Cryptopunks now on-chain, Wallet landscape & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #190 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 19th of august 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so more drama in the uni governance world so doon analytics has posted a psa on twitter just a few hours ago saying a uni swap governance proposal that will let flipside crypto which is a data analytics uh firm manage up to 25 million dollars in uni tokens and use the yield generated to fund their own operations is about to pass in less than 24 hours with almost zero community attention now you can see the proposal here before i guess like i was looking at it before and it was actually there was only 10 million votes against and 41 million votes for

so obviously very heavily lobstered there uh and then dc investor kind of like i i guess like a tip devoto because he voted no uh with the uni tokens that he has delegated to himself but essentially he puts it really well in his tweet thread here where he says the growing precedent of using the uni treasury for large cash grabs to support pet courses often benefiting narrow groups of actors is bad it's very bad not sure what we can do when some of the largest token holders support this and i mean i'm of the same opinion right because uni governance right now seems very very centralized where there's only a handful of people in groups that kind of like have the majority of the voting power and they seem to be voting for things that directly benefit themselves or benefit their friends or kind of like

anything like that we saw this play out a few weeks ago with the the legal fund that got you know 10 million dollars of the uni tokens dumped it on the market and were able to kind of like get 1000 cash and it kind of felt like they just looted the treasury with like little oversight here and that's exactly what this feels like as well to me i mean in general it just feels like people are looking at uni swaps treasury and they're like okay well there's billions of dollars worth of uni tokens in here um and you know how do we kind of like get the voting power to essentially help us loot the treasury at the end of the day now i'm not going to attribute any ill will to flip side crypto here um i i'm friends with some of the people that

kind of like work there and everything like that but at the same time this just seems ridiculous right giving one kind of platform i guess like the ability to manage 25 million dollars in uni tokens in order to kind of like fund their operations or whatever it just you know and with kind of like little oversight i mean they've got their little oversight committee here but on the oversight committee they have like the ceo flip side so it's just kind of like weird it's like that's a conflict of interest right there like and and uh they have uh uh other people here nick carter and boris stannic i think yeah that's that's nick carter the the bitcoin i don't know who boris is um uh i think he's part of uni swap um but you know nick carter being on here again kind of weird right like

he he's he's definitely not an etherean or a uni swapper he's definitely like a hardcore bitcoiner but i guess the most weird to me was was dave bolter the ceo of flipside being on this oversight committee and yeah it just seems like uh i guess really weird to see this proposal uh um you know kind of like passing without like much fanfare at all i mean i didn't even hear about this so it really does seem like these proposals are put forward they're voted on by a small group of people and they hope that no one notices uh before it kind of like passes and then they're able to just loot the treasury which is which is really crappy so yeah i mean i'm in total agree agreeing agreements with dc here that this is just really really bad and as he said you know they're often

often these proposals are made by actors who will benefit from them directly and all that sort of stuff there there are uh there's a few comments in here as well kind of like talking about uh different things i'll let you read through the thread for yourselves and there was someone actually sticking up for for doing it uh for flipside crypto and and i'll read out the comment here because this is like taking the other side of it where they said is it better to raise capital from vcs the old way and charge for the premium version of the product uh you have a conflict of interest you being due analytics flipside is free and puts a lot of resources to these grants while empowering low-income users with bounties so essentially what this account when moon is saying is basically that you know dude analytics and flip

side crypto are definitely kind of like competitors right they offer similar services and and they're competing for the customers and all that sort of stuff so kind of like when moon is saying you have a conflict of interest here uh basically a pretty huge one uh because of the fact that you know you've taken money from like vcs and you charge your premium version for your product whereas flip sides trying to fund themselves through i guess um uh this kind of like uh treasury i guess just getting money from the treasury and you know dude analytics responded to that and said dune is first and foremost free and focused on community users there's a competitive market for service providers that prove that they can get both funding tokens or vc and revenue there is no need for unique holders to massively subsidize specific service providers and i mean i do i do agree

