Binance $4bil fine, Blast "L2" drama and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #693 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delway refu where up the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony Sano to the 25th of November 2023 all right everyone let's get into it so I'm back after I guess not doing four episodes this week I unfortunately rug fueled you guys on Tuesday as well I just kind of ran out of time to do an episode was packing and everything for my Sydney trip which was very very fun this was my kind of like favorite meme that came out of it you can see on front in front of my screen right here I'll link this in the YouTube description and the show notes for you guys to check this out here uh but yeah I mean it was really just a two-day event on Thursday and Friday for the bulk of it but on Wednesday I was also

at a another event called BG which is all about governance and I was on a panel with medy from Sigma Prime that was really fun to do and then I was on a few other panels uh I was on one with Kane from synthetics we talked about defi stuff and and synthetics obviously in infinex uh and DOW governance all that good stuff there and then I was on uh then I was on kind of like a panel on my own I guess like it was just me and the uh the presenter there kind of asking me questions about ethereum and trying to I guess spread the word about ethereum uh and then uh I was also on a panel here with Daniel from swell uh which is which is really fun that's where the meme kind of came out of here we're just talking about all things uh

staking but overall I had a really fun time I met a few people who listened to the refuel uh and you know I got the same answer from all of them they basically said that uh not the same answer but they basically said the same thing they said that I'm part of their uh kind of morning routine uh which is always heartwarming to me because it's honestly awesome to know that I'm part of people's routines and it actually keeps me motivated to keep going with these things with these episodes and make sure that I don't do many rug FS because then I feel really bad that you know your morning routine has been interrupted uh but yeah I mean if there's times when I'm sick or something then unfortunately I have to do a rug fuel but generally I think I'm I'm pretty good here but yeah I mean The

Vibes were were kind of uh I guess like split in half at this event because as I said to you guys it wasn't just like a Crypton native event it also brought together people from like the trafi world from the regulatory World a lot of lawyers were there actually um which is which is always fun but you know from my conversations with them they're all kind of like on our side right they're not trying to fight us they're not trying to do anything like that that they're actually trying to go to bat for us and especially when it comes to things like tax like I had a lengthy discussion with uh with Harry who's a tax lawyer and specializes in crypto tax these days we just talked about all things kind of tax the Australian tax officers approach to things uh and all that and in between

and I talked to a bunch of other people about similar things right like regul regulatory uh kind of stuff in Australia and abroad and how Australia seems to be falling behind and how we keep talking about it but the you know things aren't really moving that that quickly there are some things in the works right now especially from the um the treasury I believe the treasury Department or one of the Departments out there that uh that there was a paper published a little while ago that basically uh was guidance to the government I think to on how to regulate crypto there are a couple of concerning things in there but uh yeah there's good people giving good feedback on these things and there's a lot honestly there's a lot of good people kind of uh going and and fighting these things and making sure that uh you

know crypto doesn't get screwed over by some bad regulation or anything like that but yeah as I said like the crowd was was definitely varied there and it was kind of funny because on the first day on the Thursday um there was like the first half of the day until I guess like 1:00 p.m. or 12:00 p.m. or something like that was all talks from like the Trad five regulatory folks and the second half of the day was more kind of like defi talks and then on the the Friday or guess more Defi and crypto talks and then on the Friday uh in this event that I was at here that was organized by um Helix and upside uh and and and the crypto assembly event it was basically all kind of like crypto stuff which was which is awesome it was it went for a while you know we went way

over time actually with the event uh but it was great because it was uh you know more in I guess like our wheelhouse as as crypto natives here U but I had a lot of fun but yeah just overall had heaps of fun meeting uh lots of people that's what I love doing at these events and and I guess like thank you to those who came and kind of just came up to me and said hey because obviously like you probably know me but I don't know you so it's always good for people to come up and just introduce themselves and I get to know you know more people that listen to the refuel and it always warms my heart as I said there but in saying all of that we're going to move on to the news now it's going to be an extra long

episode today I think and I've done the episode on a Saturday of course because I didn't want to wait till Monday because it would just mean that I'd have to cover even more stuff and I think that I've let you left you guys hanging long enough I left you guys hanging since Monday and there is so much there is so much that happened right you know it's always funny whenever I don't do refuels so much happens and of course I guess I have to start at the top the binance news now I actually think this news is incredibly positive overall and I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about here but for those of you who don't uh if you've been living under the rock for the last few days um the US government has fined binance more than $4 billion it has forced CZ to step down

as binance's CEO and has actually brought criminal charges against CZ that could uh land him in prison for I think up to 18 months or something like that that they're seeking right now um but the reason why I say this is good news is because for the longest time since I guess like FTX collaps there had been a lot of rumors circulating in you know in crypto that and outside of crypto that binance was next right that binance was going to collapse theyve been doing the same thing that FTX was doing they've been Shady for quite a while now you know so on and so forth right and to be fair like the I guess like accusations of them being shady or doing kind of like shady things were completely accurate I mean uh for them to want to I guess like settle uh even though this

fine is quite substantial here um I I feel like it means that they felt like they weren't going to win if they went to court and obviously CZ stepping down is another signal there but it was an Open Secret that from the early days especially binance played Cowboy right they did not follow regulations they did not follow laws they they basically had the approach of you know do what's necessary now to grow and then ask for forgiveness later and it seemed to have worked to an extent because as I said like binance is still there the company's not shutting down it has a new CEO now I'm sure CZ is going to be in the background as a shadow CEO anyway um but generally yeah none of those other kind of like Duma predictions came to be and I think it's because even though binance and CD CZ did a lot of shady

