Coinbase sues the SEC, Staking updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #573 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 25th of April 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for missing yesterday's episode guys I know it's always a little bit shitty to miss an episode on a Monday because it means you didn't get an episode Saturday Sunday Monday but today's episode is going to be a longer to make up for that and there is a fair bit of news to get through so let's kick it off with the announcement today that coinbase is suing the SEC so you can see here Paul Grewal who is the chief legal officer at coinbase tweeted out saying today we filed a narrow action in the U.S Circuit Court to compel the SEC to respond yes or no to a rulemaking petition we filed

with them uh last July asking them to provide regulatory guidance for the crypto industry and then Paul continues the SEC is required by law to respond to petitions within a reasonable time but they have not yet responded to our petition from last July which is why we filed our action in court today it's obvious that there is a lack of clarity among our Regulators regarding crypto as even the chair of the SEC has declined to say which crypto assets are securities the crypto industry and its users need clear laws and rules to follow that are built for a new technology enforcement actions based in inapplicable security laws and aren't the answer so this I guess just continues the sec's really bad and really poor approach to crypto generally you know it's almost like the I mean maybe I maybe I can't speak about

everyone at the SEC but it's almost like Gary Gensler has this massive bone to pick with crypto and he's just going out of his way to be as uh you know as poor regulator as possible yeah and just stonewalling everyone at every single turn uh gaslighting everyone just doing everything uh wrong basically not not doing anything right from what I've seen honestly I mean even when they bring enforcement actions against legitimate scams uh it's like a slap on the wrist for uh for a lot of them and a lot of the time it's it's only enforcement actions against celebrities because it makes Gary Gensler and the SEC look good in the headlines right uh he doesn't care he doesn't seem to care about protecting investors or going after the the scams or anything like that and he

certainly doesn't care about crypto or at least giving any kind of clarity or guidance to crypto in order for um crypto companies especially centralized ones who want to be regulated uh to have clear guidance guidance on how they're going to be regulated so I this just continues coinbase as I guess war against the SEC they're not backing down I remember I said this a few months ago that if anyone was going to fight the SEC in the US it would be coinbase and they're living up to that because they are obviously the biggest crypto company in the US they have a very good opportunity here to keep growing and growing uh in in the face of all the blobs we saw last year of all the C5 services and other exchanges like FTX coinbase has a very very big opportunity here to grow and obviously they're

frustrated because they're trying to grow and the SEC and other Regulators are not playing ball with them they're not even trying to give them any Clarity on anything and we saw the other day that coinbase is going to be launching their derivatives exchange offshore they're not going to launch it in the US because it's just not possible in this current regulatory climate in in the US here so as I said last week not only is the US losing out on kind of like economic and social growth yeah and jobs and and um and bringing people in and things like that uh they're also pushing away or not just pushing away existing companies but also pushing away people that would have thought of maybe making their company in the US or starting their company in the US they're not going to do that they're going to look

at the US they're going to be like okay well this is super hostile why would I stop my company here and people who may maybe wanted to immigrate to the US in order to get work within crypto or work within crypto they're going to look at that and be like wait a sec if I go to the US uh there's probably going to be teams out there that won't even want to hire me because I live in the US and it's just too much risk for them to take on and this has actually happened I've heard stories about this so as I said this just continues on this trend that we're seeing this really bad Trend that we're seeing where the SEC especially is not only not playing ball with crypto at all they're going out of their way to make life as hard as possible for crypto

companies whether they be centralized or or centralized companies or companies building decentralized products and services it really seems like uh either Gary gensel or the SEC as a whole does not want crypto to exist in the US and what's really funny about this is there's been a bunch of videos floating around recently of Gary Gensler giving talks that you edit at universities I think it was like four or five years ago now where he was very very positive on crypto he was talking about um different tokens in really positive ways it was funny he was even kind of Shilling I'll go around in a lecture and uh people were making the comparison that I think like the algaran token is down a massive amount since he shielded it and they're like you know his Gary again they're going to take responsibility for harming investors here so it's a lot of hypocrisy from him