with that i i i kind of find it weird that you basically put in the costs of you know i guess like flip side is basically putting the cost of running their operation onto uni token holders and uni governance participants or whatever and that just seems really weird to me it doesn't the connection doesn't seem like it's there for me maybe i'm missing something but yeah just just definitely very weird so this is i mean this is unfortunate vitalik had a really great blog post the other day about governance and how coin voting governance is like completely overrated and we should move towards something like uh quadratic voting and things like that you can go read his blog post it's on his blog if you just search vitalik or just go i think vitalik.ca um his blog post is there but essentially uh we need something

better this is not working uh you know all the d5 apps suffer from this sort of stuff like voter apathy uh you know i guess a small group of people holding the majority of the tokens or holding the majority of the voting power just voting on what they think is best for themselves and and kind of like enriching themselves and that's obviously not what we want d fight to become and at the end of the day governance tokens hold a lot of power there's a meme oh governance tokens aren't worth anything well i mean if you can use those governance tokens to loot a treasury they're worth a hell of a lot at the end of the day right and you know you don't even have to hold them for the whole period you could just buy some uh some some tokens or even borrow them and

then vote on something uh and then kind of like you know you know take some money or make some money from the treasuries or whatever you're voting on and then kind of like sell off the tokens or whatever so yeah definitely uh kind of like gonna keep a tab tabs on this as i said it only happened a few hours ago i'm going to see how it plays out but i'll probably i'll cover it tomorrow and see what the end result was here so metamask is now rolling out eip1559 support to all users so if you haven't uh kind of i guess seen the update yet you may have to force an update on your metamask or maybe it just hasn't rolled out to you just yet but essentially uh this is really great to see i mean i saw i i've been monitoring the chart of uh

kind of like one five five nine style transactions on the network uh i think it's at like 45 percent right now or around about that around about that and it's it's going up really quickly and especially as minimize rolls out more support here it's gonna continue to do that and then you know once ledger rolls out support for it as well it'll just get even more i don't think we're gonna get to like a hundred percent of of transactions on the network being one five five nine style because there's always gonna be like those lag guys there's gonna be wallets that don't support it or there's to be people using kind of like all manner of wallets that just take forever to support it um so or kind of like just do weird things so you know i think we can get to 80 90 in in

in relatively short period of time which would be really awesome because that'll just help the network out but generally you know i've been seeing people say you know did 1559 really help out the network and and kind of like stabilize gas fees and it has like all the data i've seen has showed that the the the network fees are actually like much more stable than they used to be and the volatile periods end much quicker than they used to if you will have noticed um during nft drops the volatile periods don't last very long at all it's like inside of an hour um and then like the mempool gets cleared very quickly uh and then you know we're back to back to kind of like normal i guess like regular uh grey prices there so yeah definitely uh uh uh force update metamask if you haven't yet you can go

you can do that by going to your extensions in chrome or else and just clicking update now and it should update it for you but it should have rolled out automatically anyway so yeah just cool to see 559 finally rolling out to all metamask users but speaking of wallets i put out a tweet today where i said the crypto wallet landscape is going to look completely different in six to 12 months time and i really really do believe this and i wrote a bit more about this in the newsletter today but essentially i followed up this tweet by saying there's more and the reason why i believe this is because there's more competition in the wallet space because peop these days because people have realized that wallets can print revenue if designed properly even without a token um so for example metamask is making a killing

just from their swap feature right now so they have a swap feature inbuilt into metamask called a sorry that acts as like a decentralized exchange aggregator that essentially looks for the best price and then they tackle their own fee on top of that which is actually quite hefty it's like 0.8 percent but the convenience to users outweighs the fee it seems and they're making 10 million dollars a month right now in revenue and they were making nothing just a little while ago so they've essentially managed to monetize their huge user base in such a brilliant way and this is just one way they monetize they also have the institutional arm right now uh and the scoop uh from the block has a podcast talking to their uh the people working on the metamask institutional arm if you want to go listen to that uh which kind

of explains in detail about what they're doing there but essentially they're just making so much money now and i think other wallets uh kind of like teams have seen this especially on the uh the browser extension side there's uh phantom which currently supports solana but is going to be supporting ethereum soon there's another one that was announced by matt longo today which i'll go through in a sec uh and then you know the mobile wallet space is heating up as i mentioned i mentioned rainbow affair a few times on on the refuel there's there's argent dharma i mean there's so many good good kind of wallets out there and i also think that wallets need to evolve because the modern ethereum user has different requirements to an ethereum user from like two to three years ago so even even like one and a half years ago 18 months ago the

requirements are vastly different i want my wallet whether it be an extension wall or mobile wallet whatever it is i want my wallet to be able to show me my nfts right like sorry the wallet software to show me my nfts in each of my ethereum addresses i want to be able to access d5 natively from in here even if they attack on a fee i think that that's fine a lot of users are kind of like would be fine paying that fee but essentially i want all those features i want social recovery features which is where smart contract wallets come in to come into play and you know i want kind of like wallets that i can use on my mobile that i can connect the desktop through wallet connect i want it to be snappy and smooth i don't want it to be clunky i

want it to i want it to be to be secure as well and i want to you know i want it to be ubiquitous everywhere that's the modern ethereum user these days like we we do not just want to send normal transactions anymore there's so many other things to do on ethereum so wallets now have to keep up and and as i said the competition is going to heat up really really quickly now and i expect the landscape to look completely different in six to 12 months time i've already started using other wallets more often now than metamask even if i'm at my pc because i'm trying to wean myself off metamask i i appreciate all the work that the metamask team has done in the past they've onboarded more users into ethereum than any other wallet by far um but at the same time they're falling

behind now they're in they don't innovate uh very much on kind of like their wallet side of things they're very slow to roll anything out uh they definitely feel i mean it definitely feels like minimize hasn't changed in all the years that i've used it right even though there's been like a couple of major upgrades it still feels the same like i can't do any of the stuff that i just mentioned i mentioned to you uh so the way i do metamask is just like this ultra reliable wallet that doesn't have many features but i can rely on it for for anything it'll let me do like what i you know in terms of like doing normal transactions it'll let me do that but at the same time i'm starting to use mobile wallets more trying to get used to that i'm looking forward to testing out the

other extension wallets as i as i spoke about like phantom and and um there's not this other one from matt lungo here called tally um but yeah essentially i just i i think it's gonna look completely different in six to twelve months because new users are probably going to come in they'll use metamask but they're probably going to come in via mobile as well so the mobile wallets are going to start dominating a lot more and i think smart contract wallets are really going to come into their own once we have layer 2s because right now to set up a smart contract wallet on ethereum layer 1 costs a lot it's like hundreds of dollars worth of fees um so on layer 2 that's going to obviously be orders of magnitude cheaper so i expect to see more adoption happening there so uh yeah and on the wallet note as well

matt longo from thesis here today put out a tweet thread where he even kind of like called out metamask and say that uh i guess on august 20th it will mark the one year anniversary of metamask stepping away from free and open source uh licensing because they went the institutional route um and since then metamask has launched their swap feature and you know in wallet trading service where they've generated 10 million dollars a month in just fees alone and then he goes on to say that that they've put together a team together a small team to ship a wallet that's built for a new open internet that means a wall ecosystem that is fairly launched sustainably aligned with users wholly owned and governed by the community and you can see here uh the wallet is called telly uh and you can see like teaser images so tell you

there's it's it's basically a dog kind of like for their branding here dog icon and then you can see on on the right hand side native dfi integration right where you can just deposit usdc or deposit eth into uh kind of like ave for example and you know start generating rewards or yield and then you can see they even support arbitrary as well uh like a layer to direct support within metamask and it looks really really cool it looks beautiful it tells you the assets on arbor trim it's much more you know it's it's much easier it gives you much more information about i guess uh what's happening and you can see it on the bottom there's different little tabs as well where obviously like just judging based on the um the tabs on the left side you have like what looks like an app store an app or a

dap explorer on uh secondly you have a wallet third looks like a swap feature fourth urn being uh you know the d5 stuff and then you have like the three hamburger menu kind of thing on the right which is obviously the settings uh so kind of like from from that perspective this already looks better the metamask right like so i'm really looking forward to this and and as i said there's also that phantom wallet but that's not supporting ethereum just yet and this tally wallet isn't out yet but as i said the next six to 12 months is going to be uh huge it's gonna change the wallets get landscaped completely and we're gonna have more competition and more innovation there which i'm really really looking forward to so i'm glad this is finally coming because as i said and much as i love metamask

and respect what they've done they've been top dog for too long and because of that they haven't had the kind of motivation to innovate um because they haven't felt like they were going to lose market share but now they will if they stay the way they are they are going to lose market share to these new entrants who are going to be adding all of these features that the modern ethereum user is demanding all right so the pyramint eth2 test net has hard fork to altair now i've been talking about altea for a little while now this is the first major eth2 uh kind of like network upgrade here um and you know it hard forked successfully there was no issues all the clients were talking to each other there's actually five clients talking to each other as well because chain safe's um loads that

client launched recently uh and the next kind of hard fork is prata which is which is the test net and i think after prada they will go to mainnet with this so maybe we see mainnet in the next month or so and then after that as i've mentioned before uh we have all of the eth2 and each one kind of like developers and researchers all stem full steam ahead towards the merge so this is the last thing that they have to do before the merge happens and that's i mean not to say the merge hasn't been being worked on while this has been happening but at the same time having like everyone aligned on this one goal being the merge means it wouldn't get it like uh much sooner than uh than we can hope for because i really i mean i've said q1 2022 plenty

of times but at the end of the day unfortunately when it comes to core protocol work whether it be at layer 1 or layer 2 giving dates is really really hard or kind of sticking to dates is really hard because you're always running to unforeseen issues now is that going to happen with the merge of course it will there's going to be plenty of stuff that they're going to have to work through to make sure this goes right and at the end of the day the merge is the biggest upgrade in ethereum's history by far like one 559 doesn't hold a candle to how big the merge is in terms of complexity in terms of uh kind of like the effort needed to get everyone on board to make sure it goes smoothly in terms of risk as well it's all there but i have full

confidence in all of the uh people working on eth1 and e2 they're going to get it done i mean they've become really good at launching these things without i don't like critical bugs or anything like that i mean we launched the beacon chain without any issues and it was running fine for for a while and then you know there's been one major issue with the prism client that was like a total edge case and because we're a multi-client system the beacon chain kept kept going i mean it stopped finalizing but it kept going and it was all well and good um and by the time the merge comes around i think the bigger chain will have been live for like 18 months so you know it's really great that that's been battle tested we have the first hard fought going live on it soon as well

and we also have uh you know eth1 continuing to upgrade with obviously berlin and then london and um you know we might have another fork before i think well it's guaranteed we're gonna have another fork before the merge unless the merch happens in december because we need to delay the difficulty bomb but we don't know if there's gonna be other eips in that uh in that fork in december so we'll have to wait and see i don't expect the merge to be in december that seems very close to me i mean we're almost in september right now it doesn't seem like that's going to happen but q1 is is my like is optimistic uh for sure uh i mean i don't think q1's are optimistic i think it's i think it's realistic but at the end of the day you know it could push into q2 so i wouldn't be surprised

about that because as i said the merge is complex but still good to see the altair fork on prior months uh these two test net go off successfully here so uh uh the sec kind of like i don't know what his title is uh right now it kind of eludes me right here but uh gensla uh which i think is he's titled the secretary um he's basically been making noise about d5 regulation lately and uh generally kind of like defined like airdrops and liquidity mining and he said something today that i think larry cermak tweeted out if i go to here i can actually find it um did i retweet it no i must have just replied to it but essentially uh what larry larry kind of tweeted out was that uh genn's law was saying that uh where

is it where is it i actually i need to i need to get to it because if i don't i'm not gonna be able to there we go there it is okay so uh secretary uh gensler basically said that projects that reward participants with valuable digital tokens or similar incentives could cross the line into activity that should be regulated no matter how decentralized they say they are so essentially he's taking aim at liquidity mining now which i don't really get like unless these tokens are securities then i don't really get what he's saying that they should be regulated like this just screams over regulation to me as usual right from from the sec from from the us government um but essentially he also made comments saying that defect projects generally aren't immune to regulation and i kind of push back on that and i say if the projects are truly

decentralized then yes they are immune that's the entire point of defy if you are not you know if you can't resist regulation if the if any one government or nation state around the world can compel you to do something to change your your app and you call yourself defy well you're not d5 right you're you're literally still c5 because that you're not decentralized at all if that can happen and there aren't many truly decentralized projects on ethereum today if i had to pick up just off the top of my head uniswap obviously is the prime example here of something that's truly decentralized where if the us government went to hayden or the unisop team and said hey you need to change this in your you know contract or you need to you need to kind of like blacklist people or whatever blacklist these tokens they

can't actually do that at the contract level they as i've explained on the review a few weeks back they can do it at the front end level that's that's fine because it's front and centralized at least their front end is but they can't do it on the smart contract level so from that perspective uh truly decentralized projects cannot be uh regulated by by any regulator like you would have to take over the entire theorem network to actually change the code of these truly decentralized smart contracts um you know now in saying that i i think on the flip side the uh the gensler is not going to be saying oh we can't regulate d5 right because he may know that they they can't regulate some parts of d5 or most parts of it and he's not just going to come out and say that but at the same time he's

signaling that he you know the sec is looking at this they're looking at kind of like crypto more generally and and d5 like as a as a prime target here which i think uh you know we should be paying attention to of course but i also think that if they push too hard people are going to leave the us and go elsewhere like that's just as simple as that the the genie is out of the bottle here there's no way that they're going to be able to kill defy or kill any kind of like um i guess crypto stuff like over the long term it's just it's not going to happen um some people draw parallels to the online poker industry in the us where there was actually sweeping legislation i think maybe the late uh 2000s maybe early 2010s where they put through this regulation that

essentially killed the online poker industry in the us by making it making it illegal um i think or making the reporting requirements just too cumbersome uh and they did this on purpose now with with crypto and with defy you can't do this like it because with like the poker poker stuff like to actually participate in that you would have to go through the fiat rails at the end of the day right where uh essentially like all the banks and everything are not going to support you all the kind of like financial institutions are going to block you from doing things whereas crypto can already be a circular economy yes we need the fiat rails to obviously power it but crypto and d5 in general like especially d5 and ethereum we can use that in a totally circular way uh yes it would be really bad if you know the the bank

started cutting off people from being able to withdraw uh sorry put money into exchanges and exchanges started coming off people from being able to withdraw their assets to ethereum and things like that but at the same time you know i think that there are going to be various governments around the world that are going to be friendly to crypto and they're going to take the opposite stance of the u.s so i'm going to keep an eye on this regulation happening here um these comments are definitely coming at a time where i think uh you know i guess like crypto regulation is heating up more generally obviously with the kind of like infrastructure bill and stuff like that so it's definitely something to pay attention to it's not something to be ignored something to be taken seriously but at the same time i think it's like a fool's

errand if you're saying that you're going to try and regulate all of d5 i think it's just like a signaling thing at this point in time so diversify announced today that they've moved moved over to starkx v3 and now shared proofs with so rare which is another kind of app that's living on top of uh oh sorry living on top of starkx or using starquest technology to scale at layer 2 um and then what does this mean they say like a magic bag zero knowledge proof stay roughly the same size no matter how many transactions you put inside so the number of transactions uh uh it goes up sorry so so the more transactions uh equals less average cost as more apps builds with stockwear the cost reduces for everyone so this is basically sharing the load of the cost of these kind of like proofs to the

ethereum layer one which is again the magic of uh zero knowledge proofs which fancy cryptography i obviously don't understand but uh it works right and it gets a lot of people excited and literally every smart person that i've ever spoken to has said that zero knowledge uh kind of like uh cryptography is like revolutionary and it only it didn't have practical applications before but now it does with crypto which is just like super exciting so great to see this from diversify here um speaking of layer two uh the graph has now integrated with optimism so essentially the graph is like a middleware that sits between i guess like the the kind of like full node and the app like a defy app and essentially serves data from the full nodes through like a graph system to the the d5 front

ends or like things like zapper and stuff like that so for example when you go to zapa all that data that's get that gets um put into that but comes from the graph that you zapper basically queries the graph uh for your address obviously and returns you all the balances and things like that and if you go to any of your favorite default apps they're most likely using losing uh the graph um to kind of like uh serve up that data for you and query that data for you whether that be the current yields on on different kind of farms whether that be your current balances in them you know gas feed estimation all that all those sorts of things can come from the graph so yeah it's great to see them supporting optimism and integrated with optimism because they are a core piece of infrastructure that is needed to give

users the layer one experience at layer two so a proposal uh has been shared by uh shard labs here to bring matic liquid staking to polygon in collaboration with polygon and lido so essentially this is uh implementing lido support uh on polygon so you'll be able to stake via lighter with your magic tokens and you'd be able to kind of get like a derivative of that and you'd be able to use your staked matic as kind of like collateral within d5 just like you can use your st8 which is staked either from lido as collateral in d5 or kind of like put it into a little kitty pool do whatever you want to earn extra rewards there so great to see kind of this being supported here uh rainbow has released a their first version of their rainbow button which is

essentially a way to leverage the power of wallet connect to seamlessly onboard new users to the web3 world so as you can see in the video here clicking on the rainbow kind of link a rainbow button here they click through to it it you click connect to rainbow it opens up a qr code using your camera you can scan this qr code and essentially it opens up your rainbow wallet as you can see here and then you can allow the uh your rainbow wallet to connect to this app on desktop and you can do all of your transactions via the mobile wallet uh uh and then it'll like you can sorry you can send transactions from the desktop to your mobile wallet to sign and then you can kind of have that extra kind of like security there and also manage everything from from your wallet ipr

while while still getting a desktop experience which again as i said this is part of the modern ethereum user requirements like they require this kind of seamless onboarding through things like wallet connect where they can have a hybrid approach of using their mobile phone as their main ev every kind of like day wallet and being able to sign from it and basically still you have the desktop experience as well so zappa's wallet avatar customization is now live you can change your avatar here to any nft that you own which is really really cool the fun thing is is that my current profile picture the little penguin thing that you see here is actually an nft so the um the artist sent me an nft of it so my uh avatar is now my uh my my actual profile picture which i thought was

really cool um so yeah and this can be changed to any nft that you have obviously not all of them make sense but i think this is really cool because you can change it to your crypto punk right and you can have that there you can show it off to people if you have a public address that you that you've changed it on uh and you can essentially uh kind of like customize your your kind of experience here and show it off to other people which i think is like one of the whole points of nfts right like that's that kind of like a status symbol you know showing it off showing people what you've got essentially which i think is really really cool and speaking of crypto punks uh lava labs announced today that the crypto punks are now fully on chain the images

and attributes for all the crypto punks are now stored in this contract on ether scan as you can see here i'm in the contracts here i'm not going to go through it obviously but essentially you scroll down and you're able to see like what's happening in the contract um and this means i mean they put out a blog post as well but this means that even if the live labs website was to go offline or kind of like disappear you would still be able to recreate all the punk attributes by using this contract that lives on chain which was a main concern there was actually a blog post that was published quite a while ago going through these concerns um i think this was in uh march of 2017 uh or no no not 2017 much march 17. maybe it wasn't a while ago then

um but essentially it explained how a lot of i guess like all the images and kind of like things like that were hosted by lava labs and if lava labs was to go offline then crypto punks would no longer work or essentially i guess like the um the indexing will no longer work so you wouldn't be able to actually get the image of it so that's really really cool so essentially i'm really glad to see this because this was definitely a main worry for a lot of people and i'm glad lava labs has done this and you can verify yourself on chain and everything like that but i think that is it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the youtube channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and

i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone