ETH ETFs are coming, EthPillar overview and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #794 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the daway refuel where up latest news in eum EOS system I'm your host the 15th of July 2024 right everyone let's get into it so I have a bullish rant lined up for you guys today but before I get into that I did want to make a little bit of an announcement here that on August 10th or from August 10th for around 2 and a half months I'm going to be traveling around Europe now that means that your regular Cadence of refuels is going to be greatly interrupted I'm not going to take the entire two and a half months off of the refuel but I feel like I'm probably only going to be able to do like one episode a week uh you know it's going to be hard to schedule to do an episode when I'm traveling uh and when I'm you know doing

a lot of different things while I'm in Europe and also the time zone is going to be different to the normal times that I record the refuel ad and the normal times that I put the refuel live so there's going to be a bit of I guess disruption there in terms of when you're usually used to watching and listening to the refuel but I don't plan as I said to take off the whole two and a half months there it'll probably be about once a week uh and it may be might be more frequent than that just depending on if there's big news or not like if there's something major that happens I'll probably make some time or try to make some time to do an episode on that day but we're going to be uh basically moving a lot so I'm going with my fiance

of course just just the two of us for two and a half months we're going to be uh moving around uh through mostly Western Europe we're not going to any of the uh any to the countries like the the noric countries like Norway and and Sweden or anything like that we're not going towards Eastern Europe we're mainly staying in Western Europe but we are basically traveling starting in London and going around in a circle and basically spending most of the time in Italy we're both of Italian Heritage we've never been to Italy so we're very much looking forward to that but it basically means that it's going to be very very hard for me to record any refills but I will try to do one at least once a week of course from now until August 10th I will definitely try to uh stick to the regular Cadence of

Monday Wednesday Friday episodes uh until then just you I'm try not to do rug fuels but they happen of course and I think August 10th is actually a Saturday so it'll be from like August 9th which is the Friday and then from there as I said I'll try to do an episode once a week I I'm not going to leave you guys hanging for two and a half months but there is going to be that there I mean we we both uh have been wanting to do this trip for quite a while now various things happen over the years that prevent this especially Co right that was the big one that prevent trips like this from happening but we're finally uh ready to to to to basically do it and and we're very much looking forward to it very excited for it but thought I'd give you guys the heads up

about a month out in advance there now moving on from that onto the bullish rant that I was going to go on about so I have two tweets that I put out today that are related to this bullish rant the first one is that it is probably the week that the eth ETFs are going to go live for trading this week I know that some people think it's going to happen next week but this week seems obvious considering the fact that there is no reason for them not to launch this week there are no more amendments to do on the S1 forms really all it's up to at this point time is the SEC to basically put the stamp of approval on it and that's it they're live they're ready to go for trading all the issues are ready everything's ready the Market's ready for these things to start trading there

shouldn't be any more delays here now of course we know the SEC is no friend of crypto so they could just delay it for whatever reason but I don't know maybe I feel like that at at that point it's just being like extremely Petty and I feel like the issuers would get very annoyed by this and would basically back channel to try and get these things approved but I I don't know unless they want to be really the they being the SEC these things should start trading this week I don't know if it's going to happen today it hasn't happened yet today being Monday could happen tomorrow could happen towards the end of the week I'm thinking it's going to happen this week uh pretty much everyone who's in the know with these things with atfs generally think it's going to happen this week but if it doesn't maybe next

week who cares any day now basically but I'm making the prediction uh it's not really like a prediction it's more of just I'm making the the bet that they're kind of they're going to launch this week so I'm super excited to see them go live because as I've said before there is the two main questions around the eth ETFs at this point in time how much inflows are we going to see and how much outflows are we going to see from grayscale's eth E product and as I've said before as well I feel like there's going to be more inflows than people expect into eth as a especially as a percentage of BTC and there's going to be less outflows from eth because eth has been trading at such a steep discount uh sorry not not a steep discount has been trading basically at fair value for almost two months

basically and and the thing is is that if you're d trying to get out of e and you want to sell into cash you have had ample opportunity to do so without having to eat much of a discount I think the discounts at like .5% now and it's been kind of oscillating between that and and basically nothing so yeah I'm just not expecting to see see much outflows there and I also think the timing of these ETFs going live is pretty good I think we had over the last couple of weeks a pretty big capitulation event within crypto where essentially people sold off all all assets I mean BTC and E obviously sold off but the rest of the assets out there the altcoins they got absolutely hammered a lot of them set new lows um a lot of them went back to basically their

lows from from the bare market so essentially the market did a full reset there and people capitulated and you saw that with the price action that happened eth hit 2,800 I believe twice and he's now trading at over 3,300 no reason we can't go back there of course in the short term because uh I guess like volatility will happen but at the same time it just feels like we're entering the next phase or the next leg up of this bull market which is super exciting and as I said perfect environment for the E ETFs to launch into so I will keep you guys updated on that of course uh and you'll see this before I even talk about it because the next refie will be on Wednesday so if it gets approved either today or tomorrow you guys will see this but I'm just very very excited

to see what the first month of flows looks like that's my main kind of question right now as a percentage of BTC but also just as a dollar amount like if there's billions of dollars flooding into eth into the eth atfs over the next month I don't give a what percentage of BTC that is that's ton of money that's a lot of new money going into eth and I'm I'm going to love that regardless of what percentage of of um the BTC inflows it is I think that new money you know fresh money new blood coming into crypto is always a good thing now the other tweet that I put out in relation to this was just basically three main points around ethereum and why it's really impossible to be bearish right now the first point is ethereum is scaling like we all know this ethereum

is scaling more than it ever has before the layer tws are on fire you can use any of the l2s today and pay very very cheap fees fast have fast transactions have ample liquidity on a number of these things even the smaller l2s have enough liquidity for people who are fee sensitive if you're not fee sensitive you're going to be on L1 and the L1 fees aren't even that high either as well I mean they're three gay right now yes that's probably like a dollar or $2 or whatever it is to trade on L1 but if you're that fee sensitive you're going to be on L2 and like your size isn't going to be size like you're not going to be slinging millions of dollars of trades right because if you're doing that you don't care that you're paying $2 for a trade right so there is a a

size element here on that front on the liquidity front but regardless of any of that ethereum is is scaling and as I've mentioned plenty of times on the refuel scaling is in the best place it has ever been contrary to stupid crypto Twitter narratives that like to go on about how ethereum has failed or ethereum is not scaling or l2s aren't really ethereum scaling ignore all that that's all noise ethereum is scaling it's executing on its road map and it is in the best place it's been in quite a while the second main theme that is uh very bullish for ethereum at the moment is that the tokenization of everything is coming as you guys know Larry Fink black Rock's CEO is very bullish on tokenization it's basically become one of the main things he talks about now when he's talking to mainstream Finance Publications and then

also we saw last week that even though it's on a private blockchain Goldman Sachs is also getting involved with tokenization now and as I mentioned last week I don't think the private blockchain thing is going to last I do think a lot of these corporations or a lot of these companies a lot of these institutions will end up on public chains at some point down the line it is going to be a slower mover than we would like and that we are used to within crypto but it is happening the tokenization of everything is coming and it's happening in a really big way and it's funny because this has been something that I think has been coming for quite a while but as I said trafi you know the traditional world moves quite slowly compared to crypto so it may seem like it's been talked about

since forever but it's really in the last couple of years that people have been talking about this in Earnest and especially when it comes to things like real world assets like for example stable coins are being the biggest real world assets as they exist today on chain but there's more and more online and it's growing you know steady slow and steady but it is growing it's not going to be like what we see in crypto where there's a billion dollars deposited into a new protocol because they're farming some Ponzi token right it's not going to be like that these are serious institutions with serious money that are looking for long-term uh Capital preservation capital appreciation long-term oriented products not short-term things where they're farming some token that's going to go to zero because everyone's just going to dump it after the airdrop like they're not doing that they're it's a different

class of investor a different class of money right but but regardless of that the tokenization of everything is coming and it is it is coming in a really big way especially over the next few years and then as I mentioned before the eth ETF launch is imminent right now so it really is impossible to be bearish and I posed this question in the daily way Discord Channel today and I pose it to you guys out there as well please come up with just one I'm only asking for one I'm not asking for five or 10 I'm asking for one fundamentally bearish thesis on crypto generally but on E specifically just give me one reason to be bearish over the next 6 to9 months and it can't just be oh you know we might have a recession like I don't want that that kind of reasoning I want a detailed

analysis of a bare case for the next 6 to n months um for eth and for crypto generally please I I can't see any right now and I don't like that I can't see any because I usually think that there should be at least some some reason to be bearish in in you know in the midst of all the bullishness but right now there are a million different reasons to be bullish from everything that I just mentioned to uh regulatory Tale wins for crypto not just with a possible change in admin you know you I don't like to get into the politics too much but hey as I've said before you know crypto uh the Democrats have been so hostile towards crypto for the last whatever it is 18 months or you know whatever it is that if the admin changes if uh the Republicans win and and the admin

changes immediately or almost immediately the SEC is going to be completely different right Gary G's gone he's going to be replaced with someone else uh the general makeup of the SEC is going to be shaken up the regulations around crypto or any kind of I guess anti- crypto armor or any kind of attacks against crypto are going to be completely gone if and this is obviously um uh I guess like a uh Reliance upon Trump and the Republicans sticking to what they're saying I was actually going into a little bit of a hied debate in the daily disco channel the other day where I said that I don't like believing outright what people say especially not when it comes to politicians doesn't matter what side of the aisle that you're on doesn't matter what your politics are politicians are generally pretty good at either bending the truth

or lying or spewing just to get elected and then when they get elected they tend to go back on a lot of what they say so I'm giving the good reality or the good scenario that let's just say Republicans win and then uh they stick to exactly what they said they were going to do with regards to crypto that would be stupidly bullish for crypto honestly because it basically means that we have at least four years of crypto being left alone from the government or mostly left alone there will still be things here and there obviously uh you know the uh the president doesn't have complete control over everything but it will be a lot less hostile like probably 90 plus% less hostile than what it is today uh with the Democrats currently in power as we know they're very anti- crypto especially the SEC especially

high ranking politicians uh Democrat Democratic politicians and Senators like Elizabeth Warren uh like um Maxim Waters like Brad Sherman you know the names that we see all the time so you that's what I'm talking about when it comes to I guess like regulatory Tailwinds the fact that we're winning in the courts against the SEC and against other Reg at bodies but also that uh if the Republicans do end up winning which I don't know what the odds are of this happening I mean I'm an Australian I'm an Australian citizen I don't uh really have any insight into the US elections but hey the the prediction markets are saying that they think Trump's going to win so if he wins good for crypto uh if he sticks to what he said if he doesn't stick to what he says then who knows but honestly the Democrats have been so

anti- crypto and so hostile towards crypto that even if they don't the Republicans don't stick to what they said with regards to crypto it would probably still be better than what we currently have who knows how it's going to shake out as I said this isn't about politics to me this isn't about where you rely on things it's more about the fact that we know what crypto is how or how crypto is going to be traded under a democrat's um I guess presidency uh we don't know what it's necessarily going to look like under Republican one because the last time the Republicans were in power uh was from 2016 to 2020 right and that was a very I guess like different time for crypto crypto was much smaller back then it wasn't in the mainstream Consciousness we didn't have big institutions like Black Rock involved I think for the next 10 years

at least that's the mainstream Arc of crypto that really is the mainstream Mark of crypto and I think that we can't afford to have a hostile uh government because it's just going to end end up in Road Blocks everywhere and it's just going to be really shitty there's going to be so much money wasted so yeah that's a huge Tailwind guys like honestly it is really really bullish if that was to happen if they win and they stick to what they say really really bullish for crypto so anyway as I said can you if anyone out there can please find me just one reason to be bearish on crypto over the next 6 to9 months and I don't think a reason to be bearish is that the Democrats win again and they continue their anti- crypto hostilities I don't think that's a reason to be

bearish either because during the entire period that they've been hostile towards crypto it's been up only after like after obviously it bottomed um obviously uh for the year 2021 we had the bull market Democrats were in power we had the bare Market in 2022 and then it's just been for the most part up only so I don't think they've had much effect on the prices so I wouldn't even consider that to be a bare case there but as I said if you do have one for me please let me know on in the YouTube comments or in the daily grade Discord Channel I would love one a bease on eth and crypto generally because I'm just not seeing one right now all right moving on so Justin Drake has tweeted out that their based pre-confirmation are now live on the testet Helder and there has been a

lot of people and companies and entities within the ethereum ecosystem working on and I think that he has tagged all of them in this tweet which I'll link in the YouTube description below but you can see uh I mean there's a lot of teams here and there's also he's also grouped them into what they're responsible for so you can see here that the execution pre comps on Bas rups were being done by puffer and Tao then you can go down and see um the the registration contracts were done by spy Labs I'm just picking out random names here the relays and gateways were done by Titan Builder and ultrasound money so on and so forth so many teams and people working together to make based pre-confirmation a reality on test net here which is really great to see now I know there's been a lot of

discussion around uh based rollups and pre- confirmations recently there are a lot of concerns around pre-c confirmations and around how they can potentially um centralize things around uh possible me I guess negative me externalities but generally I think that based rollups are a really really Sound Idea sound primitive where essentially you're using the L1 validator set to process transactions so you can have essentially the the same security and decentralization guarantees as L1 has and sensorship resistant guarantees but the drawback to that as I've explained before is that because L1 slot times are 12 seconds you could be waiting up to 12 seconds for your transaction uh to process so the ux goes down a lot compared to the existing l2s which have

a sequencer that will process your transactions within 1 second or less essentially that's where pre- confirmations comes in where essentially pre-confirmation is this cryptoeconomic primitive that essentially tells you okay well I'm going to pre-confirmation in less than a second and then I'll promise you with some economic promise that this will go Li this will be put into a block on ethereum L1 uh within a timely manner usually within like that 12 second slot window there so essentially the end user gets good ux of of their confirmation sorry of their transaction confirming within 1 second or less but it's still not you know confirmed on chain for those 12 seconds or up to 12 seconds of those slots there but as I said with pre confirmations

even though they're a very cool primitive they're still relying on relying on cryptoeconomic guarantees not cryptographic guarantees and also it can be centralizing because there are different entities such as uh the relays or in the gateways that can be uh that can be very centralized like what we have with um the relays with M boost today and the builders within M boost today so there's a lot of work still on to on figuring out how we could potentially decentralize that obviously as I mentioned last week there's a lot of talk right now as well about lowering ethereum slot time to 2 seconds this would basically fix this issue completely because it would essentially mean that you would only have to wait a maximum of 2 seconds provided you paid the right fee to get your transaction included but it as I mentioned last week

it presents with a lot of different issues as well because of the fact that bringing the slot times down slot times down to 2 seconds breaks a lot of things on ethereum today because ethereum today exists with the assumption that slot times are 12 seconds and not 2 seconds so it would obviously have to be done in a gradual rle maybe weow them to 10 seconds then 8 seconds and then you know keep lowering them I don't know if you even know if that would be possible to do or how hard that would be to do but maybe that's something that ends up being done in a couple years time because yeah that that basically alleviates all the centralization concerns because then you don't need pre-c comps essentially you only like based rollups are able to get their transactions included with the right fee paid within those 2 second slot time so

there's no there's not I mean you could have pre- confirmations if you want even faster uh confirmations there but at the same time the problem with that becomes that uh now the pre- confirmations are competing with just normal L1 confirmation times and it becomes a game of can these pre-confirmation offer such a better ux to give up the you know the guarantees of having your transaction included just normally on L1 remains to be seen But regardless a lot of work on this a lot of work across this entire stack from a lot of different teams a lot of different um entities a lot of different people here and you can go check all of them out for yourself if you would like uh Justin Drake has linked them all in his tweet which I'll show for you which I'll share for you guys in the YouTube description below

for you to check out all right so this is one for the solo stakers out there or the aspiring solo stakers now a lot of you may know about Queen cashew uh they do guides for various different things within the ecosystem they have a really really good ethereum solo staking guide now this is the one that I have followed to set up my Solo stakers in the past uh and it served me quite well it is very straightforward they explained a lot of different things it's basically copy pasting commands into uh the the terminal and Away you go I mean I've not really had any issues with these guides before but what I realized or what I discovered that they had released recently was an even easier way to get started with um you know they say here node management or solo staking on

ethereum they've got a new piece of software called eth pillar now this is a nice little graphical user interface uh that allows you to essentially set up all of the necessary infrastructure that you need to become a solo Staker on the network now you can see from these screenshots what this looks like essentially you you boot this up it's it's a nice little interface yeah it's not like a full graphical user interface that you're used to within something like Windows or Mac OS or Ubuntu for example but it gives you a nice little interface within the um the command line itself now you can run this on Mac and Linux I believe Linux I believe but you can see here what this looks like so essentially you just run through the steps you get your execution client set up you get your uh consensus uh client

set up you get all your validator set up you set up all the necessary stuff like getting your validated Keys done depositing the relevant eth getting your um JWT store done making sure that you're securing the Box correctly with the firewall with and making sure your your time's in sync with crony all that sorts of stuff that you would normally do just manually you can now do mostly automatically even setting up things like me boost using this eth Piller software so if you are someone that hasn't spun up a a solo uh solo staking setup yet or maybe you just want to run a full node I do recommend checking out this piece of software you can download it I'll link it in the YouTube description below a direct link to it uh because you'll be able to essentially just get started very very easily and as

I've said before you can run a full ethereum node on very low powered Hardware if you have a Raspberry Pi lying around and you have enough storage space I think you would want to have at least 2 terabytes uh of storage space connected to that Raspberry Pi or a rock 5B or even an old laptop or something like that right as long as it can be online 24/7 and ideally connect it to an ethernet port rather than Wi-Fi because it's more reliable then you should be able to run a full node just fine and as I've said before it doesn't require e to run a full node it's completely free to run a full node at least the software obviously you have to buy the hardware and pay for um the internet electricity and all that but it it it doesn't cost any eth and of course if you want if

you've been thinking about um spinning up a solo staking setup well honestly I would highly recommend this this is probably going to be one of the easiest way to do it if you want to do it on on your own Hardware on your own there are obviously other easier ways to do it such as dap node which also provides a graphical user interface that is probably simp it is simpler than what this is but you buy the that you know you obviously buy the hardware and then you install dap node on it and it's a different piece of software so that's probably the easiest way to do it right now but if you didn't want to do that and you wanted something that was a bit easier than the command line but but not like you know super Noob friendly and you still wanted uh to have that full

control over things and you still wanted to learn how it all works all the ins and outs of it then I highly recommend going and checking out eth pillar um I've was uh checked out the screenshots readed through the docs I haven't set this up myself yet because I've already got all of my nodes set up but I do plan on playing around with this on one of my spare raspberry pies that I've got lying around I got like 10 of these things I I bought a lot of them because I I found some sale once that were clearing them I think it was the old one um and then they've just been lying around and I I normally I get them out and just test different things on them I basically I was playing around with um I believe it was py hole which was essentially uh

what was it I'm forgetting what it was now but I believe it was a way to essentially uh configure your DNS at the the router level using using py hole or essentially no it was an ad block thing so essentially what it would do is it could have an ad blocker uh between your uh uh Network and all the devices connected to it so instead of an ad blocker on a device by device basis you would have an ad blocker uh basically at the Ingress Point um of of the network so essentially the network feeds into the pie hole or your your internet feeds into the pie hole whatever website you want to view on it and then it just add blocks it at that at that level there at the network level which is which is really cool I mean it worked for a while

then it stopped working and for some reason I never went back to it and it does tend to break things if your Network's rather convoluted and you've done a bunch of different custom stuff to your network but I'm getting off topic here I I just have a lot of them lying around I like to do things on them so I'll probably check this out at some point soon but you guys should do that as well I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to go check out all right so as you guys know ethcc took place recently in Brussels uh and of course there was an eth Global conference right after it or E Global hackathon right after it and as of July 15 y as of today basically the finalists uh were announced so you can see here list of projects uh there is no winner

of eth global events they always have 10 finalists so you can go check this out um I'll link this in in the YouTube description below uh but essentially there are a lot of interesting projects here I think that there's no real kind of main theme to the projects there different things doing kind of different things so essentially there's one playing around with Unis swap V4 hooks there's one doing AI stuff there's one doing stuff with NFC there doesn't really seem to be any main theme here which is really awesome to see because usually at these hackathons you'll have someone building or you have you have the finalist like most of them building something in defi or most of them building something on on layer 2 or most of them doing something with ZK whereas uh this one seems to be Vari I don't know if that was done on purpose

or if that's just what people wanted to build over over the the hackathon here but you should definitely go check out all of these for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below you can go to each of these Pages they're actually really good Pages because they show you everything they give you a link to a live demo and the source code so you can check out all of this for yourself and judge for yourself which project that you like the best which one you find the most valuable because sometimes uh these projects go on to become real actual live you know funded projects that you can use on on Main net here um but a lot of the times obviously they're just done for the hackathon but still it's it's really cool to see what the next generation of ethereum Builders are thinking about and what people are

building here because there is obviously this perverse narrative for some reason within crypto that we don't have any apps that people use and then I kind of look at all the growth that's happening on you know across the whole ecosystem really and I'm like but people are using them and then people will say Well they're only using them because they're air drop farming or they're farming something here farming something there and I'm like yeah okay so like is that not usage like I is this not what we're building here permissionless systems for people to use however they want like no one says that someone is only depositing money into a bank account that's offering a teaser rate or you know no one tells says that they just farming the teaser rate right that's just an incentive that people are are giving to you for depositing or that the bank's

giving to you for depositing money in there now whether you stay or not is up to you and up to really the bank to entice you to stay but no one calls it farming the Y no one calls it just going there to get the um I know saying oh it's not usage or you're not using that bank because you're just uh you're just farming that bank or whatever it is it's such a weird thing within crypto they people just come up with these convoluted narratives for some reason and it just astounds me especially because like if you're Ling into crypto every day if you're checking crypto every day you're on crypto Twitter you're checking the prices and then you're just bearish on this whole industry and you say that we've got no users you know the prices suck everything sucks whatever like why are

you even here like it just why would you waste so much time like it's just stupid like go somewhere else and do something more productive than just being here every day being bearish like I don't know it's just something that I've noticed especially over the last six months just just this cohort of people that it's it's some kind of mental illness that they that they do this I don't I don't understand it really um but I know that doesn't apply to you guys because you guys wouldn't be watching the refill if you were just Perma bearish on this industry but yeah just something that I've I've noticed and it it's just very weird there but anyway enough ranting about that I think that's going to be it for today's episode uh but yeah I think I'll be back on Wednesday so Wednesday so thank everyone for listening and watching be

sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Wednesday thanks everyone