thread that goes through on chain kind of um analytics for ethereum and points to kind of ten ethereum charts that have already hit all-time highs in 2020.

now the reason he's done this is because you know btc crossed all times highs last week 8th is still sitting you know 50 below its previous record um so if this has got you down he's got you covered so he goes through here and you can see on the screen the utilization rate for the network is still at all-time highs you know i mean we all feel that with gas fees right uh you know ethereum capacity is maxed out on eth1 right now uh there's just so much demand to use the network ethereum's hashrate is at all-time highs despite the fact that uh we just launched a proof of stake blockchain right uh total eth options open interest is also at all-time highs and it's approaching one billion dollars so this is uh i guess like

institutional maturity you know kind of adoption here in the mostly i guess centralized uh exchange space but still you can see the growth here it's basically all within the second half of 2020 it's grown here which is really really great um d5 users are at all-time highs of course like it just keeps going up we've got over one million users now obviously people have multiple ethereum addresses so it's not one million individuals uh you know if i had to wager i'd probably do two to three hundred thousand um kind of like maybe unique users in terms of active users as well and basing that off metamask as active users as well and taking into account that people have multiple addresses the total value locked in d5 is at 15

billion which is a new high of course dex volumes are you know i mean they they obviously spike during d5 summer and rose a lot i mean you can see on the chart here oh the charts actually small here but you can see on the chart here that they spiked and then they've come down a bit but they're still higher than they were in 2020. uh btc on ethereum is obviously really high ethan greyscale in grayscale's kind of investment trust is is very high as well uh i think 2.3 percent of the total supplies in that and that's like a black hole for eth like that's not coming out once it goes back in uh stable coins obviously at all time highs here and eight in the deposit contract is also on an all-time high there and then he links to his piece in the

kind of bankless newsletter where he goes through this and explains it in more detail so i think this is an incredibly bullish thread i mean it basically mirrors what i did in my a data pump video i think looking at on-chain data is always extremely healthy especially you know as he says when you see the price and like bt says that all-time highs but it isn't you think you know why is this the case and then you look at the fundamentals and the fundamentals just keep getting stronger i think the reason why btc is at all-time highs is because of its institutional macro adoption where you have these billionaires you know saying we're going to buy all this btc which obviously plays out in the markets uh some of them are saying they're going to buy ethan as well but it's not as prevalent right i do think eth is poised

to have a very strong 2021 obviously overnight we had a bit of a crypto apocalypse which was a bit weird i guess maybe opportunistic kind of traders and whales because it's the holiday period but i'm not going to give like a full market analysis here i just know that ethereum is poised to have a really really great 2021 um and all of these kind of metrics are at all-time highs so and i expect that to continue into 2021 for sure all right that's it for today's episode everyone thank you for watching listening if you haven't yet subscribe to the youtube channel hit the thumbs up button on the video subscribe to the daily guy newsletter join the discord and i will see you all tomorrow uh tomorrow's going to be christmas but i'm going to record a refill for you guys so that you can

keep up to date with what's happening so yeah thanks everyone