Curve permissionless pools, Loopring growth & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #36 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 15th of january 2021. all right everyone let's get into the news from the last 24 hours so actually a couple days ago i mentioned this project uh railgun uh that was uh kind of announced on twitter that was centered around privacy now uh roman from tornado cache actually dug into this project a bit more and he says that it might like it you know it's highly likely that's kind of a scam here uh based on a few different things so he says that there's no code or white paper published you know only marketing there's a token pre-sale with a minimum contribution of 108th they disable discussions in their

telegram group and there's anon devs associated with it he does clarify that he doesn't have anything against anon debs but that combined with the rest of the red flags is a major problem here so i mean you know a couple days ago when i spoke about this i did say that the information was scarce and uh you know i was waiting for information to come come out about this before uh you know digging into it more but yeah unfortunately it looks likely like a scam especially if they're doing like a token pre-sale and you know having a minimum contribution and they're disabling discussions and stuff like that but you know we'll have to see what happens here i'm not going to call it an outright scam just yet but yeah unfortunately this project might not be uh something new you know some new privacy kind of

thing privacy magic on ethereum might just be a scam instead so i just wanted to kind of give a warning there as i did speak about it a couple days ago so jake trevinsky tweeted out today that fincen one of the regulators in the us has extended the public comment period on its proposed uh rule around i think it was around self-hosted wallets by 45 days citing the robust responses provided so far so i mean this doesn't guarantee that the rule won't go through but it takes uh us well into you know well past january 20 and into the biden administration so i mean i spoke about this a lot on the daily wear refuel about these kind of like self-hosted wallet regulations and how they could be rushed through

uh but due to the overwhelming responses that fincen received from the crypto community uh you know in large part due to jake's uh kind of um marketing i guess of of this and and kind of like uh championing it on twitter and everything like that it worked and you know they've delayed uh sorry extended the current period by 45 days which is a pretty large extension and as he said it goes into the new administration which apparently is supposed to be friendlier towards crypto so you know it's it's more likely that maybe this rule doesn't go through then it does go through uh but yeah this is really really cool to see it shows the i guess the power of the crypto community when they can come together and stop being tribal for a couple of minutes right and kind of you know realize that crypto

as a whole is kind of like fighting the same enemy right uh you know government regulations uh you know central banks all this sort of stuff like that's kind of what uh the ethos is there to decentralize all this sort of stuff um so it's great to see the community come together at times like this and you know i'm really happy we have um someone like jake in the industry he's a great uh one i guess great great crypto lawyer um you know he uh for those who don't know he works as the general counsel at compound he's been there for quite a while now um he's got doing a few different things within the industry so yeah he's uh he's a great champion here and i really respect him for what he was able to push through with this uh because i think we owe him a lot for

this definitely um he was one of the i mean if not the biggest cheerleader of this uh of getting people to submit things to this so yeah thanks jake for that you've might have saved us from some bad regulations here all right so uh tyler winklevoss tweeted out today that gemini are releasing a credit card where you can earn up to three percent back in bitcoin and ether or any other crypto when you use it for purchases uh it's not out yet you have to join the wait list uh to get early access so i'll link that in youtube description if you want to do that yourself um but yeah this is just really cool i mean i personally really want uh something that i can trust like from a trusted brand uh like uh that i can use uh you know

for my everyday purchases to get back these crypto rewards like i'd love to get eth back every time i spent money right on something that i just feel really great and another thing the winklevoss twins are actually like a bit of an aside here but they've been kind of tweeting a lot more about eth lately and whenever they tweet about bitcoin they're tweeted about ether as well and i mean this is great because it signals to me that ethan's kind of like matured to this point where it's on the same level as bitcoin from like uh uh i guess i guess you could say like macro perspective where whenever people talk about bitcoin they also say okay what about ethereum what about eth uh whereas this wasn't the case you know just a few short short months ago uh and and since then we've kind of seen this here so

you know ether's maturing it's being kind of put on the same pedestal as bitcoin in the macro sense even though within crypto we all know that ethereum as a network pretty much like flips bitcoin on on like lots of different metrics right you know fees generated value settled uh even node count i think is is up there uh there's a bunch of other metrics as well so it's really great to see eth getting more macro attention because you know tyler minkovos and his brother they have a lot of connections within the traditional finance world right uh they are not crypto natives i guess they're more like traditional finance natives but they've been around in crypto for ages i mean they bought bitcoin very early on i'm pretty sure they own a couple hundred thousand bitcoin or something like that

uh they bought eighth very early on as well and they're in a bunch of different things too of course but and they obviously have a crypto exchange but i would still say that they've spent a lot more time in that traditional world of things they're not like people who sit on you know crypto twitter are in the community responding to people all the time and like getting involved in all the posting and stuff right they're out there talking to banks of course because they have a crypto exchange right talking to regulators talking to all these people that you could call like old money i guess uh because i think their their family or i guess like their father was um was big in that world too so i mean and i mean it's the winklevosses right everyone knows them you know from the facebook days and

things like that so yeah i mean it's just great to see them pushing on this front more um you know i haven't used gemini myself i haven't an australian-based exchange that i use but i've never heard anyone complain about gemiini so i'm hoping they get more love out of this uh definitely go check them out if you haven't yet so awoke from get coin put together uh this uh this oh he put out this tweet today sorry that said that he's working with uh yala from uh meta cartel uh i mean his jaguars does a bunch of different things like git coin meta cartel uh whaler dow raid guild i mean he's doing a bunch of different things here but anyway he's working on uh basically a website that helps developers choose what layer 2 tech to build on so you can see

here in the image obviously if you're listening you won't be able to see it but you can see here that there's a bunch of different kind of like layer 2 solutions here and then they've got different kind of rows for sorry columns for type transaction cost fundamentally consensus max transactions per second and all that sort of stuff so i thought that was really cool and i think this is very sorely needed it's not ready yet but it's kind of in development and i think you can help because it's open source and everything obviously but i think it's really cool because uh there's going to be a lot of this happening i mean i've spoken a lot about layer 2 lately and how it's going to be a huge thing in 2021 but it's also going to be a little bit hard for developers to choose which one they want to go on and

that's why i believe we're only going to see a handful of winners here in terms of like massive network effects right um but this is going to help developers choose and you know kind of look at the differences between them and kind of see like how secure is that like is it right for my application you know i've described before how there's a massive difference between layer 2 and side chains where layer 2 is secured by the ethereum network and side chains have their own kind of security that they rely on and they just bridge into ethereum i think a lot of the high value financial apps need to be on a layer two if they're on a side chain it's it's not good because you can't have a billion dollars on a side chain right being secured on their assets because that's a very big honey

pot for the the limited security to go after so i wouldn't trust that for that sort of stuff and i would trust it on layer 2 whereas i would trust a side chain for like gaming for example right and gaming assets uh obviously you know potentially you can maybe have a billion dollars of the gaming assets on there and then the lines kind of blur but i mean you can still host the assets on ethereum as their home and then on the side chain you can have all the other logic going on right and you know anything can be a side chain doesn't even have to be something like x-style matic network it can actually be just a centralized exchange or another blockchain that just sacrifices decentralization to achieve scale which means it's pretty much centralized but you know it doesn't have to be uh

one of those things it can be coinbase it can be gemini it can be any of these it can just be a database right um in in a you know like a in like a dropbox folder like a spreadsheet or whatever google sheets it can be a database like mysql or something like that as long as you know you can record this sort of stuff and bridge in that's kind of like what a sidechain applies to so the terminology definitely gets mixed up on crypto twitter a lot um kind of a pet peeve of mine because i don't want people kind of like saying you know putting the things into wrong buckets and saying you know this is a layer two when no it's a side chain and there's distance in this i know i'm being pedantic about this but i think it's important to make the delineation here

