Coinbase cbETH token, Mainnet merge blog post - The Daily Gwei Refuel #435 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cena and today's 25th of august 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so we have the official mainnet merge announcement blog post that was posted around 24 hours ago it actually was posted just after i recorded yesterday's refuel but here it is the official mainnet uh kind of blog post on the ethereum foundation blog with all the relevant information you need to know about the mainnet merge so here is the kind of like last little bit of the road map to the merge i mean it's very very close now right we've got all done all those test nets now we're just waiting for our ttd to hit on september 15th for the actual main net merge to hit but we also

have our ballot tricks which is happening on september 6th which is the upgrade to the consensus layer uh in order to get it ready for the merge and then we have paris which will hit with the ttd uh you know between september 10th and 20th i mean we are targeting september 15th based on on ttd but as we know it can change uh and then you know there's a note on timing there there's the client releases so links to all the clients lighthouse load star nimbus prism tekku on the consensus layer slide side and basu eragon geth and never mind on the execution layer side we have five clients on the consensus layer side now which is really cool load style just hit version 1.0 or production ready i think the other day just a few days ago just in time for the main net

merge so if you want to run a minority minority client which loads that definitely is i think it is the least represented on the beacon chain well now you can uh with uh with the kind of like official v1 release here uh there's some upgrade specifications and an update to the merge bug bounty so critical bugs are now worth up to 1 million usd uh until uh between now and the 8th of september so this is a four times multiplier as to what they already are and there's a bit of an faq here as well which i mean all of you guys will know all of this stuff you know what what should you do as a node operator well uh you should go check out the merge readiness checklist and uh and kind of check out what to do there and and i mean this has got

information too uh this is i guess like as a solo staker um you know as a stake of what do you need to do uh what is the estimated date for the ttd uh as an application or tooling developer what should you do so the faq is really is really good here gives some gives answers to the most frequently asked questions obviously but yeah guys like it's uh the days are ticking down i mean i feel like at this point saying the merge is coming is kind of redundant we all know it is i think there are still some people out there who don't think it is which is so weird to me so weird like that that people still think it's there's a chance that it's not going to happen as chance is going to get delayed you know it's funny the only way it could actually

get delayed right now or at least the only way i could see it getting delayed is if for some reason most of the miners drop off the network and ttd gets pushed out to like october that would take i believe you know a huge amount of the network falling off for that to kind of happen which doesn't make any sense considering that it's still extremely profitable to mine the ethereum network so i don't expect that to happen i expect it to go pretty smoothly i haven't i've seen no indication that it's going to happen hash rate has stayed pretty uh pretty steady for quite a while now we're obviously not getting any new miners uh coming online because there's no point but it doesn't seem like we're getting any dropping off because at the end of the day they're still making money they're still able to inch out

those profits uh and and that's that's the incentives working uh which is really cool but uh but yeah you can go check out this blog post all in kid in the youtube description below just as i said counting down the days to the merge here so uh speaking of the merge actually uh uh rocketpool has released version 1.6.0 of the smart node stack this one is ready for the merge and adds support for drawing on the beacon chain graffiti wall and more so if you are running rocketpool uh and and the rocketpool smart node stack then you definitely want to be upgrading to this which you can do by uh going to the github here or just following the instructions as per normal all right so we got some uh i guess like an updated bit of news around alexi percev who is was the uh or is the

arrested tornado cash developer and it's not good news unfortunately so a judge has in amsterdam has ruled that he must stay in jail for 90 days pending trial uh which was ruled i think believe i believe yesterday so i think he will have spent at the end of the 90 days 120 days sitting in jail and he still hasn't been formally charged which is just so insane to me i believe this is this is the way it works in in the netherlands that they can hold you up to 120 days if you're denied bail without charging you i believe that's that's the law uh and yeah obviously because the fact that he's still being held means that his bail was declined if i had to kind of i mean there wasn't a reason specified as to why his bail

was declined but if i had to give a reason it was probably on national security grounds because of the fact that he's involved with tornado cash which was sanctioned by the us government over the cour the connections to north korea but that doesn't make this any less of an injustice this is really like honestly i i really feel for alexi here i mean you always see kind of things about uh people saying a free uh ross ulbricht right the guy who ran silk road and that happened a long time ago now uh like actually a very long time ago i believe he was arrested in 2013 uh so you know almost 10 years ago now um and but this hits much closer to home for me personally because of the fact that it's you know tornado cash it's on ethereum and it is very very recent and i'm

obviously much more involved in the ecosystem these days uh and it's and obviously we're all following this very closely so the fact that this person is going to spend so much time in prison or so much time in in jail without uh being charged formally with anything just really breaks my heart and i think that they're going to come up with something to charge him with uh or they're going to let him go and there's only two ways they can go right like they have to charge him with something or they're going to let him go but if they want to charge him with something that doesn't make them look uh like they've got egg on their face the and like they they arrested him for no reason well it's it's it's gonna be i think quite difficult because not only do they have to charging with something then they

have to bring those charges to potentially court and prove that in a court of law uh to potentially a jury and a judge that this person did what they're charging him with and if they lose that it's even worse so i think they're in a rock and a hard place and by there i mean the authorities that arrested him because they do want to charge him with something but they have to make sure the charges stick right like and and if he hasn't actually done anything wrong which i don't believe he has obviously i don't know for sure but uh i i think they're alleging that he facilitated money laundering and profited from it well proving that would be quite hard if all you've got to go on is the fact that he was a developer on tornado cache because you can't say that just because he developed the

code for tornado cache that he was aiding with uh with money laundering right that'd be like charging as someone who manufactures guns with atoring in murders just uh so with aiding in murders because of the fact that the gun was used for a murder you know you see where the logic is going here right so i think that i am going to be monitoring this closely i hope that they don't charge him with anything and he just gets freed that would still be shitty because he spent time in prison for basically nothing uh and uh he would he would have like 120 days of his life robbed essentially but i'm sure i don't know how it works in the netherlands but in the us i believe that you can sue if that happens to you and you can kind of like get compensation or something but i'm not

sure how it happens in in the netherlands but still the fact that he's been in jail at all and has been denied bail here without being formally charged with anything just seems like an injustice to me so i hope that there are brighter days ahead for alexi but unfortunately in cases like this it's kind of hard not to not to be hopeful because of the fact that when it comes to national security as i've mentioned before things get very murky things get very uh very serious and i don't think governments want to look weak when it comes to national security uh not just for their own citizens but for their adversaries uh you know abroad as well but you know well i'm gonna keep an eye on this and keep you guys updated on everything happening here all right so vitalik put out an

interesting tweet today where he said people continue to underrate how often cryptocurrency payments are superior not even because of censorship resistance but just because they're so much more convenient big boost international business and charity and sometimes even payments within countries i think this is an important point amongst all the censorship noise that we've been i guess like experiencing over the last few weeks because payments is obviously one of the most basic use cases if not the most basic use case of crypto bitcoin is a payments network at the end of the day right like the all you can really do with bitcoin on the base layer is send and receive btc so when you think about it this whole industry was born from you know being payments infrastructure now of course

none of these like bitcoin doesn't scale to the world at least one either does ethereum we need these other solutions but throwing away all of that it's like all of those kind of like issues it's still very much better than the existing system and i've explained this before how using the example of if i was to send money overseas it would not be anywhere near instant or even within like a minute or so and i and i would have to go through a complicated process there'd be more fees involved i'd have to put up with um with currency risk and all that sort of stuff but when i want to send say a usd stablecoin to the other side of the world i can do that on the ethereum network uh you know basically within a block if i pay the right fee and then i

can have a settlement guarantee that that money got to where i sent it to because i can actually look at the blockchain and see that and even if it was done as a private transaction i could still see that which so just because it's transparent normally doesn't mean it has to be with proper privacy on ethereum you can still have a guarantee that the funds went where you where you wanted them to go and you could even do this with tornado cash if you sent funds to tornado cash and then sent them from the tornado cash address uh sorry to know the cash contracts to the person's address you could tell them hey like here is the funds that i sent you uh and this is where and i sent them from toronto cash because i didn't want to link my address here and that would be a perfectly

valid use case and a perfectly valid uh a payment so and that's i guess like another example of why tornado cash isn't just for money laundering isn't just for criminals it's for everyday people wanting to protect their privacy but i i think vitalik's right here we definitely overlook house uh how super how much um how superior crypto payments are uh but not just how superior they are just the fact that they are the thing that has probably the best product market fit in crypto when you really think about it so just a good little thing that i think vitalik highlighting here um amongst all the censorship noise because yes repayments with censorship resistance is the ultimate goal and yes the ultimate goal of a blockchain should be to maintain credible neutrality and be as censorship resistant as possible

but even if it's not even if there is something's being censored the the fact is is that like you still have that payments infrastructure in place you can still make payments uh to a lot of people and you can still make them better than the existing system because you know with the existing system say for example you have your money in a bank like yeah it doesn't happen very often but we have there are many instances of instances of it happening where you're you have to have your money in a bank because you want to do digital payments but your bank account can just freeze that money i mean so your bank can just freeze the the money in your account and you have i mean you have recourse but like it's a very frustrating process whereas with cryptocurrency you can self-custody your funds until you're ready to

