Uniswap Labs lawsuit, The Merge updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #354 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 14th of april 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i know i said that i'd be doing a refuel tomorrow uh being tomorrow being friday uh but unfortunately i don't think i will have time to uh i have too much going on that need to get sorted before i fly out to amsterdam as you guys know i'm flying out tomorrow so just to kind of recap here because of this there's probably not going to be a refuel until may 2nd which is the monday i get back may 1st uh so yeah i'm going to try and upload here and there if i can but there's no guarantee so i'm just going to say that

there's not going to be one and if there is you know it's going to be going to be a nice surprise i guess and it'll probably come out at a different time than you're usually used to the the refuels coming out at um but i'm so pumped uh this is my first kind of like real holiday since before covered um it's the first time going to a proper eat conference since 8th denver in 2020 uh i just i i'm yeah i'm so sorry so excited so anyway uh here's a recap of my plans with devconnect these are the days that i'm going to be attending so i'm going to be at 8th day uh for about half of it and then i have some other commitments to get to i'm going to be at the staking gathering i'm actually going to be giving a talk there uh layer 2 amsterdam

i'm going to be out as well and i'm going to be on a panel there uh tbd yeah it hasn't been officially announced but i'm going to be on a panel there be i'll be at shelling point uh and i'll be judging the amsterdam hackathon and i'll be around like various parties and things like that and just around the city so as i said plenty of times if you see me please do come up and say hello i would love to meet as many of you as i can uh and i'm just yeah as i said i'm so sorry so excited right now i just i can't contain my excitement at this point uh but hopefully there's not many delays at the airport apparently the airports are being chaos obviously because it's the easter long weekend i didn't even realize that when i was booking everything and then my fiance is

like you know we're leaving on good friday yeah and i'm like oh okay i just kind of like i i wasn't paying attention i'm like oh oh so apparently airports are a bit chaotic but you know hopefully i get there and always well and good but i'm not gonna bore you with the details are there so yeah i mean i guess like after today's episode i'll see you all on two weeks on the refuel uh but we can we can do our goodbyes at the end for now there's a few different things i want to talk about with regards to the merge now i know i've talked about the merge a lot lately i spoke about the quote-unquote delay the other day and the funny thing is if you had been listening to the refuel i think it it was either three or four weeks now where

i've been saying that i i doubt june was going to go ahead you would have been you know you would have had this alpha before basically everyone but on top of that you would know why right and the thing is is that i remember saying to you guys if the kiln test net went well if it or if if it didn't have any hiccups and everything went smoothly then that would be the best case scenario and we would probably get emerge in june but i did say if there were hiccups then there's probably not going to be the merge in in june and uh there were hiccups and here we are right and that that kind of like target window of june was originally given because of the the difficulty bomb basically what ended up happening was that there was a core devs a while ago where people where they kind

of like got together and they said okay let's let's aim for june with the merge because that's when the difficulty bomb starts kind of like going off and then if we don't make it by then we'd have to do separate kind of like hard forks so it wasn't actually a date given for the merge it was more just kind of like a target window but i've explained this to you guys plenty of times before um and tim biker put out a bunch of points here i wanted to read through a few of them uh so you know he put he put like basically a screenshot with with a bunch of text saying merge timelines and then first question when will the merge happen and this is tim's words uh tim biker being the person that's heavily involved on the execution eth1 side as coordination very heavily involved with

cordes devs but he says there is no official date for the merge yet but they will only be set once client teams are confident that the software implementations have been thoroughly tested and are bug free any date announcement will be communicated on blog.ethereum.org it's exactly the same thing i've been telling you guys for months at this point so i don't think that should be news to you so what needs to happen before the merge as of april 2022 all client teams have in-progress implementations for the merge which have been tested by test suites the launch of new test nets and shadow fox shadow forks run against both existing test nets and the ethereum main that have revealed implementation issues and clients teams are now fixing these and regularly re-running shadow forks to test fixes and you guys know i've been covering the shadow forks since they've

been happening so again not news to you once clients work without issues during shadow forks then the existing ethereum test nets such as robson and gurley will be run through the merge an announcement will be made on blockdown ethereum.org at this point again same thing i've been saying once test nets have successfully upgraded and remain stable then a time will be set for the upgrade to happen on the ethereum main net the merge unlike previous ethereum upgrades will not be triggered by a block time as you guys know it'll be triggered by ttd or terminal difficulty value or total terminal difficulty um and then a list of tasks to be completed before the main net upgrades can be found here and there's a and there's a kind of like link there so that's basically from tim himself i mean probably one of if not the closest people to the merge so

you're not going to get any closer than that at this point uh but yeah i mean you guys know my my thoughts on this and there was a kind of like tweet today i can't remember who it was from um maybe it was from domothy uh someone someone put out a tweet that basically said you know we we communicate the ethereum roadmap for years we we try our best to educate we try our best to kind of like um how to kind of like get the right information out there and then tim baiko says on twitter in a thread that the merge isn't pro isn't going to happen in june and for some reason like everyone latched on to that like the media was all over it everyone was talking about it and it's like holy like this is just crazy right no matter how hard we try bad information just

just spreads like wildfires so that kind of like really annoyed me um and i kind of i i do get disheartened sometimes it's not like i'm going to stop educating not i'm going to stop doing what i'm doing but i get really disheartened sometimes where i'm like i put so much effort into educating you guys into keeping up with everything into trying to spread the right information and then you know random people can come along with bad information or negative information and that spreads just like wildfire and most of the time it's not even accurate so that kind of annoys me to some extent but i'm not going to kind of rant about that for now there was an interesting tweet here from uh from jesse who is building dowers um and and he's at coinbase uh where he says the eth merge is likely the top five most

complex technical organizational and incentive migrations in human history not just in crypto in human history i'm actually inclined to agree with this it makes me very mad when people nitpick or attack the teams for minor timeline changes especially when we're this close and folks are working so hard look i know it's bit bombastic to say that it's the top five most complex technical organizational and incentive migrations in human history but i think that's rather accurate for a few different reasons number one this has never been done before never in history has a network or a network of value the size of ethereum being upgraded from basically what's securing it to another kind of a

mechanism that's going to secure it so private work is currently securing ethereum it's keeping the ethereum network alive running secure all that good stuff and we're ripping that out and replacing it with proof of stake that alone is absolutely massive within computer science within computer engineering that's absolutely massive on top of that we're doing this in a decentralized way we need all the incentives to be right there are uh adversaries out there that will take any opportunity to attack ethereum to you know to to kind of like attack any of the weaknesses or bugs or exploit anything and that's why we're doing all these tests um so for people to get mad that maybe the merge happens in q3 or q4 rather than happening in q2 or june or whatever people to get like really

really mad about it is honestly astonishing to me it just they just miss the forest for the trees i um i can kind of like understand why they're mad in terms of kind of like uh not agreeing with it but understanding and some people like some people actually believe that the merge being delayed means that isn't going to go up or that it's going to go down because of it and i actually put out a tweet where i said the people who think that the market is efficient enough to price in quote-unquote delays around the merge are the same people who think the market isn't efficient enough to price in the bull case for the merge it's just just absolutely stupid right like if you think that if okay let me put it to you this way let me let me kind of like simplify this if you're

buying eth today and one of your reasons for buying eighth is because of the bull case for the merge and you believe that it's not priced in yet that's why you're buying today because you expect a return on your investment but then you also believe that any delays for the merge is going to lead to uh you know a selloff of eighth or bearishness for eighth how do you reconcile that because if you believe the market is efficient enough to do the latter then you should believe it's efficient enough to do the format but you don't so when i see this kind of thing people complaining about price this is all i think about and it really just speaks to the fact that i mean there's a lot of people in crypto have absolutely zero patience right like just basically nothing there's probably a lot

of people who have bought over the last gi hasn't haven't really seen anything any return on their investment um unless maybe they bought like a in the low 2000s or anything like that and there are plenty of people out there who get their information from the worst kind of sources so again i understand i understand why it is like this not that i think it not that i agree with it not that i think it should be like this but you know it is because of that those those reasons as i outlined and the merge itself you know coming from a kind of um perspective around what it's going to do for the price look guys it's not like the merge is going to happen and then 8 is going to double triple quadruple in price instantly this is so how it works the merge is going to happen