as well and as we saw last week when he was getting grilled by that Financial Services committee uh he just didn't want to answer any of their questions he had a smirk the whole time he looked like he he knew he was on Untouchable and the sad thing is is as I said before he is pretty untouchable right now because there is no way that the Democrats are going to remove him and the only way he gets removed well as I said last week is there's two ways really he either um well I guess technically three he either uh gets fired if the Republicans win next year uh late next year he gets promoted and goes to the treasury or he resigns himself I I don't think any of those are likely except maybe him going to the treasury uh it's too early to tell who's going to win the presidential

election next year it's still I believe 18 months away so I'm not even gonna rely on that uh I don't think he's gonna resign I don't see any reason why he would uh and I also uh don't know when he's going to be promoted to the treasury because that's the next step after you work in one of these Regulators here on the SEC or cftc you go to the treasury and obviously that's where Gary Gensler wants to go that's what he's trying to do and that's just something we're going to have to deal with but it's really positive that we have uh us-based companies big companies that can fund this like coinbase uh swing the SEC taking them to court not letting them run all over uh coinbase because they're acting as this kind of Shield against uh all these other companies that may not be able to afford

the legal fees that it would take to go to take the SEC to court the SSC doesn't want to go to court either mind you they would love to settle this sorts of stuff outside of court because for them going to court it's really bad because they know uh going to court is is uh it's a slog that's for sure and if they lose in court that's a really big deal and I believe they've actually lost five out of their uh a six kind of um cases that have gone to court uh I I don't know what the the sixth one is or which one they won there but usually when the SEC brings action against a company or individual or whoever they settle and we saw that with Kraken for example Kraken basically settled and said okay we're going to shut down our staking product

instead of fighting the SEC in court and then the SEC went off the coinbase and quebe is like no screw you guys we're fighting now as I've said before Kraken and coinbase staking products are distinctly different socracker may have seen maybe okay the SEC has a good case against us here based on our unique product we'll just we'll just close the product down rather than fighting it whereas coinbase he strongly believes that their product is not a security they're staking product so they're like you know Screw You sec we're going to uh we're going to take you to court if need be so yeah the sec's days of of bullying companies I I hope uh over sooner rather than later but they're going to keep bullying the smaller companies and they've shown absolutely no in indication to me or to

anyone really that they have any plans of uh properly regulating crypto or at least giving any kind of guidance yeah so yeah just really proud of coinbase for doing this now if you want to support the cause you can mint this stand with crypto nft and the mint fee from uh the sorry the Zora mint fees actually being donated to an advocacy round with Bitcoin so yeah as I said you can directly support the the uh action here that coinbase is taking by minting the nft with the proceeds going towards to the advocacy around in Bitcoin and you can put a shield Emoji in your Twitter name if you want as well to show that you're standing with crypto standing with coinbase yeah so I'll link that for you to check out in the YouTube description below now moving on to some

more positive regulatory news uh in another part of the world in the EU so the EU is actually uh regulating crypto and they're doing it in a forward-looking way they're doing it in a way that doesn't kill Innovation doesn't kill crypto doesn't make everyone a criminal and they're doing it at a rather um uh a rather what's the word I'm looking for rather they're doing it quickly I'm just going to put it that way they're not resting on their Laurels and waiting around for things to for things to change or for Innovation to get ahead of them they're like you know we need to to regulate this thing and they started earlier they've been doing this for two and a half years now you know we need to regulate this thing we need to give clear guidance to companies operating within crypto and that's exactly what they've done and Patrick

Hanson here has been following along uh with this pretty closely he's actually the director of strategy and policy at the EU branch of circle as you guys know Circle are the issuers of the usdc a stablecoin so you should go check out his uh uh tweet and um I think he's got like a blog post here as well uh discussing this and there's also uh this Mica at a glance so Mica is the name of the the um I guess set of regulations uh that are coming in so you can see a micro at a glance one regulation to rule them all and it's got on the left asset categories and on the right issuer requirements so it's just a plain English way of helping all the relevant actors within the crypto space operating out of the EU to know how they are regulated uh and if they're basically

breaking the law or not so that's really great and apparently um it's it pronounced Mika not Mica okay another thing that I pronounced wrong but you know Patrick actually has here it's spoken Mika so that's that's great anyway enough on that I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right moving on from the regulatory news some positive news here from Visa so Q Sheffield who's the head of crypto at Visa put out a tweet today saying we have an ambitious crypto product roadmap at visa and just opened a few requirements for senior software Engineers to help us drive mainstream adoption of public blockchain networks and stablecoin payments and they've linked this careers page here where you can go apply if this is something that you're interested in now I've talked

about uh Visa before and how they had plans to or have plans to be heavily involved within crypto uh they I believe we're building a layer 2 or still are building a layer two we haven't heard much about that uh lately uh but they're definitely building it and they're it's Visa right they're going to be more slow moving than one of your roll-up teams roll up startups out there but they specifically mentioned Layer Two I believe and account abstraction yeah in the qualifications here so they say here you need to have a good understanding of layer one and layer 2 Solutions and experience running smart contracts using solidity and they said good understanding of public information DLT networks security protocols private key custody Etc and understand the new ethereum enhancements such as lc-4337 which is of course account

abstraction so if this sounds like something that you'd be interested in doing a senior software engineer at a big company like visa and and working on crypto still then you can definitely go check this job out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but just wanted to highlight this because I wanted to remind you guys that Visa is still active within the crypto space uh still trying to build out a product and a service for uh for Visa more generally and they also and as I've said cool Sheffield is the head of crypto Visa so they have like a whole department working on this it's not just some kind of uh as some kind of guy and like the photocopy room working on this no it's it's a whole thing it's a whole team and you could be part of that team so I'll

link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right a few ethereum staking updates so swell is now live on mainnet in public beta you can now liquid stake with zero fees for a limited time only enjoying swells a voyage to progressively decentralize the Dow so the link is here at swellnetwork.io slash mainnet and this blog post will be linked in the YouTube description below this basically explains what's happening with this launch and then there is also the actual app that you can go to at app.swellnetwork.io to start staking with a swell here so uh basically this is very new so I want to just throw out a few warnings that big given that it's new uh uh it's it's risky right anything

that's new any set of smart contracts that uh that have just come out of risky uh you should definitely study up how swell Works how you know what what you know the fees right now are zero what are the fees going to be when this limited time only promotion ends uh you know what's what's the kind of staking model that they're using all that good stuff there so you can check that out in the blog post of course and they've also got their Discord Channel which you can join and go ask questions in and stuff like that and you can read all about the risk in their documentation too and they've got a bunch of other things in the docs as well such as security measures and smart contract audits so they've actually been audited by Sigma Prime and the audit report can be found

here and they're going to be audit getting more audits post mainnet launch so yeah you can go check out all that for yourself would be linked in the YouTube description below but great to see another staking service live on the ethereum mainnet here uh and uh yeah I mean just continuing to see that great reshuffling hopefully going into not just one particular service but a bunch of them as they launch onto ethereum now speaking of staking services Jasper has another great thread here about why uh the it's a crucial moment for rockapole and what is that crucial moment well basically at 5am EST us time which I think is like now or like soon from when I'm recording this it's probably already passed by the time you're watching this

cracker newsers will get their staked teeth and he says yeah this is a crucial moment and then he says five simple reasons why you should consider rocker pull for staking and then there's a thread here it's a short threads only six tweets here but basically the main reasons uh higher rewards more decentralized access to D5 insurance and community and then uh Jasper says there is no better way to stake now I mostly agree with that I I would it depends on what you want out of staking I think and it depends on the kind of risk that you're will uh that you're willing to take and it depends on a bunch of other things uh like do you want to hold RPL if you want to spin up a mini pool do you want to be exposed to that that volatility and price risk all that good

stuff there I would say that I don't agree with this statement there is no better way to stake I am a solo staking kind of maximalist I I obviously do run rockable mini pools as well and you guys know I love rockapol but I think that if you have the ability to uh look into solo staking before looking into one of the pools but I know that a lot of people don't have that ability because 32A is the minimum requirement for solo staking at least until DVT technology is more distributed and then we have potentially other Solutions down the line but to become like a pure solo sticker obviously in that 32 8 which is a large amount of money so if you've got like as I've said before if you've got like eight eighth and um you're happy taking RPL uh exposure you can stake

with rocketball spin up a mini pool and Away you go but at the same time if you don't want to spend up a mini pool you can still stick with rockable by buying the R8 token uh with your Eve so you just basically swap eat for our eth on unusual or whatever right so in terms of the best way to stake and the safest most decentralized way to stake right now uh other than solo staking I would definitely say that's rocket pool I I know I just talked about swell but swell is very new they just hit mainnet rocketball has been on maina for quite a while now they've done multiple upgrades um they've been preparing for for withdrawals for a long time now and they have a really robust ecosystem so in terms of where I would go and that's I mean that's the reason why the only two

uh ways I stake is solo staking in rocketball mini pools I'm not staking any other way I don't have any eighth in any of the centralized staking I don't hold any st8's with Lido and I don't stick with any of the other centralized services or providers and for me it's a question of security resiliency self-custody especially and and decentralization always for me but I don't fold anyone for staking with any of these other services but you should definitely consider uh rocketball so I'll link this thread in the YouTube description below for you to check out uh and you can go read uh the whole thing for yourself all right speaking of solo staking Remy Roy here from the East dagger Community has uh published or shared something on Twitter called eighth wizard with which

is a piece of software that the steakhouse um project has made here that allows you to run a full validator node on Ubuntu or Windows in a few clicks so you can see here uh with it wizard as described as an ethereum validated installation wizard meant to guide anyone through the different steps to become a fully functional validator on the ethereum network it will install and configure all the software needed to become a validator it will test your installation and it will help you avoid the common pitfalls uh so I haven't actually tried this out for myself yet but this is exactly what we need to enable more people to be able to easily solo stake obviously I it's never going to be like a one-click thing there are there are multiple clicks that you need to do in

order to get set up with solo stacking and there have been other solutions that allow you to have nice interfaces like uh like a like dap node with avado and things like that but we need more and more of those Solutions and that's what this eighth wizard tool is now I am planning to test this out myself on on Windows actually because I think that this thing is more targeted towards the less technical users the ones who don't want to have to worry about tinkering with the command line or anything like that so most of the time they're probably going to be using Windows right so I'm going to test it on Windows I have Windows as my daily driver all my staking is done on um on Ubuntu or some variant of Linux I'm not actually using Windows for any staking Services right

now but it's funny because I actually started on Windows when I originally spun out my validator I was one of those noobs and it worked it worked just fine but I think that if we're trying to open up staking or I guess like Solace taking to as many people as possible and trying to get them set up in an easy to use way well they're going to be on Windows we can't expect them to install Ubuntu we can't say hey you need to install Ubuntu and they're like what what the hell's Ubuntu it's like oh well it's Linux like what the hell is Linux right they're not gonna no one and anything except Windows and Mac right those are the two kind of um operating systems that everyone knows about uh well not everyone but like people who use computers know about right and most people use Windows that's

just the reality of it so if you want to get the the um solo staking to as many people as possible this is something that we need to to work on these tools like eth wizard so as I said I'm going to test this out for myself on Windows and on Ubuntu as well I want to see what it's like there but just something that I figured I'd highlight for you guys to go check out see if you want to get started with it because I know a few of you have asked me before you know what's the easiest way to get started with solo stacking eth I I've given I've said like guides before or I've shared guides before like summer esat's guides and queen cashew uh there's been a bunch of videos that I've shared but a lot of those things require command line right

like yes you can copy paste the commands in uh and look you might run into issues you might not it's definitely not full like noobs it's it's definitely technical right you definitely need some kind of um knowledge of of computers and and gen and generally how things work whereas something like 8 wizard is targeting that user who just wants a nice interface wants everything kind of happen in the background for them just wants to be able to deposit their eighth into that deposit contract and get started it's all over validating without having to worry about anything else in saying that in saying that I have an opinion that may differ from a lot of other people in the staking Community about this I don't think solo staking is ever going to get to a point where it's as easy as like staking with