to use them until you're ready to send them to uh to you know through payments or use them for whatever else and by maintaining that self-custody no one can take that away from you unless i guess you lose your private key or your seed phrase or anything but like no central planner can freeze your account or anything like that they can free specific assets obviously holding usdc is an example of of that in usdt but if you're just holding eth in your own account as a hardware wallet or whatever uh there is no risk of that and you have the ability to send payments globally which which we're very with very strong secure settlement guarantees and security guarantees and also censorship resistance too like the thing is is that as i've explained before

even if 90 of the network is censoring you or 95 of the network is censoring you you'd still be able to get your transaction in i believe if it's 90 post merge you'd still be able to get your transaction into a block within 20 blocks which uh block times are 12 seconds a few minutes that's all it would take even if the vast majority of the network was censoring you because uh just the way it works where the um validators are rotated and a validator a new validator proposes a block through that rotation every single time it's just the way it works like from a distribution perspective and from a probabilistic perspective so you'd still be able to get your transaction even if 99 of the network was censoring you obviously it would take longer then but all it takes is is

one percent uh uh it would it would i mean it gets kind of like weird when you think about it because it gets like exponentially longer i mean if every single validator on the network was censoring you except your own validator you know then it would be it would be quite hard but you know the funny thing is is that i believe in theory if even if every single validator on the network was censoring you except your own one you would just have to wait until your validator was up to propose a block and then you would manually include your own transaction in that block now this could take months but it's still possible i believe from a from a technical perspective it would still be possible to do that and don't quote me on that because i'm not 100 sure but just thinking out loud uh here but yeah

interesting tweet from vitalik glad he put it out all right so i'm going to move on to the coinbase news from the day so coinbase has announced support for coinbase wrapped staked eth or or cbe on the ethereum network which is basically their uh version of a liquid staking eighth token now they have a whole white paper around this which you can read i believe if it's it's linked somewhere here uh no is it linked somewhere here learn how acb where there was a white paper somewhere and i've just kind of like lost the link to it now unfortunately uh or i'm blind and i can't find it but there's a lot of good stuff to like about this i think i think it makes sense for coinbase to be doing this so that people can like exit and enter

their stake at will uh sorry enter and exit staking at will there's no need for them to wait to a queue obviously when you sell your cbe you're not exiting that eighth is not being exited from the beacon chain at least not until withdrawals are enabled but you still get that instant liquidity there which i i think is very cool uh but if i want i want to find this white paper here it is uh because it's got a bunch of interesting nuggets of information here i wanted to get through so it's not that long it's about 15 pages but i mean it's it's big text and a bunch of graphics and things like that so essentially there is one thing i wanted to talk about they uh they talked about kind of like how they're calculating the rates so i believe it's just going to be uh uh the conversion

rate is the rate at which cb will be issued or redeemed burned relative to the amount of staked eth being wrapped it is a function of the amount of eat steak any post commission rewards earned any penalties in pros and total cb stakes so they actually show the way they're working this out on this white paper as well how they're kind of paying out the rewards which is really cool uh and the market exchange rate uh this basically works the same way as st it's not pegged it's just a free floating market exchange rate uh and it could uh that could be priced based on risk as well you can see here coinbase's token wrapping uh operation so basically cb is going to be completely centralized it's got an admin and owner key blacklister as well so it can blacklist any address so they're being very upfront about this

but this is to be expected i mean the cb contract apparently is inherited directly from usdc with two feature editions which is an exchange rate and an oracle roll so essentially like it's the same thing it's it's super centralized which i mean you're sticking with coinbase of course it's gonna be super centralized so you shouldn't expect any decentralization here but i like that they're being upfront about it right i really like that they're being upfront about it what i like even more is that they have a risks page here where they say there is risk of slashing so they're actually being upfront that you know use staking doesn't mean a free lunch like there is a risk of being slashed for a number of different reasons there is also smart contract security risk when you're holding cbe because it is a smart

contract uh that is powering it you have blockchain technical risk you have custodial risk and you have price risk uh that is associated with the s the cb eth token so i love that coinbase is doing this because obviously there's been a talk there's been a lot of talk lately about do users even know what they're getting into when they're staking well if the risks a a show to them up front and center even if they don't read them it's their responsibility to know what they're getting into i don't buy this argument that we should not i mean if you want to take the extreme example here i don't buy the argument that we shouldn't socially slash one of these exchanges just because there's fallout for end users at the end of the day these end users should know what they're getting into and i think that we

shouldn't be training users to just uh not consider risks when they're interacting with things because there's risk attached with everything now obviously there are different ways to train users on this and different ways to present the information to them if you just present them with a wall of text they're less likely to read it so i'm wondering how coinbase will do this on their website i haven't actually checked it out myself but they should be very i guess like easy to read things for for users that that make all these risks apparent to them so that they know what they're getting into because you're earning a reward at the end of the day you're not just like putting eth into this thing and earning nothing uh and risking it all for nothing you're earning an eighth denominated reward uh and yes okay you're paying coinbase for

the uh a fee for staking on your behalf but you are still getting a reward at the end of the day and especially with cbe's token you're able to enter and exit that position at will which i think is obviously very very positive now the bit more comments around i guess what quebec is doing here this is fitting in with my thesis that i've said it before and i'll say it again there's two ways that staking is going to become more distributed one is they're going to have more competition uh with these kind of providers and more competition in the liquid staking uh derivative space particularly because now we have cb eth we have st we have um uh r8 obviously from rockerpool and a bunch of other ones that are all going

to be competing with each other for market share which i think is obviously very healthy then on the second uh the second point is when withdrawals are enabled that we see that great reshuffling of stake which i think is just just as important as well because even if all the coinbase steakers sold their their cb right now which they they technically couldn't but even if they did that eat would still be staked under coinbase because coinbase can't withdraw the east from the beacon chain right now so when that loop can be closed you're going to see a much more efficient beacon chain a much more distributed vegan chain and much healthier one because of that so i'm very much personally looking forward to that but it's great to see uh queen bases scb eth token come out today i think all of the exchange uh staking

operations is going to have a token like this especially with coinbase leading the charge if coinbase can do it the rest can do it i expect you know k from kraken or i think binance may already have b eth or they definitely do have beef but i don't know if it's a steak derivative token i i don't know if it's like a futures market or something like that but you can expect all exchanges that offer staking to have one of these tokens because it just makes logical sense especially if coinbase is able to do it then these other ones will be able to do it as well all right so tether i made an announcement today saying that they hold firm on decision not to freeze tornado cash addresses and awaits law enforcement instruction this is pretty this is a pretty big deal here i think

tether is trying to take the opposite spectrum of the centralized stablecoin spectrum oh the opposite side of the stablecoin spectrum here because of the fact that usdc has been very upfront about abiding by any law orders given to them they will freeze any address that they have to uh they will kind of freeze any funds that they have to whereas tether is kind of taking the other side yes to that has used their blacklist function plenty of times before and they have frozen things but they don't seem to be going above and beyond here so they're not actually freezing the tornado cache addresses uh which i think is obviously distinctly different from uh uh from usdc and these usdt and usbc are the two of the biggest centralized stable coins

within crypto obviously uh but yeah this is this is pretty cool i i think that i think that this is cool because we have uh soft guaranteed that usdt is like uh i don't know an insurance policy if usdc ever becomes too tainted and never becomes like too i guess controlled and regulated by the us and where it becomes very cumbersome to use it so i'm glad that tether put this out now obviously there are a lot of issues with tether there's a lot of drama surrounding tether i'm not gonna go into that for now i think that as long as the market believes that usdt is worth one dollar it's going to be worth one dollar it doesn't matter even if it's not backed i mean obviously it does matter in the long run but

and obviously we want it to be back because we don't want another terror situation but i think that from what i've seen tether that isn't as dodgy as it used to be um but i'm not going to endorse it and say that you should use one stable coin over another but it's there as an option for people who rather use something that is potentially less restrictive than usdc on the centralized stablecoin front all right so autoscan i think i covered this a while ago but autoscan is basically an open source ethereum block explorer created by uh willian here willian mitsuda uh so basically i think this is uh live today yeah i remember shouting this out in on july 2nd 2021 this was a while ago i remember i

remember shouting this out on the uh on the refill but basically i think you can install this locally using uh using github code uh so uh yeah so it's on github you can install it locally uh and i think that uh uh this is a good alternative to either scan obviously we all love the etherscan and there are other block explorers out there but at the end of the day if you want to have your own block explorer that can talk to a node talk to an archive node such as aragon which you can sync on your own pc you can go like even beyond fully self-sovereign with just a full node you can have an archive node running you can run your own local block explorer with autoscan and then you won't even have to rely on either scan like this is this is

what's amazing about crypto is that we're about ethereum in particular you can have your own wallet no one controls you can have your own rpc which is your own full node you can have your own archive node and you can have your own block explorer so that you don't have to actually interact with any third parties that could potentially censor you you know it may sound funny to say this but either scan could censor an address they could just not show that address in their search results so you wouldn't be able to actually see anything about it you would have to go to a different block explorer uh and it is possible for them to do that because either scan is a centralized website so i actually think it's quite amazing that we're getting to the point where you can have like full stack decentralization and you can have

it with different front ends as well not just auto scan but you can have it with different default finance download them run them locally yes it's more technically involved but i mean that's by design at the end of the day like if you want to try and do things on your own of course it's going to be more difficult than someone else doing them for you but i think that's a very underrated aspect of of ethereum and blockchains more generally or decentralized blockchains more generally you do have the ability to be completely fully self-reliant you don't have to use third-party services if you don't want to which i think is pretty amazing so yeah i mean if you're looking for i guess a self-sovereign block explorer you can download autoscan and run it locally using an eragon node and basically get

similar data to what you'll get from either scan maybe not all the bells and whistles and all the features but you still get something similar which i think is really cool all right so spectral here has announced a 23 million dollar series a round i uh i believe here uh uh led by a bunch of different investors here as you can see uh so this i believe comes uh a year after their seed round i i would say and for those of you who don't know what spectral is they're a uh programmable credit worthiness uh protocol so essentially what that means is they're trying to bring credit on chain so that we can actually have credit systems because right now within d5 we don't most of i mean there are some protocols like maple finance and and gold pinch that enable this but most

of d5 doesn't allow you to actually have credit it just lets you borrow funds but you have to over claralize credit is a different concept where you're able to basically not have to over collateralize with funds you can over claralize so to speak with your reputation with your identity so that's what spectral is trying to do here so i mean congrats to them on this raise i should note that i participated in their in their seed round here as an angel investor a while ago um but yeah i guess i i just came across this today i was like oh congrats to them on on this new 23 million dollar raise this is obviously going to give them a bunch of runway which is very cool and they'll be able to continue building out uh what they're building with with spectral so if you want to learn more

about spectral you can go visit their twitter and and website and i mean it's live at app.spectral.finance as well and you can check your score and all that good stuff there i'm not going to check it now uh on on my end but uh but yeah i'll link this in the youtube description for you to go check out all right so we've got a fresh new dashboard from hill dobby today so if you want to dive deeper into unisop v1 v2 or v3 or sushi swap dex pool data you can check out the dashboard where you'll find historical data for volume fees tbl yield impermanent loss apy and more so i'll obviously link this dashboard in the youtube description below for you but this is just more stats that you can check out about uni swap and juicy swap which i thought was was very cool i mean

i love hill dobby's dashboards i've shouted him out a bunch of times on the refill before he makes some of the best dune analytics dashboards that i've seen i follow the ones that he makes religiously i love following along with them the staking eth ones the layer two ones all that good stuff there so just wanted to give him another shout out that you should go check this out if you're interested in dex analytics for both uni swap and all versions of uni swap and sushi swap all right last up here i just wanted to give a quick shout out to a bankless brazil now not the thing is is that this bankless brazil publication doesn't just do bankless translations they also translate their daily gray newsletter so they translate it to portuguese you can see here all the uh the bankless and and and the defiant newsletters but also if

you scroll down a bit you'll be able to find deadly grain newsletters so you can see here that they've been translated into portuguese now not every newsletter is translated i believe but a lot of them are so i wanted to give a shout out to them as a big thank you for doing this but also it is their one year anniversary so i guess like happy birthday happy anniversary to bankless brazil i really love these initiatives because i mean obviously crypto is dominated by english-speaking people but there are so many cultures so many countries so many different languages spoken within crypto that we shouldn't limit ourselves to english and we need people to step up who can speak english and write in english and translate that to you know portuguese or or any other language out there um there's also kind

of a spanish translation of of the deadly gray as well uh and i believe there are a few others floating around too but not just that daily way but like any content should be translated and i know the ethereum.org website does a really good job here as well because as i said there's a lot of english-speaking people but that doesn't mean that everyone is is uh is english-speaking like and and i think we kind of optimize for english-speaking people because of the english-speaking dominance whereas we should be optimizing for as many languages as possible especially the popular ones so that we can bring ethereum to the world and not just virtual virtual signal about bringing ethereum to the world but yeah i guess happy anniversary happy uh birthday to bankless brazil here keep up the amazing work i think it's a very good a very

good service uh definitely bringing more people from brazil and more portuguese speakers into the ecosystem so thank you for that but i think on that note that is going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone