The Daily Gwei Refuel #5 - Ethereum News & Updates - Coinbase ETH staking, YFI news, eth2 + more!

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where we recap the last 24 hours in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the first of december 2020. all right let's get into it everyone so price eighth's been doing some really fun stuff the last uh day or so we got back over 600 um we are looks like we are heading higher i mean i'm recording this before the e2 genesis so you know many people in the ecosystem are expecting a kind of like genesis pump or eth2 pump for example and we might see that right but it might just be a short-term thing i think the general uptrend is the general trend is still up of course i mean you know bitcoins basically at

all-time highs and you know there is some debate over what the all-time high actually is but generally it's accepted that it's 19 500 or above and and that's where bitcoin's sitting out right now as you can see here you know it went even higher than that overnight it went like you know over here i went to 19 840 on on bitfinex um you know that's almost 20k so we can we can pretty much say that btc is that all-time high which is providing some amazing tailwinds for eth as well of course so yeah we have eth2 we have the the bitcoin all-time high we have december which is generally a really great month for eighth performance wise so yeah that's why i said yesterday i think december is gonna be gonna be really fun

so yeah good to see ether bub 600 again nice to see you know bitcoin up here in the all-time high area um you know maybe we break through and then it comes back down to to kind of like test the lows test some some sort of support again uh but remains to be seen what happens there as for d5 i mean you can see the d5 pulse index here is is still trending up i think december is going to be a really great month for d5 tokens as well um you know they tend to follow kind of eth when it's bullish d5 is bullish as well which makes sense from i guess a market sentiment perspective and for those of you wondering if you're watching you can see these big you know kind of like dump in the chart here on the default pulse index and then like

it basically goes back up you know instantly this is actually not a bug or anything this is this is real price action here but what ended up happening was a whale decided to just market sell like millions of dollars with the d5 pulse index right which which tanked the price and the price went back up now the price of the d5 pulse index isn't actually set by the secondary markets it's set by the value of the d5 tokens uh in the d5 pulse index in in set protocol so you know we refer to that at set as net asset value so basically the value of all the real assets in the d5 pulse index and not the secondary markets and the reason why the secondary market's correct so fast is because when this happens it creates an

arbitrage opportunity between the you know the net asset value on on set where you can mint a new dpi or redeem existing dpi and the secondary markets where it's trading so that's why you see these kind of like random uh i guess it's not a pump and dump but these random like you know huge dump and then like a pump back up it's it's not you know real price action or anything like that it's just you know it's better to follow the net asset value than it is secondary markets but they both influence each other to an extent as well so yeah if you're curious about that that's why that's that's why that happens there so i think the biggest thing happening today other than you know the anticipation of the ev2 launch is this announcement from coinbase that

basically you know they announced that early next year they're going to be doing e3 staking and on top of that they're actually going to be issuing an iou token called eth2 uh for people that want to uh basically have instant access to liquidity so as as everyone knows you know if you're staking on your own you send ethan to the deposit contract and you know you stake on the beacon chain that eighth is locked for potentially one to two years uh until transfers are enabled on the beacon chain or until we have the merger between eth1 and eth2 now what coinbase is offering and what i expect every exchange to offer uh is you know a flavor of this iou this this kind of like derivative token that represents eth on the beacon chain

now there's a lot of discussion around this today on twitter and i do want to clarify something i think um you know a tweet here that i have summarizes at best where hasu kind of asks is like you know so does it follow that eth deposited on exchanges he's no longer eath but something else or why is self steak e is self staked eight considered eath but delegated eath is not eth um and this is around basically saying you know is the eth that coinbase is giving you the eth2 token is that like an iou or a derivative or actual eth and i argued that that it's an iou right it's a derivative product it is not the eth in the beacon chain it is a representation of that now due to this uh you know the the iu

that the exchange produces called eth2 token or whatever you know there could be one there's gonna be one on kraken they're gonna have their own one bitfenix gonna have their own one binance will have their own one every exchange will have their own flavor of this um but this is not eath right it is a derivative now the eighth of the custodian stakes on behalf of users is real eth but this belongs to the custodian right even though the users purchased this and it's kind of in their account and they have this iou the actual keys to this eth so when the merger happens or when transfers are enabled the only uh individual or comp i mean the only entity that can withdraw this real eat from the beacon chain would will be coinbase so you know and then i go on to say

stealth self-staked eath belongs to the individual since they have the keys so that's the key difference here right and i i mean i i don't understand why this is so hard for some people to to kind of like get their head around the iou tokens are nothing new right we saw this play out for for things like filecoin so filecoin had an iou take the token trading for a long time before the real one went live right before the network went live same with polkadot and even back as far as like the ico i i've seen that that hit btc actually had an iou on eth right before it traded so these are not real real eth this this should not be considered real it is an iou

slash derivative um and that's it right there's no there's no more arguments here like i i i think that that is as simple as it is and as it gets so yeah i just wanted to clarify that point for people who might have seen the discussions on twitter today um but back to coinbase here i think it's really positive to see this you know staking in eth2 right now as it is is is still very involved and very technical i i i'm not going to expect anyone that you know is new to crypto to get involved with this on their own they're going to do it through exchanges and you know i'm i'm fine with that i think that exchanges are just one party you know there's going to be staking service providers there's going to be individuals there's going to be funds there's going

to be all these different parties and i mean you know there's worries that it's going to centralize to exchanges and i actually don't think that's going to happen i i think that if the ethereum community is so big and so vast and so and so dynamic uh and differentiated from other communities that that centralization probably won't won't happen i mean there's still a risk and obviously people are going to be monitoring it but i'm i i think you know enabling this and letting more people get involved and have instant access to liquidity on their staked eve is important and it's inevitable there's you know there's nothing we can do here to check to change it we're not gonna we can't control these exchanges and said hey guys can you not do this um you know and even doing that would be disastrous right like no one

no one can say that and if anyone even attempted to you know the exchange is not gonna listen i mean i guess that proofs have to centralize the eighth ears as well uh but yeah some exciting news i think we're gonna see more exchanges uh come out with more news around this uh you know in the future and coinbase's one isn't actually going live till early next year so it's not live you know today it's not gonna be live with the beacon chain be live early next year for those of you interested in that but i do encourage you to check out the decentralized alternatives that will probably be live earlier than that like rocket pool uh for example is a very popular one i think there's maybe maybe one other that i can't remember but uh and even better i think you know staking

on your own if you have the 32 eth uh and and you're willing to lock it up for a for a period of time uh is is much better but you know if you don't have third to eighth and you're not willing to lock it up uh even if you do staking through an exchange and getting an iou token is the next best thing for you i think so yeah don't feel bad about taking on exchange or anything um you know that's just uh that's just the model that eth2 has to design around is is these exchange staking things and you know and not everyone's going to be able to stake on their own which is which is fine i think right really cool news out of chain link today as well so chain link has brought this proof of reserve product to d5 so basically what it is

it's been designed to ensure the end-to-end transparency of the d5 ecosystem uh with with the proof of reserve uh reference feeds that provide smart contracts with the data they need to calculate the true collateralization of any on-chain asset backed by off-chain reserves so i mean obviously everyone knows chain link um you know they're the oracle uh oracle network uh they provide feeds for a bunch of different things um and proof of reserve is actually something that nick carter uh nicot nicaragua's a bitcoin i has had kind of coined the term uh i think it was maybe a couple years ago at this point where he wanted exchanges to prove their bitcoin reserves right because you can do this on chain you can sign it as an exchange say okay

this is my address you know uh well this is the exchange address and and this is to prove that we have as many bitcoins uh you know you know um as we say we do oh this is the proof we're not doing fractional reserve kind of banking within our exchange and i think this is kind of what channeling wants to do with proof of reserve for assets like wrapped bitcoin that are kind of like you know centralized kind of custodians like bitcoin is is in bitco you have like true usd which is a stable coin obviously i think they've got like a tokenized gold here um and other kind of cross-chain assets as well so yeah really cool to see this at a train link oh you know it's a pretty detailed blog post here so if you want to learn more i'll leave a link to it in the show

notes and the youtube description so you can go check that one out all right uh so we've seen seeing a lot of these lately right uh these these why earn mergers partnerships acquisitions whatever i think i've spoken about it on every single daily way refill i've done so far and today is the biggest one yet so andre announced that wyon and sushi are teaming up now on the other daily we're refuels i said that i think these are more like partnerships than anything else and i still believe that this isn't merger or acquisition the sushi token still exists uh you know these these aren't going to be kind of like um absorbed into into wyoming but what i think is interesting and what i've kind of changed or kind of like i

guess honed in on how i think about these things is basically what wyoming is doing is it's building an ecosystem similar to what ethereum has done right so you can think of ethereum as like the nexus the center and then around it you have all these different kind of things right you have like d5 apps you have dows you have nfts you have gaming you have um you know all these other things like infrastructure all this stuff right where ethereum's at the center and these things are surrounding it why urn is at the center of their own ecosystem and then they have all these other things around them too so they have sushi cover cream they have uh there's probably other projects that i'm forgetting um and they're gonna basically work with those projects very closely and bring everything in-house to uh

iterate really really quickly and to build their own kind of like like d5 ecosystem within the wire under the wiring umbrella and what i think they're doing is they're basically uh i mean i wouldn't call these things distressed assets but what they're doing is they're going for the the underdogs here right so sushi is obviously the underdog to uni swap cover is the underdog to nexus mutual right cream underdog to rv compound right wyoming couldn't merge with these other bigger ones they just wouldn't do it right uh but the smaller ones yeah sure they can they can get them on board and i think what they're going to do is they're going to try and basically create a parallel ecosystem to to to one that basically includes you know maker compound are

there um synthetics you know the bigger players which i think is actually amazing for end users right the more competition the better but again not mergers not acquisitions partnerships the sushi one's actually quite detailed there's a lot of dot points here going through the synergies so you have basically the usual stuff sushi and wyon is gonna merge development resources tvl uh the keeper network that that uh andre launch is also gonna be playing a big part here um there's gonna be uh some sushi rewards paid out to to um you know pairs like keeper eath and things like that so there's a lot there's a lot of going on here right um and you know after seeing all of this i've i've also been asking the question to

some of my friends i'm like you know where does the value accrue here right you know does it accrue to the wi-fi token does it accrue to the individual tokens of all these projects uh you know if these projects are relying on wyoming to succeed then wh wouldn't thought wouldn't their tokens kind of like bleed out or or bleed into wi-fi basically and i don't actually know the answer here there are people on both sides there's people saying that all these other tokens are now worthless because they are just like uh they're nothing without wifi so wifey's gonna kind of like get all the value but then if we want to make a comparison here think about ethereum and eth right and think about the apps built on top the apps built on top accrue value for their own ecosystems

so for example ave has a the arbor token has accrued all the value of the other ecosystem and it's hard to argue if ether has accrued that or not now 80 is much bigger than rv in market cap right so it's a lot harder to move i think 8 is like 50 or 60 times bigger in market cap than rp right 70 60 billion 70 billion compared to one billion so taking that into account as well right it's it's hard to say that eth hasn't been a beneficiary of all this usage uh you know not directly but just from a kind of like investor perspective being like okay you know if all these apps are like generating all this this activity on ethereum i'm going to buy eth because i want exposure to that even though you actually don't get fundamental exposure right now because

if you did you'd basically have eip1559 in where every time an app you know makes a transaction every time there's a transaction some eth gets burnt and then fundamental value actually flows to eve but in saying that you know you have eth being used as collateral in these apps so as these apps grow and offer more products to people people put their etherium people using eth more there's higher demand for eighth that plays a part uh but bringing it back you know is wifi gonna play the same part you know are each of these protocols gonna have to pay a fee to to the to the yearn do i own treasury which goes and like buys wifey or whatever or what if he has a claim on those assets in the treasury i think that we might actually see that uh and then why okay and then if that's

the case why do the individual tokens accrue value from that point so that would accrue value from their own ecosystems just like uh you know all these other protocols on either crew value for their own ecosystems so yeah it remains to be seen i'm not as bearish as some other people are i actually think and this obviously is an investment advice i actually think a lot of these tokens um will go up in price simply because they are now under the wire and umbrella right so they have the the wyoming power you know that's actually a big thing it might sound like a joke but mean power is a big thing when when you're investing in these assets especially the smaller cap ones that are easier to move uh their tbr is going to increase because they're under the umbrella they have direct kind of like

interactions with all the other protocols surrounding it there's like a bunch of other stuff that's going on here that is going to increase those those prices so yeah let's let's see how this goes uh you know wifey's actually if we look at the chart here right uh the mergers went through i guess like over the last week so if you look here it life has just been ranging right i mean it went up to like 27k came back down to like 17k uh and then you know it's marched back up and it's about basically where it was when these mergers started happening i think so it's hard to say if this is just normal recovery with the rest of the market since the rest of the market is pretty bullish right now or if wife is actually getting bought by people who think that it's going to

accrue value because of these merge not mergers these partnerships so it's it's difficult to say though i do think that wife is gonna go up regardless um uh regardless of their of i guess like the the partnerships because they have their own ecosystem as well right they have the the volts and and the v2 volts coming and a bunch of other things that they're building around this so yeah it's going to be interesting to see how the wi-fi ecosystem or the wiring ecosystem continues to play out i think andre and the team are pretty ruthless they really want to win which is is really great um you know full disclaimer i own i own wifey uh i think it's pretty obvious from my from my tweets about it over the last

few months but uh really bullish on the project in general i really think it's it's great but as i said not investment advice or anything like that just me speculating on where i think these things can go uh you know and it's a bull market right we won't know the fundamental value maybe until the market comes down a bit maybe everything just grows up with bitcoin which seems to be the case in in bull markets as well so going to keep an eye on that for sure all right so ryan watkins from massari put out this great eth2 thread where he basically says you know eth2 is finally here it's going to transform ethereum as we know it and he goes through a few other things here uh we've got to do with ethereum and e2 in general so he has a really great description of

ethereum like a one-liner here where he says ethereum is a global public good that is open borderless neutral transparent and censorship resistant uh ethereum provides a system of property rights rules and economic opportunity for anyone in the world with an internet connection i think i think those two sentences basically sum up what ethereum is and why it's so exciting uh and then he's got like a funny little picture here um of this i guess like this this this kind of i don't know what it is it's it's it's fun it's like a photoshop with eth on ether on its face um uh ruling over this kind of town here but yeah um anyway as we scroll down here we can we can see you know he's got his thread basically i won't go into the detail about the thread here but then he links

to this the road to eth2 uh kind of masari research report done with bison trails it's quite dense i think uh i actually think it's um i don't know if it's free or if it's paid i think it might be paid but you can like start a trial here and get it for free but basically you know he's got the got the kind of like breakdown here so they go through the philosophy of eth2 the history uh and then goes through like each of the phases and how they're going to work and then the conclusion so it's a 68 page report i haven't read it yet but bisari is their research arm is amazing i i read a lot of their stuff so i can only assume that this report is going to be great and like you know as i said it was co-authored by bison trails which is

a kind of like staking company and they're amazing as well uh victor buenan from there writes some really great these two posts and he really understands what's going on in the ecosystem so definitely i'm going to check this one out and i i suggest you do as well link will be in the show notes uh and the youtube description of course so definitely go check that one out so uh real vision so for those who don't know real vision is this kind of uh education platform for not just not crypto it it does all of finance business and like the economy in general but they've got a crypto arm as well so they started with bitcoin of course educating people about bitcoin and things like that but now they're moving into other kind of chains and specifically ethereum

and recently they released a 95-minute documentary on ethereum uh and this was basically you know with vitalik they had joseph lubin on board kane from synthetics hudson jameson from the ethereum foundation alex saunders from nuggets news uh paul brody those of you might know him from uh ey they did a bunch of privacy work uh as well uh ash bennington uh from he heads up real vision crypto and raul who is the founder ceo of real vision basically so yeah i i haven't watched this yet i'm going to i think it's free i'm pretty yeah i'm pretty sure it's free um and basically what this does is it tries to break down ethereum e2 eth all this sort of stuff

for the newbie investor or newbie kind of like person who's interested in this because that's what real vision is all about i mean i heard role in a podcast say it's about democratizing access to this kind of knowledge and information around finance because so much of it is actually you know usually like behind pay walls or you know you have to dig through a lot of different complex things to find the information and it's hard so that what they're trying to do is kind of democratize the access here um i've heard this is is for people that have watched this documentary that's actually really great it's a really great intro for new people to ethereum as well it it it gives a bunch of different perspectives so definitely go check that out i mean i'm going to check it out regardless like obviously i'm not new to ethereum but

i think that it's always good to watch these things to hone in on your own knowledge and you know there's probably things in there that you've missed or haven't thought about um you know and the people that they have on board in this interview are great right like not just vitalik obviously but joseph lubin has a lot of context he can give from the consensus side of things kane from synthetics and d5 in general hudson a lot of you know hudson does a lot of core developer stuff theorem foundation stuff and things like that um and alex saunders obviously from nuggets news uh he's really great in the ecosystem as well he does a lot of education there too so definitely go check out this documentary as i said it's free will be linked in the show notes uh finally little tweet from from banteg

or bantaji i don't know how to say his name exactly basically he's a core dev uh he or she i don't actually know if their identity is known so it could be a she but basically they record dev at wyon and they put out this funny tweet today uh basically it reads i've probably used bitcoin twice since the last all-time high wants to buy a ledger and another time to wrap it on ethereum like to bring it to ethereum which i thought was quite funny because really i mean what else are you gonna do right like if i had if i held bitcoin then i i would literally put it on ethereum to earn yield on it uh in d5 i wouldn't put it on like block fire one of these other centralized lenders because i don't trust them frankly

um and you know why would i do that when i can do it on ethereum uh you know in saying that you know when you bring btc over to to ethereum most of the solutions are centralized like route to bitcoin and things like that and the quote-unquote decentralized ones still have i guess you can call them admin keys or central points of failure but uh yeah i thought the tweet was funny because it just shows that ethereum is this i've written about this before but ethereum is this economic nexus of of value basically so all these assets are just flying through ethereum you know they come to ethereum and then they basically stay there and do all different things you know on decentralized exchanges in lending apps earning yield all these things and a fun fact about btc on ethereum i haven't actually seen

the the chart go the other way so the chart that i look at is actually at btc on ethereum.com maybe i can bring it up here for you guys sometimes it takes a little a little bit to load here but but basically while that's loading so i i monitor this you know i watch this the bitcoin doesn't seem to be going back to bitcoin it stays on ethereum once it's on ethereum uh here we go you can see the chart here so it's just straight up right there's there's it hasn't gone down at all it's gone straight up and uh you know it's flattened out a bit here i think uh because obviously you know as you if we had such a meteoric rise i mean for those that aren't watching and just listening here it was a thousand btc on ethereum in uh basically at the

start of this year it is now 148 000 btc on ethereum that's almost three billion dollars and as i said none's gone back right it's all i mean some would have gone back but like a very small percentage has gone back you can see on the you can barely see it on the chart um and most of it stays on ethereum again ethereum being an economic nexus having this massive gravity pull on other assets outside of it we see more assets coming to ethereum now that's going to be wrapped file coin i think wrapped dot wrapped everything right just bring it all on ethereum because most people don't want to even speculate on these things if they're not on decentralized exchanges um you know and people want to use these assets to generate yield like i don't want to hold an asset that

i can't actually use as collateral or generate yield on because it's just a dead asset right like why am i holding this to get price exposure yeah sure but you know um it's it's it's it's better off me holding like getting price exposure to that and using it as collateral to to do even more things like yield farm with stable coins or some people use it for leverage to to to leverage bet on things so yeah definitely really cool to see that playing out but speaks to bantag's tweet here about there's really nothing to do with your bitcoin on bitcoin just bring it to ethereum and you've got a whole world of options there all right last thing that i don't see basically anyone in the ethereum community community talking about which and it's quite funny that this has happened

basically as we're about to launch proof of stake so ethereum's mining difficulty and hash rate are at new all-time highs which is quite insane because you can see on the chart here that ethereum's hash rate actually was was flat for for you know uh flat or like a little bit positive for for basically 2019 and half of 2020 and only recently has it shot up so it went from basically in in july it went from 177 terra hashes to 265 terra hashes which is an all-time high the last all-time high was 242 terra hashes in july of 2018. so it's been quite a while uh since we've seen these this hash rate go up and this is obviously because the price has risen

and also the fees have risen so miners are actually earning a lot more from fees now than they once were so there's been like a renaissance in ethereum mining which is funny because we're we're on track to kill ethereum mining right to kill ethereum proof of work so i'm wondering what's going to happen to all these miners once once that happens right we're going to do that in in the merger which could happen in a year year and a half maybe so what happens to all these miners they could move to another chain but there really isn't that many other chains that actually share the same kind of mining algorithm as ethereum i think maybe maybe zcash does from memory ethereum classic things like that but they're you know they're nowhere near as lucrative because their prices of those assets are much

much lower so you know i guess we'll see where this hash rate ends up after after the merger you know maybe we have like a minor fork where the mine is like we're just gonna fork eth1 and continue it on as like you know eth1 classic or something just so we can milk some money out of it which i fully expect to happen by the way um i i fully expect miners to do this and it's not you know that's not gonna be the real kind of eth1 chain or anything like that the real eth one will be merging to e2 but there's always opportunists whenever you have something like this we saw this play with all the other forks as well like monero had a bunch of forks as well when monero broke the assets on the network they had like other forks that spawned off of it and

they accrued some tiny amount of value so this isn't new right um so yeah but just something i wanted to point out for people that may or not have been paying attention to this that the hash rates at all time high on the day that we're launching proof of stake which is obviously the aim to get rid of rid of this so just a funny observation there all right that's it for today everyone i've recorded this about two hours before e2 has gone live so you will either be watching this just before a2 has gone live or after it i'm going to focus most of tomorrow's episode on eth2 of course uh i wanted to get this out before then because i thought there was a lot of other interesting things to talk about today rather than eth2 so definitely subscribe to the youtube channel if you haven't to

catch to catch tomorrow's episode i i you know i assume it's going to be a really fun one um and definitely go subscribe to the newsletter uh the delegate newsletter and check out our discord channel uh so yeah thanks everyone and see you tomorrow