an LSD pool for example buying our eth or buying sta or staking with a centralized exchange it is never going to be as simple as that for the for the simple fact that if you're running the software yourself you have to be responsible for upgrading and maintaining that software so just those two facts alone eliminate the the um eliminate the the argument that it can be as easy so for example when there's a hard Fork on the ethereum network say uh with chappella everyone who runs an ethereum full node and a validators attached to it had to upgrade their software and if you didn't you would end up on the wrong chain and you would be offline uh technically in the um view of the network and you would start leaking

for being offline basically you wouldn't get slashed unless you were doing something malicious but you would start leaking eth now that that would require like regular maintenance from people right you have to upgrade it yourself that you can't Outsource that to anyone yes you can abstract it away from the user with a nice interface but it still needs to be done right um and then on the maintenance side the other side of maintenance is making sure that you are actually attesting to blocks making sure that you are proposing blocks making sure things like Mev boosts are set up correctly as I said you can abstract away a lot of that but not all of that and and if something goes wrong you have to debug it yourself no one's going to help you right um I shouldn't say no one's going to help you I mean like no one's sitting

over your shoulder is going to be able to just help you then and there you can go into like the East Decker Discord there will be great or or the rocketball discord's also great and you can get help there but the thing is you have to go out and and get that help right you have to be an active participant whereas if you're staking with a centralized exchange or you're buying an LSD you don't have to be an active participant at all you have you you generally don't have to do anything actually um and that by a virtue of just that alone and that that point alone it is going to always be easier to stake through that now of course doing that you know you incur fees right uh there are fees associated with uh with staking with lsds and also staking with centralized Services whereas if you're

solo staking you keep all the rewards for yourself uh but so our stacking is also uh you know there's also a large barrier to entry there with the 32th requirement so there's always kind of trade-offs here and there are pros and cons and things like that but if you are someone who you know even if you're only a little bit technical but you're still looking for just like a super easy way to stake I think eath wizard is something you should definitely check out so I'll link that in the YouTube description below and again shout out to the rockapool smart node stack which is also relatively easy to get started with I don't think it actually requires you to use the command line uh or use many commands on the command line uh that you may not be familiar with the documentation is really really good most

of it is done through the the smart node GUI uh and yeah typically with rocket pool I don't have to use the command line very much unless I'm checking like the status of the sync or something like that and then it's a really straightforward command like it's rocket pool uh you know service config to open the config like that it's not a a complicated command that looks like gibberish it's it's plain English it's really easy to to you to use and as I said it's well documented so there are different levels of staking here for different technical abilities but yeah I I I look forward to the day where solo staking gets as easy as possible even though I don't think it's ever going to be as easy as thinking you know with an Alastair or centralized exchange but it's going to get to a point where it's

just so easy and it and a lot of it is abstract abstracted away from the end user and that's when I think we'll get to the the point of um of uh getting more and more people to to solo stake but anyway you can check out ethwizard for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so I think this is the second last thing on staking I want to talk about so you guys know that I'm running a proteus device which is basically something that Joe from the rockapool community may he made a bunch of these uh things he 3D printed the cases for them and custom engraved them depending on what you wanted on it mine says they're like way on it and inside is a rock 5B board which is a low powered Hardware sort of like a Raspberry Pi now

I'm running a bunch of validators on there uh and I I mean you guys know I had issues with missed as testations that had nothing to do with the hardware though uh there was something to do with my connection and saturating my internet connection um but yeah I'm running multiple validators on there and a full node on there I'm not Outsourcing full no duties to another machine on my on my network I'm running it all on that little box there and it's running perfectly fine now ethereum the ethereum on arm Twitter account is the one to follow if you want to follow along with all these low powered staking devices uh and and everything around that well they put out a tweets saying that their zero day validator which is basically the validator that they've been running since Genesis of the beacon chain has

proposed 39 blocks since then it didn't miss a single block since its activation and always running on a resource constrained and low powered device using less than 10 watts of electricity so this little device here is small but powerful and you can run a lot of elevators on a device like this because the validator client itself is lightweight the heaviest thing is the execution layer client like Geth or never mind the consensus layer clients are actually quite quite light so I could speak for myself I'm running quite a few validators on my um on My Little Rock 5B board my little protease device and I've had no issues with it so if you're thinking wow okay I want to run like a rocker pool mini pool or something you can get a protest device