but yeah really great to see your walkie and yalo kind of working on this um you know i i can't wait to see it live because i think it's going to help developers uh especially to choose which which kind of layer 2 solution they want to use here so uh wyon or yearn i don't know how how i should say it i always change between the two wyoming or yearn i'm just going to say yearn from now on um they put out this really cool promotional video um about curve so basically on curve uh you can do permissionless permissionless pools now um with with your own finance so basically on curve uh it's obviously a stablecoin exchange you weren't able to put in your own

pools or create your own pools right you had to go through the governance process and all that sort of stuff and it was kind of annoying but now you can create permissionless pools which is the same that you can do on like uni swap right where you can create a pair uh on uni swap and it's it's all dandy balance is the same thing sushi swap all that sort of stuff uh surprisingly this wasn't on curve yet right now it is so i think that's a big deal because there's a lot of different stable coins out there that people would love to experiment with and put them into pools right so you can imagine having like all these algorithmic stable coins in the same pool and can we make like a a meta algorithmic stable coin out of it or can we like get trading volume through there

can we can we do some some kind of stuff there right as i've said in one of my newsletters before i think those algorithmic stable coins aren't really stable coins they're like i guess you could call them i mean i'm not going to call them ponzi games but they are money games i like to use that term because it's more of a game to see kind of like um how much money you can make essentially uh so maybe you know that's something that gets spun up on these permissionless pools and kind of get some popularity there but there's a lot you can do here so really great to see that from curve and and yearn and also i did want to clarify that uh some people thought that uh curve um acquired yearn or something it was something weird going on on twitter that is not what happened this is just a

collaboration slash partnership uh definitely not an acquisition or anything like that so i just wanted to clear that up for anyone who saw that and andre from uh from yeon uh he put out an update yesterday of uh this website called ihedge.finance and what this is it's basically a view only dashboard of sushi swap single-sided and hedged in permanent loss positions so i mean i don't know if you you have been tracking this lately but andre is trying to solve or maybe has even solved in permanent loss so if you're a liquidity provider on you know uni swap sushi swap any of these amms you you do suffer from impermanent loss now andre and a few other people working on this have claimed to solve this

uh by using single-sided um liquidity positions and hedged in permanent loss positions so i guess this website just lets you view them if you're in one of these positions and see uh kind of like your your position your debt your profit your shortfall your balance all that good stuff uh so yeah that was a really cool site there but just in general i'm really curious to see kind of like if this actually works at scale right if that you can actually quote unquote solve in permanent loss and by solving permanent loss it's more like you know can you make it less painful i don't know if you can take away all of the impermanent loss um you know and permanent loss is really just another way of saying that you're taking on uh i guess like an opportunity cost where you believe that you by entering into a

liquidity provider position you're going to make more money than you would of just holding on to the token from fees you know and all that sort of stuff and you believe that the price is going to oscillate around a certain amount uh or a certain ratio depending on the pool that you're using so if there is a way to to to solve that and to basically make it so that you don't have to take on that risk or and and kind of like assume that you might outperform it or whatever i think that uh that's huge right it's a massive breakthrough but i don't know if it's uh if it's going to work at scale i haven't seen it at scale yet but i'm going to keep my eye on this and you know unisoft's been talking about this for a while as well the uni swap

team so maybe they've got something in store with unison v3 we'll have to wait and see for that but very exciting times in the amm space i think uh so tim bicker put out this twitter thread uh yesterday uh basically summarizing the ninth eip1559 implementers call so these happen every couple of weeks i think uh or maybe maybe not even every couple of weeks uh actually i think it is um but anyway they happen quite frequently um and uh they basically discuss all of the ip1559 implementation details uh so there's like a a kind of summary thread here that you can read through obviously i'm not going to read through it right now um but yeah i mean this is

can get quite technical um of course you can visit the the kind of github here and links to different things like that but if you want to read through it i'll link it in the in the youtube description there uh but yeah i mean it's funny because i i've said it and i'll say it again 1559 has never been in a in a better position than it is now we didn't have these implementers calls until a couple of i guess a few months ago at this point if this is the ninth one right and it happened every two weeks um it's like 18 weeks ago so like a few months ago um yeah before that we didn't have this we didn't have any structure around it we didn't have anyone leading it and now that we do all this stuff's happening and it's great i mean it's

absolutely amazing i can't i can't like i can't even express how great this is because this this to me is like when danny ryan joined on as the e2 coordinator you know the e3 effort was kind of like split there was multiple teams working on different things there was no kind of clear path i guess or clearly defined path of how to get to mainnet for a long time and then danny ryan jumped on board and kind of defined that path and we got to mainnet really quickly after that so i think the same is going to happen with one five five nine and as i've said i'm speculating that we could see it as early as july um but that's speculating pure speculation on my behalf do not take that and quote that as a as kind of gospel or anything like that but

definitely still i think it's still gonna happen this year for sure so yeah go read this thread if you want to get an update on what they discussed on the ninth implementers call so a tweet from loopering today saying that their zk roll up has now holds over 100 million dollars with the value uh there's 29 000 ethan there uh it moves swiftly gas gas freely unencumbered by l1 congestion yet completely securely and they go on to say this is a moment 3.5 years in the making for us we are so happy and grateful thank you tease ethereum l2 season i mean i i talk about loopering a lot on here and i don't even really hold any lrc tokens so it's not just me trying to show my bags or anything like that i just absolutely love that they're

leading the charge here on layer 2 in such a big way um they are the pioneers here 100 the pioneers here i mean you can see on the chart how quickly they've grown lately because they did a liquidity mining program right get the liquidity on there the high gas phase is obviously being kind to them because people are motivated to move across their exchange it just works so well and their interface is really great so they're getting a lot of this market share now and i'm really happy that they are because there have been a you know plugging away at this for for quite a while now loop ring's been around for ages since like 2017 i remember their ico or or their token sale i think at the time um so yeah uh great to see this i think you know

synthetic should be going live like today or tomorrow with their optimism soft main net launch so that's going to be another big thing that happens on layer 2 here but loopering is definitely ahead of the game right now and i hope to see them continue growing even as other players enter and you know that's just gonna the fact that other players are entering we're gonna have all this competition it's just gonna breed more of this innovation and more of this kind of like um growth in layer two and i i mean i fully expect to see many billions of dollars worth of liquidity in layer two within the next six months it won't even take us to the end of the year we're gonna see a ton of value in layer two and people are gonna be like how did i live without layer two basically you

know why was i using layer one for so long i mean as i mentioned just on yesterday's refuel i went on to lubricants exchange again and uh used their layer to exchange again and i was just like blown away by how quickly it work how quick it was and obviously i mean i don't understand how at least surface level of how zk roll-ups work and how they're secured by ethereum i felt very comfortable on that exchange and exchanging value on there wasn't it a huge amount right because a lot of this stuff's still early so i wasn't going to risk like a massive amount on there but even still i mean loot bring is really really dedicated to getting things right so and i've been incredibly impressed by their progress uh over over the last few months here so yeah kudos to them hope to see this

growth continue uh so i'm a bit of a meme here from cryptocat which i found quite funny uh he says quote okay ethereans since cecil xerox has committed to a btc level at btc development level of ct activity we need to pick up the slack all right just i wanna i wanna pause there and say that that's hilarious it's one of the best memes i've seen about me being off twitter i just i mean i absolutely love that so kudos to cryptocat there that was that was really funny made me laugh um but the point of the tweet is that over 2.5 million each is now staked in eth2 that's a massive amount of eight that's over 2.5 billion dollars worth of eighth securing eth2 obviously not securing much right now because it's just the

beacon chain right it's just securing itself i guess um but still a huge amount of eighth has flooded in uh over the past like i guess couple months right eighth two beacon chains only been live since december first it's been six weeks the deposit contract november first been 10 weeks uh so in 10 weeks we've managed to amass 2.5 million uh uh 2.5 million eighth in eth2 and this is going to keep growing there's staking services going live coinbase is going live with their exchange staking soon which i think is going to be quite a big deal uh lido is getting a lot of attention lately uh for their st which is their staked eth kind of token where you can stake each with them and then get this iou token that you can use to like yield farm on curve and things

like that so that's really really cool but yeah i mean i i don't expect this growth to stop i mean it's it's slower than it was for sure um and i think it's kind of peaked in in terms of how fast it's growing at least from individual contributors it might grow really fast one day because coinbase comes online and has like a millionaire they chuck in there or something like that that might happen and i actually expect that to happen but in terms of like the speed of individual contributors that's slowed down a bit i think at this point because you know there's only so many people who want to either trust a service to kind of stake for them and get like this kind of iou token or there's only so many people who would um basically lock up their eighth for an undefined period of time right

it's a stake and that's fine you know the early stakers are getting more rewards i think the rewards are still around maybe 12 or something a year on your eighth which is which is really great uh and you still get to obviously be a validator and and help the network out so yeah really great to see this and thanks crypto cap for tweeting this out because this is something i would have tweeted out if i could but you know i didn't but hopefully soon you know i've got so many tweet ideas in my head of things i've been wanting to say i'm probably gonna be quite annoying when i come back but i'll try not to uh but i mean as i've said every every kind of day um on the refuel i think that the memes are are amazing i actually really love it

it's quite heartening to see that you know my spirit still lives on on crypto twitter even though i'm off crypto twitter for now and you know i see a lot of people still saying that you know me retweeting things is cheating like i don't care you can say i'm cheating i can tell you right now that retweeting doesn't fill the void of not being able to tweet my own kind of ideas out there um but yeah anyway i digress there for now but really great to see this kind of uh this traction on eth2 here all right the last thing i wanted to quickly talk about was uh this kind of book from stateful work so for those who don't know statefulworks is writing a book about each two contributors and this is just their first

project they've got other projects in the mix here but basically this thread summarizes what they're doing and who they are why they're making this you know and it's going to be a physical book as well it's going to be kind of um i guess like the haiku book that i spoken about um just to kind of like put a spotlight on uh the eth2 contributors like you know all the people that made this thing a reality from the researchers to the developers to the community members to you know the designers or across the entire stack right basically um there's a lot of people that you would have never heard of before you've obviously heard of like the top people like i mean i say top people but you know the the core researchers like vitalik

danny ryan justin drake um there's a bunch of them right i'm not going to list every single one of them because i can't because i don't know every single one of them's name but there there's so many people working across you know the beacon chain phase one phase two roll-ups which fall into eth2 you know the merger incredibly important you know the eth1 devs also work on eth2 stuff sometimes as well so this book just aims to basically shine a spotlight on all of them which i think is actually really important uh something i'll definitely buy i'd love to read through that as i don't have full knowledge of the entire breadth of the eth2 development squad it has to be in like the hundreds of people at this stage maybe in terms of like contribute contributions from everything that touched eth2 is maybe in

the thousands it was it was such a big effort over so many years basically i guess you could say over six years worth of development and people coming in and out you know maybe someone just did something small once right or something that is small that that seemed small at the time but had a big impact on eth2 there's a few of those things that happened you know you can even consider like the auditors e3 contributors right because without them and without them auditing and formally verifying this sort of stuff it wouldn't be as secure as it is because the deposit contract obviously sending eth into a contract that essentially like burns the ether once it's sent there um you can only get it back on eth2 when the merger happens the deposit contract itself will not re

refund you you there's no kind of clawback there so you know making sure that that worked correctly and functioned correctly was critically important so i think the auditors definitely played and the formal verifiers played a big part there as well so yeah if you want to keep up to date with what is going on here definitely go follow the state full works twitter account i'll link this in the youtube description of course for all of you to go have a look uh look at it and check out what it's what it's all about all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for watching and listening if you haven't yet subscribe to the youtube channel give the video a thumbs up join the discord subscribe to the daily gray newsletter and i will see you all next week hopefully i'll be back to tweeting by then we'll see if eth can

muster up the energy to get to all-time high this weekend it keeps teasing us it's over 1200 we'll see how we go but yeah have a have a really great weekend everyone