right it's going to happen there are people out there who think it's that they think it's not going to happen at all which is crazy i was reading some minor threads on reddit recently and they actually think that it's not going to happen at all and it actually amazes me that they think like this because then it actually explains the fact that the hash rate is going up and hash rate is at all-time highs because people are investing in mining equipment with the thesis that the merge isn't actually going to happen absolutely insane to me but you know it is what it is but it is going to happen and then once it happens who knows how long it's going to take the price to to go up right who knows how long it's going to take for 8th to get to like 10k 20k wherever else that that we all um

think it's going to go like it the timelines are hard like i'm always long-term fundamentals based investor and i actually thought of something today and i i was kind of like thinking through because as i said yesterday i kind of want to do a video on what i look for when i kind of like invest in things in crypto and i'm probably going to do a separate video for that when i get back from amsterdam obviously um but i was kind of thinking through and i'm like okay what makes a good investment in crypto like what makes eth different from other things take away the take away kind of like you know a lot of the fundamentals uh in in terms of kind of like driving demand how does it stop ethan going down less than other other things out there and i think there's two major reasons one

obviously is a much bigger asset right so to move it in both directions is harder but i think secondly and what plays out over the longer term is that fundamentals rather than acting as a demand driver act as a cushion for when the price is going down or the price is not going up and just going sideways and what i mean by this is that if you're an eth holder and you're a long-term investor you will look at what's happening while the price is going down and you look for reasons to keep holding right like i mean if you've been in it for a while maybe you don't do this but i know a lot of people that do this they'll look for reasons to keep holding well you have a million reasons to keep holding right now right like you have the merge is a

big reason you have everything happening with layer twos you have one five five nine burning and and and eight uh attracting value from that you have staking and things like that i mean there's a million different reasons to hold each and different fundamental reasons to to hold eth and to not panic sell or to not sell your wreath and to hold for the longer term so i think that fundamentals definitely act as a as a cushion and and kind of like dampen the downside of volatility upside is driven by a bunch of different things over the long term i think that fundamentals definitely play um play a role but i think that they they play a much stronger role in cushioning the fall rather than leading to to you know those spikes in demand and that extra kind of like by pressure on on eth

or on crypto in general so anyway i'm going to talk more to more of that sort of stuff in in the standalone video that i want to do there uh but yeah i mean i've spoken about the merge enough i think at this point you're not going to hear about it for probably two weeks now so just wanted to get that out of the way hopefully these next two weeks are good i think there will be i mean it feels like these next two weeks are pretty critical in terms of like shadow forks and test nets and all that sort of stuff surrounding the merge you know people are going to be together in amsterdam they're going to be working together as well and there's going to be a lot happening there's going to be a lot of people talking about this sort of stuff so i think that taking all that

into account yeah next two weeks are going to be very very fun uh around ethereum itself and around the merge of course all right so something that i forgot to cover the other day which i followed for a while on the review and then it went quiet was virgil griffith's case now for those of you who don't know virgil griffith was um kind of like uh i guess what did he do at the ethereum foundation he was kind of like in charge of special projects at the ethereum foundation and a few a few years ago i think i think it's like three two to three years ago at this point he um basically broke or i guess like went against sanctions went to north korea and did a presentation on how north koreans could evade sanctions using ethereum now obviously this is not something you

should be doing uh obviously he uh i kind of got because he did it in the open the united states did not like this and they brought a case against him now today or i think it was yesterday or the day before he was sentenced after i think it was two years or something of a kind of like process here and he was sentenced to 63 months in prison uh for helping north korea with crypto that's that's what's said here um and uh both griffith and the prosecutor side of the ukraine war virgil saying it showed him the importance of sanctions u.s urging uh deterring evasions and then this guy here kind of like put together i think another thread where he's talking through the whole case but yeah that's that's what's basically come of it now i don't know the exact details of like if this

includes time served and stuff like that this is this is over five years by the way 63 months guys that's a it's not not a short time and someone like virgil like i met him only once and i met him in early 2019 and he was so friendly and such an awesome guy someone like him in prison doesn't belong in prison in my eyes i don't know what prison he's going to be in but i don't think someone like that belongs in prison but that's just my kind of um uh interpretation of that there and if you don't know who virgil is here's a picture of him if you if you kind of like don't remember there but yeah it seems like uh this i guess uh is this chapter is kind of like ended here we got the sentencing for for virgil and um you know i don't know what

the the the exact details are there's also a hundred thousand dollar fine of course um but i don't know if there's kind of um uh there's kind of like a plea deals or other play deals kind of like um appeals process and stuff like that and later down the line not totally sure on all the details but that's basically what what has come of it so unfortunately uh i think that's what people kind of like expected he took he basically i believe he took a plea deal i believe he pleaded guilty in order for a for a lighter sentence but obviously the us wants to make an example here and wants to to anyone else from uh trying to kind of like teach the people under sanctions how to evade them i'm not gonna opine on you know world politics sanctions war all that sort of

stuff i just wanted to kind of like give coverage to this because as i said i considered virgil or i still consider virgil friends i even know i only met him once but he was a very he was a light in the ethereum community and still is so hopefully once he's out of prison um you know who knows how long that will be maybe it's the whole five years maybe he comes out before that as i said don't know the exact details here hopefully he he's kind of welcomed back into ethereum with open arms and he can continue doing what he was doing uh i would love to see that personally all right so a interesting chart here from data always where they said quick teas of my next writing uh looking at the surge of supply inflows when ethereum unlocks are finally enabled for

now enjoy a possible acceleration path with the cl ticking up and liquid staking de-risking deposits so you can see here i mean it's a kind of a quite complex chart here but my read is basically what it's showing is that kind of like uh data always expects the validate account until the until the possible until sorry until unlock to just keep going up right and i mean it can only be up only because of the fact that uh you can't withdraw your eighth right now but he he's kind of like plotted it out here to show kind of like a consistent kind of trend um and you can see he has plotted hopeful merge and hopeful unlock on the date so the merge between july and october and then uh hopeful unlock between jan and april of next year and then he's also got uh the

churn limit in in terms of kind of like the the validator um queues and stuff like that so yeah this is an interesting chart um i think the validated queue i don't think it's that 14 000. i think it came down it's at 13 000 but i mean it's still been hovering around there it's actually quite crazy like i'm looking at the beacon chain website right now 343 000 validators and basically almost 11 million each staked on the dot there uh and there's more than that coming because of the pending validators so i think that uh and i think data always is comment here about liquid staking de-risking deposits is actually very important because a lot of these new eth deposits going in are going in via services like lido and rocket pool because of the fact that they issue you this derivative token re and st which

you can go use within d5 and do whatever else you want with it so you basically still have liquidity on your eighth even though it's in this kind of like one-way bridge to the beacon chain right now i think that's definitely driving a lot of this and it's important to realize that but people often kind of talk about won't that dampen kind of like uh uh the um the demand for eath and dampen the effect of of of a locked up eath i don't think so because these staked eat deposits they need liquidity with eth to to to have a market right because they're only i mean right now they're only really one-sided market um if there's a bank run it actually becomes pretty bad i think we've seen this with lido before where there was a a mini bank run or at least there was a large amount of eight

withdrawn from the curveball and then there was an imbalance and this is simply because uh that eighth that exists in the bigger chain right now can't be withdrawn uh so it's kind of like the s to e you know you do have a claim on that eighth when it is able to be withdrawn but if you wanted to get out now you have to go through the um the the various liquidity pools on ethereum to trade your st for for eighth and this is what all these derivative tokens will always be like they're always going to have to be backed up by eighth and if they're not if there's like a bank run well what ends up happening is that demand for eth goes through the roof because people want to get out of their staked earth token into eth and they have to trade to

do that uh and then you know demand goes through the river it's the same thing with with most derivatives and i think a lot of people don't realize how derivatives work um but i don't think it's going to dampen demand for ethan i don't think it's going to dampen uh kind of like the effect of locking up eighth in staking that's for sure all right so georgios from paradigm shared a new research post today uh titled hardware acceleration for zero knowledge proofs and he's capturing it by saying as zero knowledge proofs become more integrated into l1 and l2s the opportunity for zk mining could grow to a size similar to that of proof of work mining fpgas not s6 or gpus are the best answer to meet the unique compute needs of zk roll ups so i'm not going to read to these blog posts obviously but you can check this

out i've mentioned this before how i said that i think that miners and people who have been kind of like doing hardware related stuff should very much be looking at this because zero knowledge proves the bottleneck from what i understand right now is actually computing the proofs and this obviously requires hardware to do and the better hardware that you have uh the the easier you can compute the proof but obviously it costs money to do this so what paradigm is making a bet on here or at least what georgios is kind of like making a bet on and what i am too is that we're going to have like a massive hardware industry blossom around zero knowledge proofs and i don't think it's going to be as intensive as something like proof of work is it's it's definitely going to require some

some powerful compute but i don't think it's going to be as intensive as proof of work and this kind of like acts as a lifeboat for all those miners especially in ethereum who basically are going to be left in the dust once we you know do the merge right literally from from block to block they're going to be left in the dust there so they should be looking at this if you are a miner if you know miners you should definitely be looking into this definitely give georgios's blog post a read for an overview of that but i think that as more people come to realize that this is an actual opportunity as these l2s that you know the zkl2s issue tokens and then they can pay out those tokens to the you know the people running the hardware it's going to get quite lucrative i imagine so

we'll have to see how it plays out you know in in practice but in theory it seems like it's going to be a quiet quite a lucrative kind of like endeavor and there's going to be harder manufacturers that actually get spun up around this specifically just like we've seen asic manufacturers spin up to produce asics for um you know proof of work networks and things like that so definitely go give this blog post a read if you want to learn more about that one all right so the rainbow extension is going to be launching this summer it will support all browsers and as i say here is extra extra drippy uh so you can see here this is the preview of the extension of the the rainbow wallet uh extension uh obviously if you've been using rainbow mobile wallets uh on your ios or android device you would be

familiar with them very nice looking wallet very cool looking uh very uh very awesome way to view your nfts uh as you guys know i'm not a huge mobile wallet user but um rainbow is definitely one of the ones that i have installed and i like using it from time to time even just to watch my addresses and things like that um i i do enjoy using it but yeah it seems like uh this is coming soon launches this summer this summer being northern hemisphere summer my pet peeve is people using seasons to refer to times of the year because summer for for me is not this is not uh middle of the year it's end of the year uh but but yeah this summer so june july august uh so we get the rainbow extension in june and possibly instead of the merge but you know it's a that's

a trade-off right it's an equal trade-off uh so i mean they say here you can kind of like enable a bell on or alerts on the github repo for maximum alpha to see when this is going to going to go out so this is funny it's uh taylor monahan mentioned here your github is literally empty except for a five month old emoji i look so excited to have someone take some of this market share but like what i think this is done on purpose right i think they're gonna kind of like release all the code once it's ready sort of thing so that's fine but yeah you can kind of like enable alerts here if you want to do that uh but cool cool to see uh rainbow making movements on their extension here all right so i talk about signing with ethereum a lot on the refuel as you guys

know i think it's one of the most bullish things to happen within the ethereum ecosystem and one of the most exciting things being worked on uh wyc.e put together a great thread today about sign with ethereum and how it's the first step to unbundle the login so wyc starts by saying today identity providers such as google facebook or apple manage the entire logging experience but so much more can be unlocked by unbundling by unbundling user control data sharing and plastic innovation i've talked about this kind of stuff before obviously with user control um and kind of like data sharing and bringing your profile across different kind of like web services and stuff like that and you can see here a nice little image that says web 2 on the left big login such as facebook and google and then you have web3 on the right which

kind of like splits up these things into key based user authentication using your uh using your wallet obviously your ethereum wallet or other network wallet public network transactions such as read write of on-chain data on all the apps that we know and love and then signing in with ethereum and web3 login in rewriting off-chain data and you can do this with all kinds of services out to all kinds of web 3 services out there in this thread wyc continues and kind of like breaks down each of these uh a bit more here and they work uh at um at spruce id which is actually working closely with the signing with ethereum team and building this whole thing out and building the kind of like widgets that are needed and stuff like that to get this kind of like um you know ubiquitous across the web so so

yeah definitely give this thread a reader link in the youtube description for you to do so uh but you guys know i'm super excited about signing with ethereum and just like as wyc says yeah i'm bundling the login i think that's a really really cool thing i think it's a really cool thing that's not um you know a financial thing like i love that obviously it has financial implications but i love that it's not defy it's not nfts it's like pure web3 true web3 stuff that's actually going to lead to better outcomes for for users all right so there's been a lawsuit uh kind of like i guess a class action lawsuit lodged against unisop labs from someone who and you can see here yeti whap um summarizes this by saying the plaintiff first used the exchange the

exchange being uni swap in may 2021 and first learn and make okay let me may 2021 was the market peak guys last year um the first time i guess like technically the market peak was november but may 2021 was crazier um but yeah mate 212 was the peak and first learned about unisop around that time plaintiff incurred substantial losses on her transactions in connection with each of the tokens and the tokens i don't know if i can bring this up because this is quite a lengthy thing but the tokens that she bought were literally like scam coins like absolute just like i think it's yeah yeah um here you go ethereum max scam right that was an actual scam uh rocket bunny boom baby dot what else is there matrix samurai i

don't even know what these things are and she's blaming uni swap labs for her losses due to this now i don't know who took this class action on like is there a law firm kind of like labelled here um this is just insane to me this is such a waste of time like that she's not gonna win um or whoever's lodging this they're not gonna win because i mean for a number of reasons right like unicef labs didn't tell her to go trade these things they don't control the uni swap um smart contracts or anyone can list markets on there it's all decentralized and it's just i feel like the judge is gonna say this is a complete waste of time like what do you even waste you know what are you even doing here like you made an investment decision you decided to put your money

into it you can't just go and sue someone because you're uh um because your investment didn't work out like it's it's just so stupid right i just i'm laughing because like i i'm just thinking through how silly this is and how someone actually got a i feel it seems like someone got a lawyer to to kind of like take this case and uh and kind of like um uh uh sue unisop labs over this i don't think anything's gonna come of this i think unisop's gonna fight this and basically win i don't think there's going to be um any um any kind of like settlements or anything like that because it's just it's just such a stupid uh thing here and you can see here the amounts invested are so small as well holy i hadn't seen

this what the hell so the amounts invested guys it's like 31 in ethereum max 141 dollars in ethereum max and there's like there's multiple transactions you bought it on on 15th of of um of may the 30th of may the 2nd of june the 3rd of june the 16th of june and the 29th of june and each time she seems to have kind of like increased her money she put like a couple of thousand dollars in here um what the hell like i'm so confused i'm actually so confused uh i think the total what's uh it goes down here i think the total mate might be less than ten thousand or maybe ten thousand dollars something like that and she's suing over over that wouldn't it cost her more money to do this unless she unless she was able to find a law firm that would represent her

in this case and that would actually take this on as kind of like no window charge as well which seems very odd but i guess it happens i mean there are ambulance chasers in the law world and and that's the term you know to use to describe kind of like law firms that do this but um yeah this is just crazy she's suing over this and you can tell these are all kind of like those scam coins because look in rocket bunnies you put 95 bucks and it got a 1.9 trillion tokens it's just it's it's those tokens that like have you know this this huge supply to make the price look really cheap to full noobs into buying and obviously she was fooled and now she's trying to blame unisop labs for this i don't know i'm laughing too much at this i'm not going

to rant anymore i'll link this in the youtube description so you can go read it for yourself um but i think that's gonna be it for for today's episode so yeah reminder again guys i'll probably won't be doing one for another two weeks so i'm gonna i guess i'll see you guys in in two weeks from today i'm i'm gonna try and upload before then it may not be a kind of like full refuel maybe it'll just be an update for me at amsterdam or my phone or something like that where i kind of like talk about my experience what i've been doing and stuff like that and hopefully you guys can catch some of my talks you can check out all the schedules if you're not going to be at some at dev connect with even if you are you can check out all the schedules on the devconnect

website and to see what's going on there it should it looks like it's going to be an amazing conference so obviously i'm very much looking forward to it uh but on that note i think 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 the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all in a couple of weeks thanks everyone