stuff to grow from what I can tell and I guess like the the um the US government looked at the books as well uh binance seems to be completely solvent right they didn't do the cowboy stuff with customer assets that SP SPF did so it was a very different situation here where essentially the US government got them for like money laundering and allowing allowing terrorism financing to happen on their platform because of their lack of controls especially in the early days of of binance now the reason why it's it's so positive like I guess like the number one reason is because it basically was that last kind of overhang I think uh on on crypto that people were kind of pointing to as like the last Domino to fall so to speak and now that the Domino has basically fallen and it didn't really cause much of a much of a

crash here or much of a kind of like movement here in in the markets uh it means that people are just feeling much more positive now and feeling much more positive about uh the Market Outlook generally because I think like all rational people know that binance isn't going to blow up now binance is going to be fine they're going to continue on uh they're probably going to lose market share I mean they've been losing market share all year but they're probably going to be continuing to lose market share here especially to more of the legit exchanges like coinbase especially because coinbase um is is uh you know us-based and obviously uh they have a lot of big Partnerships coming up Black Rock and others have chosen them for their ET custody all that sorts of stuff there and I actually wrote a tweet about this where I said you know coinbase led

by a Founder that is aligned with crypto values played the long game and won and then I continued alignment is not a meme or a joke it is what creates lasting value and what separates the missionaries from The Mercenaries um and you know if you extend this kind of like to its logical conclusion here uh and kind of look at the past and history of what coinbase and binance have been doing Queen base was incredibly frustrated I guess like and Brian Armstrong and I'm sure his internal teams were incred frustrated to watch exchanges like binance and FTX and and others these offshore exchanges just just do whatever they wanted while coinbase was extremely heavily regulated but quen base always kind of stuck to its principles Brian always stuck to his principles of playing the kind of long game being a missionary rather than a mercenary and I think at this point in

time they've won they are poised to grow so spectacularly from here they are poised to be such a a force in in crypto going forward not just for their centralized exchange but also they have the wallet they have the layer 2 they have so much stuff going on uh and it's just great to see that uh in the end they they kind of won here and maybe I don't know people say it's premature to say that they won but I mean they've been around for so long now like 10 plus years I think at this point um and it feels like they're going to be around for a very long time to come uh and as I said like they've been the partner of choice for custody for Black Rock and others that have filed for BTC and eth spot ETFs so so yeah very very bright

future ahead there uh for coinbase and you know I put a tweet out as well about this where I said about the binance news where I said you know people are really going to Fumble their bag because they think the binance news is bearish in reality it's some of the most bullish news we've gotten since Black Rock filed for a BTC ETF and I really believe this because as I said it removes that overhang from the market right it removes that kind of uncertainty and I think that generally the market definitely prices things in and is forward-looking uh especially when it's things like this because if you look at what the market has done pretty much all year all this year as as as things have continued to I guess like blow up here and there you know we had we had a lot of blowups last year but we also had

blowups this year the market has trended up yes we've been in that crab range all year for I guess like for most of the Year BTC is out of its crab range but eth is still there but generally the trend has uh been up there and I think that into next year I mean I did say to you guys I think that we're in that transition phase from crab to bull market happening right now and this yeah this just further solidifies it for me because as I said it's a massive kind of weight off the crypto Market shoulders especially for people that aren't in crypto that just listen to the headlines or just just see the headlines they'll just see fud about binance you know all day every day and people will say well you know now people are just going to see that binance was actually kind of uh

running like a dodgy operation and they don't want to get involved with crypto blah blah blah and I completely disagree with that because I think that crypto thrives off of attention like and what gives more attention than news like that right and what gives more attention than price going up as well so we've got the positive news we've got like that last basically overhang done now that there's really nothing else I mean some people point to tear but I'm not going to go into tear because I feel like so many people just misunderstand tear but uh some people point to that but I don't think that's anything uh to worry about uh generally but yeah I I feel like there's nothing really left and the market is free to go up from from here and as I said like because all of this news brings more attention to crypto and

because I think that we're in that transition from a crab to a bull market uh prices will just continue to keep going up and the market would just keep going up and that will bring more and more people in and then we start you know the kind of official bull market there and I think that we're probably going to see this play out of the next 12 to 18 months to be honest I don't know I'm not going to pick a top of the bull market because that's basically impossible but you know I I I expect it to last another 12 to 18 months or so that would definitely put it in line with you know 3.5 to four year cycle because as I've mentioned to you guys before I feel like that we could potentially be having a shorter cycle overall uh because last cycle

technically we had a shorter cycle we just had like that second top because of all the leverage in the system which obviously blew up spectacularly last year right uh but I'm not going to spend too much time speculating on the market forces there I just figured that would um that it was worth mentioning that yeah I feel like if you're bearish now uh yeah I don't I don't I don't know I I don't know why you'd be bearish now I feel like now is the perfect time to be bullish but we'll see we'll see what the next 12 to 18 months uh looks like there now I think that was mostly everything on the binance front yeah but there was also some news around Kraken so the SEC has of course gone after Kraken with a similar if not pretty much the same lawsuit they went after coinbase and

binance with now the reason they are doing this is because they are doing what's called shopping for judges now coinbase's case from the SEC is in the New York District this case against Kraken is in the Californian uh I think San Francisco District so different judges will be assigned to these cases at different district courts altogether which means that the SEC strategy here is basically from my view at least from my opinion is that they they they think they know that they're going to lose against coin so they go after smaller players in the hopes of winning against them in order to strengthen their case against coinbase and to set precedent and I think that they went after Kraken uh again as well because last time Kraken settled right they settled over their staking product um and I think it

was like a $30 million settlement or something like that and this time I think that uh they're not going to settle Dave Ripley here who is the CEO of Kraken uh said we strongly disagree with the sec's claims stand firm in our view that we do not list Securities and plan to vigorously defend our position so I don't know what the SEC strategy is here you know I think Kraken definitely has enough money to be able to defend their position here and and fight in court so I guess like the nightmare scenario for the SEC is if they lose both those cases right the coinbase and cracking case but as I said uh when I covered this with um with regards to the coinbase and the binance case as well this is going to take a while to play out this is not going to happen

overnight uh it's going to take probably potentially years to play out uh and it seems like the SEC does not want to uh back down here uh which is just stupid in my opinion because they've lost those core cases recently and it feels like they're just going to keep losing I mean I I I don't see a world where they win against coinbase to be honest because as I've said to you guys before what they're trying to go after coinbase for is basically saying that they've been trading unregistered Securities uh and they've listed a bunch of just basically frankly random assets to be honest um as as listed on coinbase as being unregistered Securities um but yeah I think generally they're going to to lose that because I mean when they when they lost against Ripple I said this where it's like if they can't even win against

Ripple they can't even classify xrp as a security what hope in hell do they have of these other assets right like because xrp to me is probably the most high-profile thing that uh could be considered a security right but it wasn't and I think that uh when looking at that and taking that holistically I I think that Kraken should come out on top here along with coinbase and and probably binance I mean binance is a bit of a a wild card but I guess like the lawsuit is is basically very similar so if coinbase wins binance should win as well but I'm not too versed on you know on on on on the courts and on on how that all that stuff works there but yeah as I said like I'm I'm pretty confident from what I've read from the smarter people than me that uh that coinbase

definitely should win their case or at least the SEC might even withdraw it there but I think the chances of the SEC withdrawing are pretty low considering that they've just filed a fresh case against Kraken here which again goes back to I guess like a broader point it's just insane because as I said Kraken already settled with the SEC for their SEC their staking product way back uh N9 months ago not even that long ago go right um and then and then the is just continuing their I guess like uh uh their Crusade against honest crypto businesses right like cracken coinbase are honest crypto businesses I know binance is a bit different but coinbase and Kraken definitely honest crypto businesses uh and the ACC just continues to go after them while ignoring so much of the other crap that's going on in crypto it just anytime they say that

they're protecting investors like honestly the amount of like gaslighting and just straight up lying is incredible to me like protecting investors what are you who are you protecting and even asking you for the protection like go out and actually do something that actually protects investors instead of going after the good actors like Kraken and coinbase that have been following you know the regulations have been uh good stewards of the ecosystem and uh as far as I know have never done anything with uh you know uh uh anything unto with with customer funds which is like the main thing you know that's that's the main thing when it comes to these exchanges because they the custodians as well I want them to be regulated harshly because of the custodian aspect of it but at the end of the at at the end of the day they should be regulated um uh

based on the law they shouldn't just be regulated based on whatever Gary Gensler think is thinks is the law you know and that's why he's been losing the court cases because it isn't the law and this is what happens when you have like a gridlocked government where they can't pass legislation the regulatory bodies just take it upon themselves to basically make up their own rules and then uh the players who can't fight just settle and then the players who can't fight just get locked in court battles for years so it just it's a show all around right there's not nothing actually positive Happening Here there's no investors being protected here it's really just Egos and pissing matches everywhere and it just frustrates me to no ends because the same thing is happening all over the world right um in in in um not not not everywhere there

are some places that that are more Progressive but even like in Australia here I mentioned the um the ATO Guidance the Australian tax office guidance that came out the other day about Defi and wrapping assets and how that's now considered a capital gain event or a cgt event uh and that guidance is not legally binding it is not law but the problem is is that the tax law was written written like 20 plus years ago or was updated 20 plus years ago and it only covers Securities shares you know other assets like that it doesn't cover crypto so if you want to fight the tax office on this you have to go to court and going to court is incredibly expensive especially as an individual uh you know you're probably not going to be able to afford to do that so you just default follow this guidance which as I

said is not legally binding because there is no law around crypto and there's no tax law that specifically is about crypto now of course if you want to change the law and if you want to get a new legislation written for crypto you have to go through the government to do that and unfortunately in Australia um and and and I know that not everyone not not all my listens are Australians but just to give you an example here um in Australia the last time a government went to uh the an election with a um a tax reform plan so not the last election election before they lost and they lost based on that like that was the that was literally the sole reason they they lost even though the other party was just crap and and no one really uh everyone was saying you know this this part is

going to win this other one's going to lose and that one ended up losing based on that tax reform so now it's become a thing where it's literally poison to touch uh tax law which is just really bad for crypto because basically it means that these regulatory bodies or these other agencies like the tax office can say whatever they want and you know they can give whatever guidance they want it's not legally binding but most individuals cannot afford to fight in court so they're just going to default follow that guidance which stifles innovation um it leads to non-compliance of of of of kind of the guidance because people don't even know that they're non-complying and it's just a show all around so that's like the broader trend of just things being gridlocked laws new legislation not being passed leading to regulatory bodies and other

agencies and unelected bureaucrats just doing whatever the hell they want right and hoping that the you know who whoever they go after doesn't take them to court and even if they do who cares because these agencies have unlimited budgets basically because they're government agencies it's not their money it's taxpayer money ironically it's hilarious that it's taxpayer money funding it's like if you if you as an individual as a taxpayer take one of these agencies to court your tax dollars are literally being used to fight you in court and then you have to pay out of pocket out out of your own money right so yeah not not a fair system at all but unfortunately the system that we're stuck with here but anyway enough on the regulatory side of things enough on all the I guess like biggest that was the biggest news from the week now let's

move into some crypto related stuff so we had another all core devs call this was a uh kind of I guess like shorter one I think uh where Tim boo put together a short summary of what was going on here um basically devet 11 is mostly stable for denune um an meev boost is being tested on loadstar Nimbus hoping to have all clients tested by end of week devet 12 is launching next week so uh and and even if they don't have all the clients on it as long as we have three plus consensus layer clients on it that'll launch next week but I think that's that's Mo mostly everything got to do with um with Denon specifically there was some talk about girly and when they would Sunset that they're going to be sunsetting that about 3 months after the the girly Denon fork or one month

after the main denune Fork so as I said to you guys like girly we will Fork to denune but then be sunset because it's being replaced by H sky so not not really any news there um but really that was that was it from that allore Dev call um I think that maybe in the next couple of ones we might get some better ideas about when girle is going to be forked but yeah they're doing devet 12 very soon and they're also uh and as I said like I think devet 12 um is going to be launched with those latest changes to blobs that will was proposed a few weeks ago uh all the consensus layer clients should have that uh that done by now but yeah that's the latest on the all court devs stuff there all right so speaking of blobs and data availability generally Anar here

put a tweet over the weekend where he said I have not over the weekend over the week where he said I seen enough progress in data availability recently both in special purpose da protocols and in the speed with which post 4844 ethereum data availability sampling is coming together that I am now fairly confident that data will see ceased to be a meaningful scaling bottleneck within the next 2 years which also means that l2s and daps should take compute and storage throughput seriously I have seen a lot of L2 comput is free sentiment well that is true today this will change super chain style horizontal scaling might be sufficient but still has a lot of uncertainty so yeah I mean I guess like the main Talk of the scaling town has been all this talk about data right data availability the cost of storing data on ethereum L1

other data availability protocols what it looks like in a post 4844 world what looks like in a full dank sharting world with data availability sampling what it looks like in a 4844 Plus World all that sorts of stuff and Ansgar here who I I I remind you guys as a researcher at the etherum foundation he's basically making the bet that within the next two years data availability will not be the scaling bottleneck anymore um the scaling bottleneck would become compute and and storage generally and I think that with l2's handling that it's going to be a lot easier than the L1 and I think they're going to have their own ways of doing things especially with like storage and stuff like that and and compute I mean there are different ways that different l2s can tackle it whether they be optimistic rollups or ZK Roll-Ups um but it's great to see that

you know someone from the someone from the ethereum research team basically saying this uh and all of this coming together in the next two years right because I think that everyone always speculates you know when's full dank sharding going to come to the network because 4844 you know just to remind you guys is Proto Dan sharding it is a prototype of dang sharting even though protol Lambda is that's his name in it um kind of like works as double on Tandra there where it's like Proto dang shotting right but it is like literally just like a taste of what full dang sharing will enable and full dang Shing is really defined by having data availability sampling in place which can massively scale uh the data availability of uh the uh the ethereum network right and which will Mass massively scale l2s and it's basically the Holy Grail now I

think in terms of protocols that have Das or data availability sampling integrated Celestia May might have it integrated right now or in the near future I think I da wants to have it integrated but basically all the da Protocols are going to have it integrated because this is the only known way at least right now to scale data availability without increasing Hardware requirements to just like stupid levels basically right uh so yeah D is the the the main thing to look out for in terms of scaling over the next couple of years especially obviously for l2s uh but great to see ancar say this here now speaking ofp 4844 and blobs uh generally for those of you who don't know blobs uh when you purchase them I guess like if you're an L2 that's

purchasing them uh your P you have to purchase a blob or blob space as like one whole unit you can't actually split it up into multiple units now because of this there are um there are people building things that allow you to split this up so as you can see here lion who is a um cev at loadstar has hacked on something with a bunch of people at eth Global Istanbul called The Blob sharing protocol it allows smaller l2s and data producers to split split blob place with minimal overhead so basically making it uh or basically breaking up that blob space as I just mentioned how it's only kind of like a single blob that you can purchase now with this blob sharing protocol um multiple uh people can purchase the same blob basically and it

and and and it splits it up there now of course this isn't trustless yet and you can actually see the kind of spec and what this looks like in this hackmd document which I'll link in the YouTube description below but right now this is a trusted thing but I don't think that's a really a big deal that it's a trusted thing because really uh at the end of the day like you don't have to do this this is just like an optional thing and you can have basically uh uh uh uh multiple different uh of these kind of protocols on the network that people can use uh and multiple different trusted parties but I think eventually the goal would be to make this uh completely trustless and here's the work in progress uh to do to to basically make that uh completely trustless in this

hack andd document which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh for you to check out but yeah just a little fun fact there for for those of you who didn't know when purchasing a blob uh you can can only do it as a you know one chunk so you need to basically build a protocol on top of it to split these things up but it's really not like a big deal it's it's really I mean for the smaller l2s it becomes I guess like a bigger deal because they may get priced out they may not be able to afford a whole blob or may not be economical for them to buy a whole blob so they'll be they'll participate in this blob sharing protocol where they all basically pull their funds together and buy a blob together and then they get the space as

allocated uh through that but yeah as I said you can read the full details on this I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so I mentioned this a while ago um which was this kind of like execution layer or smart contract activated withdrawals for eth staking now this was uh an eth research post that was published back in July of 2021 I believe there is an EIP for this already which should be going live hopefully in not Denon but the upgrade that comes after that but basically what this is is it allows for trustless withdrawals from uh liquid staking protocols so what this means is that for example right now if you stake with like Lio um and you want to withdraw from Lio the node operators themselves have to

actually process that withdrawal for you you can't process that withdrawal yourself trustless Le you are relying on the Note operator to or the the person who controls the validated keys or I should say the validat withdrawal uh credentials as well as well oh no this just just the case I don't have to necessarily control the withdrawal credentials in order to to submit that withdrawal in order for the withdrawal to actually take place whereas with this with this EIP um it once again gets implemented into the network anyone would be able to the protocol has to be constructed to allow this but anyone would be able to uh on the execution layer submit a withdrawal request to a validator uh and not have to rely on anyone it' be a you know trustless withdrawal um on on the execution layer here which is obviously huge because at

the moment um liquid staking protocols and probably forever are going to be the the biggest protocols on ethereum and we want uh to allow people the ability to trustly withdraw from them and it doesn't just apply to liquid staking protocols either this could could be integrated into centralized exchange staking as well like with coinbase for example or binance or Kraken or whatever it is um this could be implemented there as well and it it makes the market more efficient too it means that if you want to do Arbitrage and stuff like that to the beacon chain you don't with with lsts you don't have to wait uh for the the withdrawal to go through on the um C centralized exchange side or the or the note operator side you can just do it yourself so yeah just a reminder there that that is coming um but yeah the Kirk

here posted this on Twitter because he wanted people will start making some noise around this so yeah I'm making some noise uh around it all right so etherly has just spun up 120 validators all of which are being natively restak on igen layer and they said we will continue to spin up more every day and will soon and will soon be the largest raking protocol so yeah I've been talking about ether fire a little bit recently it is a new project where you can go stake with them uh there is uh I guess like I think I mentioned this last week where they've got like a yield Burger going on where essentially you can stake your eth you get e eth which is an LST uh but it's a raking LST so basically you get the base reward the base um e staking APR then you get

reaking rewards on top of that in the future you get IG layer points and then you get eify loyalty points so yeah there's a lot of yield stacking going on here but also risk stacking too so keep that in mind definitely there's a lot of risk going on here as well but if you're someone who is interested in taking on additional risk with your eth and you want to get access to this entire yield burger here then e the is the place to stake it but great to see that they've spun up a bunch of validators uh means people are using the protocol all right speaking of staking Stak asaurus here on Twitter has a new meta for solo stakers which is your own mini staking pool so anyone can get there with minimal e by following uh the road map here so basically there's a

step-by-step guide on how to set up your own mini staking pool uh you can practice for free on Google cloud and stosor has guides in their bio which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh you can apply for Hardware grants to to offset the fixed costs such as EF run a node Grant and more to come and you can spin up a node via permissionless lsts to get started with smaller amounts of eat such as Rocka pool sta Diva and Lio which are D.A and Lio coming soon and you can participate in um emerging staking in initiatives of those protocols and scale up the tvl here the result is recurring income for yourself plus more diversity on the eth consensus layer so if that sounds like something that's interesting to you you want to become a basically your own kind of mini staking pool here then

stegosaurus has uh great guides for you which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right so this was the other piece of big news during the week um that uh I you know you may have thought that I wasn't going to cover but I'm definitely going to cover so I'm sure you've all heard of this new future L2 it's not an L2 right now called Blast now this caused a stir in the community for a bunch of different reasons one it looks like a Ponzi two it is backed by Paradigm which is one of the most well-known VC firms in the space and maybe used to be one of the most well-respected firms in the space and it had a investment round with participation from a huge number of crypto Twitter influencers and it was shielded all over crypto Twitter and on

top of all of that it has managed to gather over 400 million tvl in a matter of I guess like four or 5 days now the reason why I say it is a future L2 is because right now it is nothing but a multi it is a 305 multisig that exists on ethereum layer 1 it is not an L2 there is no L2 yet the pro the future promise is that there will be an L2 and the future draw is that when you deposit your eth into uh this L2 or into this multisig it gets staked with Lio right now but they plan to stake with other providers in the future and then you're automatically earning yield and the yield gets spread out on the layer 2 uh to people who use the layer 2 um and yeah it just basically becomes a I guess

they're calling it a more efficient kind of protocol here but the reason why it's caused so much drama I mean the multiple reasons why why it's caused so much drama is I guess one it looks like a Ponzi it looks like a casino as well because if you see some of the screenshots it says like things like spin now or spin more or bet bet more or you know variations of that um they also have uh some of these charts on their website where they're comparing the blast L2 to other l2s and you know you can see the incentives kind of row at the bottom here where they say Blast has substantial incentives and optimism and arbitr only have limited incentives and and so on and so forth and they're acting like they're the you know the blast is the the first ones to come up

with the the um the staking the E that gets deposited in the bridge contract to to get native yield for the users of the l2s which is certainly not the case because as Patrick mccy uh says here um you know he says as someone who has spent the past seven years on blockchain scalability and watching our industry get so damn close implementation wise investors in Blast should be ashamed that the project launched their marketing campaign as a multi- with a deposit deposit function if blast had done the leg work and deployed as an actual L2 there wouldn't be as huge of an issue but it's a deposit only multi deposit only guys it is not going to unlock for like another 3 or 4 months so once you put your eth in there you're not getting it back for 3 or 4 months um and uh and then and Patrick continues by

saying come on guys this is shameful to all have contributed their time to an L2 stack that is ultimately being built to protect customers and system operators uh and also obviously blast is promising that there's going to be token rewards people are farming you know the airdrop and all those sorts of things and and so on and so forth so really what blast I guess did was take all the shitty things that we've seen all the shitty incentives and shitty air drop farming and crappy Casino stuff and Ponzi stuff that we've seen in the ecosystem and basically say well we're just going to put this completely transparently out there we're not going to hide behind any fancy terminology uh for the most part and then we're just going to tell users here AP in to this like three or five multisig you'll get blast tokens in the

future and you'll get yield as well but you know it's locked for like 4 months and I mean there seems to be an appetite for it because over $400 Million worth has gone into that multi now the the multi itself is not that big of a deal because I don't think the multi is going to get exploited um the only big deal about the multi is the fact that the keyh holders are actually Anonymous I think it's a it might it's a 30 five or a four five multi but regardless it doesn't really matter um I think it I think it actually might be a four or five multi but regardless the key holders are Aon and yeah people will say oh well it's backed by Paradigm they're not going to rug it's like but that doesn't mean anything like who knows if Paradigm even knows who these people are

like I would assume they would probably do but you know we don't know who those keyh holders are at least I haven't seen anyone do the do the groundwork to actually discover who those keyh holders are so at any point in time these four or five could just literally rug the funds and no one could stop them because it is just a multisig um and and they could just run off with the funds made a cool almost half a billy for doing nothing now of course obviously like it wouldn't be that easy to run off with the funds because cashing it out would be basically impossible no exchange will let you deposit it blah blah blah so on and so forth but still like that risk R is substantial right like their incentives that they claim to have the risk is substantial here and also by

them claiming that they're an L2 without actually having an L2 live just makes just is like a PR nightmare because basically it makes the other l2s uh not look bad but it makes them kind of uh into into a joke for a lot of people they're like oh look at this L2 that has like a multier touch to it but it's like blast isn't an L2 these other l2s that have multisig on them right now like optimism and arbitrum they're actual l2s right like they're actually live they're actually uh something that you can use right now and yes they have differences between them right and there's different kind of like tradeoffs between them but it's they're not it's not like they're just a multisig that you put money into and hope for the best like that's just crazy to me but at the same time it's kind of not because

like I didn't not expect this because I know how Deen a lot of this uh uh Market is and I know that as soon as you kind of make a lot of noise about something and you promise like a future airdrop people are going to ape into it especially when the market is relatively hot hot and honestly like the the amount itself is pretty pretty surprising because like we hadn't seen something like this in quite a while it's kind of bull market things right but still you know very very crazy that um that this stuff kind of happened here but yeah generally my opinion on this is that like I I I kind of hate it to be honest I kind of hate that the marketing is misleading it just is a blatant Ponzi Casino thing um I don't have a problem with like the eth being stake to

generate yield but at the same time like it would be much cooler if there was an actual L2 if it wasn't controlled by multisig with Anon holders right if it actually followed kind of a a safe and secure practice and actually had a tvl cap as well for a guarded launch but I guess like they didn't want that they just wanted to create the most amount of noise possible in order to get the most amount of I guess like people into their protocol as possible here I say protocol like anything's even live no it's just the multic uh right now but I want to go back to what I was saying about um about the different l2s and how about how like uh they got their own and tradeoff I put out a tweet today where I said not every L1 is created equal and not every L2 is

created equal either but the nice thing is that the ethereum ecosystem has an awesome resource in L2 beat to give you a very comprehensive breakdown of the differences between hl2 so if you go to the L2 bit website which I'm sure a lot of you have before and I've highlighted this on the refill plenty of times before the amount of information on here about every L2 including upcoming l2s as well you can see blast here right like um on this list of upcoming projects you go in here and you can actually see what this actually is it says here this bridge is a deposit only and funds cannot be withdrawn yet um they will launch so they they planning to launch an evm compatible optimistic rollup supporting native yield so they're not even live yet so you know you just got a basic thing here which shows you the tvl

and and basically that it's not live yet but if you want to go to the projects that are live like the biggest one right now by tvl is is obviously arbitrum 1 there is so much here guys look at this and this is why it frustrates me to no end when I see people on Twitter talking about oh no one talks about like the L2 tradeoffs or it's very hard to find um you know what these different l2s are doing or what the trade-offs are like who controls the multi blah blah blah no it's not it's right here on L2 beat.com like it's it's here and it's not even just here in a in in in a small capacity it's here in an extremely detailed capacity with customade diagrams and and and images here as you can see on my screen here with a wealth

of information with links to even more information with links to all the relevant kind of ADD here with big fat warnings that you can see here what can actually be done with um uh what what can actually be done and what can be done maliciously on each of the l2s or or what ability the U The multi6 Have and stuff like that so yeah I mean we really are so lucky to have L2 bait honestly and I I mean I should disclose here that I'm an investor in L2 bait but honestly I invested in them because it was is more for me I traded it more as a donation where I'm like I just want them to keep building this thing because we don't have an L1 beat.com right there is nothing out there that really covers l1's at in a comprehensive way like L2

beat does they may cover them from like a high level but nowhere near the amount of detail that L2 beat gives you here I know I'm Shilling the hell out of L2 beat right now but I think it's deserved because there is just so much information here and it's just such a wealth of knowledge that you can get by reading this sorts of stuff and you can actually point this to other people and say you know hey here's literally all the information you need to know what's happening on this particular particular L2 the tech that they're using what stage they're at in terms of decentralization stages you know what their activity is what the tvl is who what the multi is like who owns the keys to the multisig what they can actually do like can they freeze your funds can they steal your funds what the sequence

is like what the validator is like are they centralized is it permission fraud proofs or permissionless all that stuff and that it's and it's not just for one project or two projects or the top projects it's for all of them and I know I'm swearing a lot here guys but I tend to swear when I get passionate about things but yeah I just figured it was worth highlighting this for you I know I'm preaching to the choir but please please please when you see anyone talking about this stuff on Twitter just reply and say Hey you can check all of this out on L2 beat.com it's all there for you to to learn you know there's no need to keep fighting things uh here but anyway I'm going to digress on that point there uh but yeah hopefully like the blast L2 actually goes live uh you know relatively soon so

it's not just a oneway deposit contract that keeps getting kind of filled up with eth and approaches billions of tvl and then maybe potentially there's a non-zero chance that it rugs and it becomes like a whole thing again I that's like the worst case scenario but hey it could happen anyway I'm going to move on from that one there onto some other news here from op Labs who posted a blog post where they said work is underway to make it possible to securely upgrade all op chains simultaneously this blog post dives into how the ecosystem Engineers will ensure op chain compatibility for all chain Governors who have opted into the Super chain so this is what I think I was talking about I don't know if I mentioned it on Monday refuel or the previous week's refuels where I basically said that all of the

chains that opt into the Super chain get to benefit from upgrading together get to benefit from what the op stack is being uh being being built to be who's are you know working on the op stack who's upgrading the op stack to do things like follow along with ethereum L1 upgrades to add other features there and that all the the opted in op stack chains can benefit from that now this blog post is very short you can go check this out for yourself uh but I'll link it in the YouTube description uh for you to do so there all right speaking of optimism the retroactive public goods F funding round three is currently live and badge holders are able to allocate o 30 m uh 30 million op rewards as they see fits now if you're interested in how this is

going grow theie doxyz has a tracker for this so they've got like an optimism retroactive public goods funding round three tracker where you can sort by different uh kind of things here but it's default sorted by how many ballots uh each of the projects are in now I believe it's a minimum of 17 ballots that the projects need to be in in order to qualify for some of the rewards here the only one that's qualified so far is the protocol guild at number one which is way ahead of the pack at 19 uh ballots where whereas second here is the solidity language team at 15 ballots but obviously protocol Guild is going to be number one I mean I can't think of anything more public good than protocol Guild and for me I mean I allocated my um op cuz I'm a badge holder uh just

before and protocol Guild was at the top of my list and I allocated them the most out of out of everyone else on my list uh because I mean the protocol Guild is not just one entity right it goes to like 100 plus ethereum core developers and researchers and I literally can't think of anyone else that I would rather donate to in the public good space right um so that was my number one I don't have my list handy right now but you can actually just scroll down this list and see all the people that are in the ballots and I was actually scrolling down the other day and I noticed myself here right as I said to you guys I I'm on this for all my work at the daily gay uh and I'm actually like ranked in the top 20 right now I'm in 12 ballots which

is incredibly humbling like I I don't know how much I'm going to get like how many op tokens I'm going to get and I've actually been talking to uh Trent from the protocol Guild because I really want to donate um a portion of my rewards that I get whatever it is from uh from this but the problem is is that I'm very limited in what I can donate if I can't donate to an official charity because I can only write the tax off if it's an official charity and right now protocol Guild is not that so as long as there's an official entity attached to protocol Guild I'll be able to go to my account and say hey there's an official entity here it means I can write that off on tax which means because uh when I get the op it's going to be uh um taxed as

income at receipt so if op is like $2 um and I get like you know 50,000 op for example that's $100,000 converted into Australian dollars whatever that is that is taxable right but if I can donate it to an official charity then I can write off the portion that I've donated which means I don't have to pay tax on that portion which means that I can donate more than I otherwise would have been able to because I didn't have to pay tax on it so I'm really hoping that um the protocol Guild can have that set up before I get my op here because I really want to donate a portion of my op to that but as I said I don't know how much I'm getting um I don't think anyone knows yet and this is going until I think December 6th right now uh but yeah

as I said it's badge holders that vote here but uh you can go down the list anyway to see which projects are in the most ballots here as well as in the most lists uh and what their you know funding has been traditionally as well and what categories they fall into there all right I highlighted this website a little while ago on the refuel uh it's the real world asset tracking website or re asset directory at rw. XYZ uh they've got a newly updated website here so they said here since it's launched the directory has been used by tens of thousands to discover companies at the Forefront of asset tokenization uh and they go through how they made it easier than ever to navigate their real world asset space and you can check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but you can

basically launch the dashboard and and keep track of all of this it's pretty pretty comprehensive and it's all free I think uh right now there is an Enterprise um data section but all this kind of like stuff is is free and it's got a lot of data here as you can see from me scrolling through here um but just on another note on the real world asset stuff I was actually asked a lot at the um conference that I went to in Sydney what I'm most excited about right now in the crypto space and the ethereum space and it was really hard for me to nail down an answer because so many things excite me but if I had to kind of like maybe say something that isn't the traditional thing I would say like layer 2os or kind of ethereum core protocol development I would say real world asset

stuff because I've always been a huge advocate of needing to bring more of the I guess existing value in the tradire world into crypto and we're needing like a bridge to get it there and the the bridge is really all these protocols all these projects bringing real world assets on chain like tokenizing them on chain whether they be uh treasury yields that Meadow is doing whether they be stocks and other assets like that bring bringing these things on chain tokenizing them to me is like the next big unlock for for crypto and and we already have like huge real world Assets in stable coins but we need to go beyond stable coins right we need to bring everything on chain we need to tokenize everything and yes it's going to be centralized because you know to tokenize the deed of your house you have to have

like a centralized entity to be able to do that uh because really ultimately the token is just representation of the deed the deed is actually secured I guess like for lack of a better term by the um government that your uh I guess like deed was issued by and that owns that technically owns the land that your house is on right so all of that would have to play into it but by tokenizing it you get the efficiency of tokenization right you get to be able to move it around you can use it as collateral within different different defi applications all that sorts of stuff so yeah my answer was typically that I'm super excited about the real world asset stuff even though it may seem quite quite boring to people it definitely uh excites me here so you can go check out rw. xyz's updated dashboard

I'll link it in the YouTube Des description below uh for you to do so all right last up here ZK P2P has shipped a new liquidity uh liquidity page so now you can easily view who's on the other side of your USD on-ramps a quick reminder that ZK P2P is also an off-ramp so deposit your usdc liquidity and receive USD in venmo which I don't think I've actually um I actually mentioned that when I was talking about ZK P2P but yeah very cool to be able to see basically um what the amounts look like here and and what the liquidity looks like here great to see that they ship this page I don't know if any of you guys have used ZK P2P yet but if you haven't you should definitely use it if especially if you've already got a ven mail account it's be very easy for you

to use it as I said there is a $250 limit every 6 hours so really you can just play around with it with whatever whatever amount that you want uh and get a feel for how it all works here now I'm not going to go over what ZK P2P is cuz I've talked about it a bunch on the rear Fu before uh but yeah I think that's it for all the updates now I know that this is a longer episode than usual obviously because I had to cover the last few days worth of information but I do have one uh last thing I wanted to talk about with with regards to maybe I guess like you could call it Market talk but it's a bit broader than that and it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the binance news and about like that

overhang on the market and stuff like that I think it doesn't just overhang on the market it doesn't just overhang on the prices of the assets and people feeling bullish or bearish it's also an overhang in legitimacy because for example like the space the crypto space is still regarded as something I guess by the mainstream that's used by criminals that's used by shadowy super cers that's used by people that you know you you wouldn't have any you wouldn't want to have anything to do with which as we know as Crypt natives is completely wrong the vast majority of people in crypto you know are just genuine Builders but obviously it's always the rotten apples that ruin it for us and honestly I don't blame the mainstream kind of audience for thinking this because the media only ever covers

the bad stuff like Terror exploding FTX blowing up 3A see you know Celsius all these sorts of stuff they don't really see the good stuff that's happening I mean they'll see maybe some of the major good stuff like the merge but most people will never hear of uh most of the upgrades that we've been doing to the core protocol all the L2 developments right all the project updates all the genuine Builder building that's going on they won't meet these people all they'll see is the stuff about the markets like the price going up or down and the blowups right which gives our industry a really bad WP which is just unfortunate but with the binance stuff and and I guess like uh uh not just looking at the binance stuff but with like entities like Black Rock filing for a BTC spot ETF and an eot ETF as much as like you

could say that oh you know we don't like Black Rock because it's super centralized or it's very trafi blah blah blah what this does is that it just further legitimizes the crypto industry in the eyes of the mainstream it basically says to the mainstream that hey there's this massive asset manager that's heavily regulated in the US that um you know all the everyone loves because all their retirements count cser in it and everyone knows who black rock is and then there's not just black rock it's the other ones like Fidelity and stuff right and people look at that and they're like oh okay well if Black Rock and Fidelity and all the these names that I know from the tradire world are taking you know BTC and eth seriously by doing an ETF then uh you know crypto must be legit you know it must be

legitimate and and and opinion starts to change over time so really uh over over time by these o these things like binance and other things being removed from the pool and then getting them more legitim kind of Institutions involved and it basically makes the space overall more legitimate which overall should lead to uh you know better market conditions right if you want to talk about like price and and stuff like that uh and I know there's arguments on both sides people say oh you know Black Rock doing ETF is bearish because they're going to control so much BTC and eth and it's just going to be very centralized blah blah blah I don't think that's going to be the case to be honest I think that BDC and eth there are so many different ways to buy it and not everyone's just going to buy it in ETF I

mean the world is bigger than us right and also by them buying it in the ETF the prices are just going to go up anyway so they're going to be able to get less and less of the supply over time there's tons of arguments to be made I'm not going to kind of go into it now because it could take me another hour to to talk about all of that but yeah I I always just look at legitimacy and legitimizing the space because I want to get to a place or I want to live in a world where crypto is no longer regarded as something that just for scammers and frauders and criminals and we don't you know we don't have such a bad rap anymore I want to get to a point where people know crypto as this just technology that exists that is like you

know other Technologies like the internet like Ai and stuff like that right where people can get value out of it there's Builders there there's genuine people building they're not just nefarious people they're not just drug dealers and terrorists and all that sorts of stuff right I want to get to that spot and I know that a lot of that rhetoric or most of that rhetoric is actually not accurate because uh there is a much more money laundering a much more terrorism financing happening in the trafi world than there is in crypto even adjusted for size I would say um because crypto is so trans par like why would you even do it you you're much easier to be caught in crypto than you are in the tradire world but uh when it comes to like mainstream opinion mainstream kind of view of crypto it informs their their kind of thinking

there so that's why I really like that we're slowly moving towards more legitimacy coming into crypto because of these big institutions and also these other things kind of like uh I guess like uh going to the Wayside or this uncertainty around them being removed because now everyone's like oh well binance isn't actually going to blow up they got fined just like Banks get fined for doing the same thing uh which means they're going to continue on uh and and all well is good all is well and good there but anyway I'm going to end on that relatively positive note for today so I hope you all enjoyed today's special Saturday episode thank you for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't that yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to newsl join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Monday

thanks everyone