for that it actually comes pre-loaded with the smart node stack I re-imaged mine and and and and turned it into solid stages instead of rocker pull stickers because I already have a rockable staking set up uh but yeah these are the devices to look into if you're looking for low power devices to run an ethereum staking setup on so I'll link this tweet in the YouTube description below you can go follow the ethereum on arm tutor accounts they always put out great tweets around this stuff all right last thing on staking is just don't forget that the beacon chain website has a staking calculator so it comes with a lot of parameters such as monthly cost future price change total stake increase and more so you can go to the staking calculator here and you can put in the amount of eth you have at

stake and what your rewards will look like and change the parameters so if I show here economic parameters USD current price of 18 123 dollars monthly price change you can put these in I'm just going to leave these at zero the staking fee so let's assume that you're a solo Staker there's no staking fee uh you want to reinvest the gains over time and there is currently I think there's like 18 million each day or not almost 19 million each day let's just do it at 19 million each staked um and your online probability is about 90 so with all those parameters set and with one validator you can see on the right hand side here what your growth will look like over time uh your state growth uh and also what your earnings will look like over time in US dollars CR based on that and then you can see a

nice little table here as well of you know as a validator here what you're earning per year now uh you can change I think you can change the percentage that you get somewhere no okay I thought this was I thought that was there was a parameter to change the actual uh the actual rewards percentage because right here it says that the return is three percent I believe it's higher than that I believe it's like five percent or something right now uh so so yeah I mean uh there was a primary I remember but I don't know why it's not there now but anyway and then you can change up here how many validators you have so say you're running a lot more than one validator you can go like a thousand eight right or a thousand thirty two eighth yeah 1032 eighth uh we'll run 32

validators here and I'm not doing my math correctly here but whatever you say you've got that much Ethan you can see on on the right hand side here what that would look like with your returns and everything so yeah just a staking calculator for you to go check out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so the kzg ceremony that I've spoken about for quite a while now and I spoke about this I believe the last week of the week before how they opened it up to participants with a nunce count of 128 or more well now that's been lowered and you can now contribute with a nuns of 64 or more so as I said uh when I cover this the first time this will be progressively lowered over time and I figured it would be lowered in in kind of increments of 50 so this is 50 less

than 128 and then obviously the next increment will probably be 32 nuts but yeah if you have a an ethereum address with an ounce of 64 or more you can now contribute to the kzg ceremony uh at ceremony.othereum.org and I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so another I mean there's a couple of more ethereum core updates here so one here from gajinda uh basically saying energy in the ethereum ecosystem is effing amazing we had a pre devnet 5 run and results look encouraging with lodestar ethereum JS and Aragon passing blobs around soon to be joined by Prism Lighthouse and Geth and then blast off to 48-44 uh with devnet 5. now I've been saying um that there's been a bunch of these

devnets around 4844 being spun up and we're getting closer and closer to uh to kind of like a a more public test net and then obviously forking the actual public test Nets so there's that there that you can check out and there's also a tweet thread here from Christine uh Kim uh talking about the latest all call Debs call that happened a few days ago so the tldr is that devs are planning on launching the fifth devnet for 48.44 which I just spoke about and that's happening this week uh Erp 4788 and 3175 look like strong candidates to include in the deneb OR Cancun upgrade alongside 4844 and devs are working on some cool updates to validator subnets uh at testation nets that don't involve hard

Fork so you can check out the full call notes from Christine Kim here in this little Pro switch I'll link in the YouTube description below really detailed notes really great notes for you to stay on top of what's happening in the ethereum core development world as I said link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right last up here we just have a new roadmap update from the ethereum.org website so this is their Q2 roadmap which is now out if you're interested in learning all about what's coming to the ethereum.org website in Q2 and what they're planning and hoping to build uh you can go check this out and you can also join the Discord Community to get involved yourself the ethereum.org website is not closed Source it is open source it is a community run project you can go uh contribute to it and any in

any way that you want uh by getting involved on the GitHub joining the Discord Channel and all that good stuff there so I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I think on that note that's 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 the video a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone