ETH spot ETF hype, Farcaster going permissionless - The Daily Gwei Refuel #670 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the Del refuel where cup the latest news in eum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony s and today's 11th of October 2023 right everyone let's get into it so starting off today's episode we have a little bit of ETF Alpha today so not exactly news but a bit of alpha here so you can see that Maro put out a tweet today where he said Eric expects an eth spot ETF one to two months after a BTC spot ETF and he expects a spot BT spot btcf this year now this source is a bankless podcast here Eric Banis is the ETF analyst that I brought up a bunch of times on the refi before he's probably one of the best ETF analysts from what I can tell in the uh in the ETF space so when he says something like this it's

worth listening to now I know I've said in the past that I would I don't expect an eth spot ETF till 2025 but I think I've also said that I would be pleasantly surprised if it came a lot sooner than that and obviously I was basing uh that kind of I guess um length for of approval on the fact that obviously Gary gendler is still the head of the SEC and the SEC needs to approve these things and G Gensler has been hostile towards eth uh and obviously calling it a security and stuff like that but as you guys know I've also also highlighted over the last few months that the SEC has been I guess uh softening up so to speak to certain crypto assets I think within the industry and I've gone over the changing language that they've been using so yeah I mean if it kind of feels like eth is

or I guess like the rhetoric that eth is a security is not really something the SEC is focusing on anymore which is obviously a positive here now another thing that Eric said here was that he expects a spot BTC ETF this year I have talked about this before about how him and his colleagues put the odds of it happening this year you know pretty pretty high but also it happening in in q1 you know even higher than that and I've said before that it could happen in Q4 or q1 at this point like I I I'd like it to happen in q1 because I I just think the timing is better if it happens in q1 in terms of like a uh I guess a bullish perspective but I don't think it really matters to be honest and if it happens in Q Q4 great right uh and there

actually an event not an event but basically something happening this week that uh that might that may change the calculus here a little bit is that um the sec's deadline for appealing their grayscale loss is due on Friday so if they don't appeal I think that increases the chances even more that they're just going to approve all of these spot BTC ETFs and then they're obviously going to allow gr scal to convert their trust into an ETF um as well there and then if that happens like if let's say it gets approved in in October November that means that are here expects a spot eth ETF to happen in like December January maybe not December I guess holiday period maybe like Jan dece J December January February and that's just incredible to me right we went from like

having no spot BTC and E atfs to potentially having many of them within the span of the next I don't know 3 to six months if you want to say right so yeah we'll have to see how that shakes out there I'll keep you guys updated on on all of that of course but yeah it's it's it's pretty much it's not 100% chance but it's like highly likely that these BTC spot ETFs are all going to be be approved either in Q4 or q1 and as I said Eric believes that we can have an e spot ETF one to two months after that it depends right like I'm not going to get my hopes up as well here because I feel like specifically in the ethereum ecosystem I feel like I get my hopes up about certain things and they just take longer than I expect them to like for

example with denune I was getting my hopes up that wow dencon looks like it's going to ship in November you know latest maybe early December this year right in 2023 and then of course that's pushed back now it's probably not going to happen till q1 and then I kind of got a little bit disappointed there cuz I was like ah damn I would have loved to have you know 4844 Al and everything because I really want people to understand that 4844 is going to collapse those L2 costs and l2's immediately become just as competitive as as all these kind of I guess like cheap l1s out there that have have those have those low fees there um but obviously I believe the l2s are much better than these other l1s of course um for number of different reasons but you know I set myself up for failure there

right I set my expectations a bit too high there and it's not something I generally do too often in in ethereum anymore because I feel like over the years I've gotten used to the fact that don't set your expectations too high because anything can happen right and it's it's a lot of the things are I mean almost everything's out outside of my control especially when it comes to development obviously I'm not a core developer so I don't really have anything any kind of input there uh but the same is true for anything really especially Market related stuff I think I think Market related stuff it's even more true because with Market related stuff you're directly making investment decisions based on these things so for example if you've been buying uh over the last couple months with the expectation that the BTC spot ETF is going to be approved in Q4 q1 and maybe

you're playing that as like a medium-term narrative trade well then you stand to potentially lose out on that if it doesn't happen right uh and obviously there a a lot of other things go into it when you're talking about trading but for the long-term investors out there you don't have to really worry about this I mean long-term investors you guys uh either playing the fouryear cycle or you're just kind of investing for as long as maybe decades right where essentially you're buying eth and staking in and stuff like that it just it really just depends but yeah best to not get your hopes up too much about these things especially even when you know people say it like Eric who as I said is one of the top ETF analysts out there uh just because it's it's better not to set yourself up for disappointment right but I'll keep you

guys updated on this and I'll keep monitoring this uh as we go so I spoke a lot about eth staking yesterday and it's generally a topic that I spent a lot of time talking about honestly and especially in the context of uh I guess increasing competition in the staking space and obviously making sure that lios doesn't grow more than from from where it is now right obviously because L is is a big a big share of the market right now uh and there are a bunch of initiatives uh in this kind of Arena right now where there's Diva doing their basically vampire attack that I've talked a lot about before uh there are many other protocols coming online that are taking stake that would have gone to Lio to to themselves right and there are other initiatives like what eth Staker has shared here that you can and they say

here in their tweet you can now stake any amount of eth Through The Ledger Live app with Rocka poool and with Kiln uh and you can actually see the screenshots here of of of you being able to do that and traditionally in The Ledger Live app uh you were I think only able to stake with Lio and I I have this strong belief that a lot of Lidos not not not like a substantial amount like not like the majority of or anything like that but I feel like a healthy amount of eth that has gone into to Lio Has Come From The Ledger live integration because if you look at the people that are actually using The Ledger live apps right they would be people who are definitely not those um you know that I would consider to be crypto native uh they are definitely

those who have withdrawn their crypto from an exchange to their Ledger Hardware wallet for safekeeping and then they've probably seen you know I want to I want to stake my eth right and then they go on the Leger Live app because that's the nice front endend that they're used to and it's integ graded with their Hardware wallet and then they just stake with Lio they have absolutely zero context over what Lio is they don't know or even really care that Lio is the majority of the market they just see what's presented to them um and that's I I think I mean I'm I'm I'm kind of assuming here but I I do think that a healthy chunk of Li's market share came from that and that's not to say that ledger shouldn't be supporting ligher in their app but I I feel like they should

be supporting as many of these kind of like legitimate staking services and these ones that have been around for a while as possible in order to share the love because you know and it kind of depends on what people go for as well I I would assume that a lot of people would go for like the highest yield too um but at the same time the yield is also influenced by the fees of these different protocols and the yield is backward looking because you can't really tell what the yield is going to be into the future for anyone protocol because it relies on a bunch of different factors obviously um but backward looking if you go and look at actually here I'll show you guys what this looks like because I'm I'm kind of getting sick of the meme that Lio has the best yield when it's not true right

let's backward look 30 days which isn't long enough but let's let's look 30 days and this uh this uh APR or kind of yield that's presented here on rider. network I believe it doesn't take into account the fees that each of these protocols charge but the fees are quite similar I think amongst them right uh there it ranges from like really 10 to 20% um I think the most of most of them fit in there but you can actually see here that yes L's uh yield is is is is pretty good you know 4.08% over the last 30 days but then coinbase is higher at 4.17% binance is higher at 4.18% right cracking a little bit lower at 3.98% and then the rest of them are around 4 to 4.2% so really they're all very similar right

it's not like ler has this massive yield lead ahead of everyone else right so I I I hate that kind of meme that people kind of bring up and like oh L's got the best yeld that's that's just not true that doesn't reflect reality and then if you actually click on all here so this will look back I don't know what the time frame is for all I think it either looks back to the Genesis of the beacon chain or to the merge but regardless of how long it looks back you know it's still it's still a lot longer than 30 days you can see here that it's all really similar it ranges from 4.5% to or 4.4% to like up to 4.7% right and some outliers like this whale for example which is just an a single entity I believe I don't think that's uh that

that's potentially not someone that you stake with has 5.3% but really most of them are around the 5.5 to 5.7% here and factoring the fees of course as well they're all pretty similar to each other right and obviously the yield as I mentioned depends on a lot of different things it depends on how many other people are staking like let's let's take the the year let's take a Year's worth of of um of backward looking staking yield in that year how many more uh I guess like validators came online because that reduces the yield for everyone what and that's just a small part of it that's not the biggest part of it the biggest part of it is like how active was the execution layer uh Rewards market right how much me was being paid out how many uh tips are being paid how uh how long was the gas

price at a high level versus a low level all of these things influence the net yield that you will get you know did the staking service that you staked with change their fees as well so all of this uh kind of influences this and because of that the yields over longer periods of time will all net out and look very very similar to each other and you may see sometimes you know Lio gets these Big Blocks right for example they get these these big lottery blocks because they obviously have a large share of the market and it's more likely that they're going to get it than not but the thing is is that over time that all just Nets out right that all just Smooths out uh and and and the big and chain was designed like this in order not to give these bigger pools kind of an advantage

here or anything like that but obviously people stake with ligher not just for the yield but for other reasons too but I'm still glad to see that that ledger uh is integrating other protocols into their Ledger live up in order to allow people to stake with not just later now of course this isn't the only thing that's being done to improve staking diversity uh swell has been running a campaign for quite a while now which isn't a vampire attack on L so to speak but it's basically using incentives you know token incentives in order to get people to stti with them and I've brought up swell before and I should disclose that I'm an investor and swell as well just to disclose that there but the reason I bring them up today is because they've got a new uh uh kind of uh um a new I guess incentive program

out today where you can basically zap into swell eth uh to get these pearls so pearls are these kind of things that um I you know I assume are going to be changed into the token when they launch their token but you can see here you know for 2 weeks only 40 pearls will be awarded for every s uh SW e you swap into via the swell app and all tokens can be uh Zapped at app. Swell network. and you can check this out as's a blog post here explaining this but yeah I mean this is the sort of stuff you need right you need the incentives and I think a lot of people forget that Lio actually incentivized a lot of their stake early on uh because they put incentives on on the uh uh curve pools um which was a big big Source because

they wanted to get the liquidity up so you could basically Supply eth and stth and get the liquidity up or you could do one-sided LP with st so obviously a lot of people went and minted St right which means that they staked with lier especially when withdrawals weren't enabled so it was like an up only thing for Lio so they stay with them um and then they went and got those ldo token rewards in order to you know to just Farm them so I think that we obviously need these other protocols now U to do this and they have the opportunity to do this whether it's Diva or swell or um you know Rocka pool is also go going to I believe redirect rewards that they took from the Odell um obviously to the P out but then out to incentivize things and there's you know number of other

protocols out there stake wise I mean there's so many now but they can use token incentives especially you know if the market hits up again they can use these token incentives in order to uh take stake that would have gone to lato to themselves because really when you factor in the token incentives the net yield is higher on a stake each position but obviously the risk is a bit higher because they're newer protocols stuff like that but if you're if you're trying to Target those users who want to take on more risk this is how you would do it right which is which is pretty cool to to see how the incentive programs work here but really A lot of the incentive programs they're going to rely on obviously the token being valuable like there's no point doing an incentive program if your token market cap is like

10 million right because then the rewards aren't that juicy but if your token market cap Fu duded market cap is like 500 million that's when it gets like you know the calculus changes and then in a bull market what happens is that potentially things go crazy and your tokens are you know market cap is worth billions of dollars and then essentially you're using all that Capital to incentivize um the better stake distribution and then you can go and talk about what that actually looks like for people speculating on the token you know we've seen what the end state of the I guess farming of a kind of defi liquidity mining look like didn't really end well for most of the tokens but I think if your your I guess like strategy is to essentially dilute the value of the token in order to grow your protocol

and then the token can just acre slow amounts of value over time that's kind of a strategy to use as well but it's up to how the teams want to do it but I think the main goal of the strategy should always be to obviously grow your own protocol but also make sure that it's working to take market share away from Lio and stop people from going to Lio or any of the big players even centralized exchanges for example like coinbase and binance we obviously want people to be staking with the smaller play players and the more decentralized players than the centralized ones out there so you can go check out the swell the new swell thing here I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right I just wanted to give a quick shout out here to marck who's put

together a YouTube video or first episode of something he's calling ZK marck which is a crash course in ethereum private keys and addresses elliptic curves and Prime field Prime Fields with stunning visuals Simple Guide to the math and code included so if you are interested in diving deeper into the more technical details of uh ethereum then this is a great video for you as I said I just wanted to shout it out here um for those of you who are interested in this and I'll link it in the YouTube description below um but the video is quite long as well I think it's like 15 20 minutes or something like that so you can definitely go check this out for yourself we'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so right igon lay has a new tweet thread out today introducing something that

they like to call programmable trust and they said here in the Tweet crypto exists to scale trust I layer exist to help you program trust trust in this article we will uncover what it means to program trust and how this virtually unlocks everything and basically you can go read the article for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but really this kind of concept of I guess like programmable trust or extending the programmable trust not just from the ethereum context but to the application layer context as well is kind of the whole point of igen layer right where you can reuse the existing ethereum kind of node operator infrastructure as well as the economic security in order to program trust into other applications such as a data availability

layer such as an oracle Network you know such as a a file storage Network for example any of those kind of use cases you can do that and you can leverage ethereum's obviously Economic Security and it's and it's its diverse uh node operator set in order to achieve that and I've gone through this before about how I believe that igen layer stands a really great chance of cannibalizing all of these kind of off ethereum use cases so for example the data availability uh layer stuff I feel like the igen da is going to be one of the most popular ones if not the most popular one just simply because of the fact that they're going to have a diverse node operator set from from pretty much day one because they get to tap into the existing ethereum uh uh validator set or node operator ecosystem they're going to have better

Economic Security because of the the eth right uh sorry the restake eth um and then outside of that I mean oracles is a lot more complicated and I feel like chain link already has that kind of worked out so I I I I I'm not as bullish on kind of like Oracle networks um within the igon layer context but definitely when it comes to data availability for sure file storage as well I mean I've traditionally been pretty bearish on file storage uh kind of protocols um especially because like the the costs uh involved just kind of make it centralized to begin with but I think it's okay if it's centralized not everything has to be decentralized right because you can have centralized things which still give you this programmable trust property where essentially you can have it be centralized but still be open so anyone can access it anyone can tap

into it you don't really have the the kind of like same chances of of getting shut down or losing access to your data or losing access to your files that you would in a purely centralized system and there are different ways to build this out I'm not going to not going to go into the details now of course um but yeah really the the bull case for Igan layer at least in in my mind and as you guys know I'm an investor in IG L as well but and we're talking about this since before I was an investor the bookcase is really cannibalizing those other off ethereum use cases and just bringing them back into the ethereum family and just basically using ethereum's infrastructure for this and now I know there's also kind of the bare case here where people say we shouldn't be overloading ethereum uh ethereum's

kind of Economic Security ethereum's validators ethereum's consensus and I totally get that and I totally agree with that but but I can they can extend beyond that where essentially they can they can use the economic security but they can also build it in such a way where essentially the the people running validators right they don't have to compromise their validators or the security and the stability of their validators in order to run igen layer infrastructure like for example for me I plan to run um I layer infrastructure on my existing boxes that I have with my validators on them but there's no reason why that infrastructure for Ian layer should compromise my validator infrastructure and I'm not personally going to be changing my solo Staker withdrawal credentials uh to to I to do reaking if I do reaking it'll probably

be through buying you know the AR token for example or any other lsts that they support probably not St like I'm not going to to to put any money into Lio um but but generally I would still like to run the infrastructure even if I'm not putting the capital up myself I would still love to R run the infrastructure as I want to do with the layer 2 stuff and as I do with ethereum today I mean I run multiple full nodes I run many many many validators on different Hardware configurations and I do it all from from home uh as well and I feel like that there is the real magic here but anyway enough enough of me BL ing about this you can go check out Igan Lay's tweet thread and blog post about this I'll link it in the YouTube description below

for you to do so all right as you guys know farcaster is going permissionless and guess what it's happening tomorrow or today I guess October no October 12th I think it's going to happen at so you can see here dami Romero tweeted out big milestone tomorrow the farcaster protocol will be 100% permissionless you can sign up directly on the op main net no more invites are required users can use any client of their choice devs will have full access to data/ apis Via hubs and zero dependencies on warcast here so this is exciting um I haven't used farcaster as much as I should be using it lately to be honest it's just been hard because it's as I've explained before it's kind of hard to manage both Twitter and farcaster but I'm definitely

going to try to to be more conscious of that but one thing I wanted to talk about in terms of farcaster going permission list here is that I'm very very curious to see what farcaster looks like in 6 months is it overrun by Bots right is it overrun by spam what does the content moderation look like because as you guys know farcaster is going to be charging $5 a year to access the site but as you can see from from Twitter uh and and the verified accounts right now is that people are willing to pay each month like probably more than $5 a month in order to run their scams or run their bots so I'm very curious to see like how vaster plans to tackle the issue of like Bots and scammers and stuff like that

and content moderation because these social platforms live or die based on that I believe cuz can you imagine if like all of everything you saw on Twitter even though a significant portion of what I see on Twitter today is scams and Bots which I I I honestly hate and it degrades the experience but could you imagine that that was the majority and then basically when you're scrolling through your Twitter feed you would really only see um Bots and scammers and every now and again like 10% of the time you would see the legitimate stuff that you want to follow so it remains to be seen how farcaster is going to deal with this and the content moderation is is going to go here and what it looks like you know six what it looks like in like 6 to 12 months or something like that maybe they

do already have a bunch of things in place that I haven't really uh been paying attention to but you can just look at what happened with Twitter or X I guess it's called These Days um to see what a platform that gets overrun with even just like some of it being overrun by Bots and scammers and stuff like that what that basically looks like and it's degraded the experience at least for me um and and Es and especially when it comes to the algorithms too which is less of a an issue on farcaster because it's an open protocol and anyone can program their own algorithms on their own front end and how they want to do these things and the logic is that people would gravitate towards I guess the one that uh that Services everyone the best essentially uh but on Twitter I mean I go to my For You tab and it's

just full of crap right like I've tried to tune it but it's so hard for some reason it just comes back uh like for example there's a lot of political crap on there and it's us politics I I'm sorry I Don't Care About Us politics I'm not an American citizen right I'm in Australia I don't even see anything got to do with Australian politics I don't know why Twitter is showing me US politics stuff and it's not tweets from accounts that I follow it's not tweets from crypto people it's tweets from all these people that I have no idea who they are and I look at them I'm like why are you showing me this right it doesn't make any sense um and and just a number of other just crap tweets so I think that's another Pitfall as well for for for social media platforms is that they

have to basically uh I I guess give into the algorithm because the algorithm allows them to monetize and and allows them to show show more ads and stuff like that um and allows them to F tune people's feeds but with farcaster as I said it's all open um as far as I know I mean the farcaster protocol itself doesn't plan to have ads embedded into it maybe the front ends can have ads on there but you can choose your own front end because everything is um hosted by this open API there's no centralized database that for example in Twitter's case they control where no one else can build a client on top of it no everyone can build a client on top of fastar which to me is the main bull case because it means that hopefully we get to the point where essentially people

just use the best client that's out there um and even if the majority use the shitty client it doesn't matter because you yourself can use the best client and you get access to the same thing that everyone else does and and this goes back to uh W with Reddit what what happened actually recently with Reddit is that they made it really really costly for people to build their own clients on on Reddit and I was using the Apollo client on my on my iPhone um and that was way better like a million times better than the official Reddit client or a Reddit app client um and it was beautiful right I loved it I loved using it but apparently you know that there was the minority of people that used that majority of people used the official app but that's fine you know if you want a better experience you have

the option here but but that's mostly being killed there are still I guess some of these apps live but mostly being killed but the point is to make it so that it can't be killed because it was killed by Reddit obviously because Reddit is centralized but with faster is trying to be decentralized so the point is to make it so that you can build on farter you can build your own front end your own app on top of it and you have basically zero risk of it being rugged right or are you being rugged you and and people can choose which which one they want to use there but anyway I'm going to be paying attention to farter kind of public launch uh very closely because I want to see what it actually looks like but yeah it's going 100% permissionless uh tomorrow there right an interesting tweet here

from Arkham today so Arkham is an intelligence platform basically very similar to nanson where essentially they track all the blockchain activity from from different chains but they put a tweet out today where where they said tornado cash is still the largest crypto mixer on ethereum even after the August 2022 US Treasury sanctions $77 million in assets flowed through its contracts uh on eth mayet in the past 30 days and you can see here that tornado cash operates on seven different chains and obses transfers of 10 different crypto assets the most mixed asset is obviously native eth on ethereum mainnet uh and then there's a few more stats here of what's going on now obviously that $77 million is substantially less than what the torado cash mixer used to process

but I think there's two main points I wanted to focus on here the first one is that you can obviously see that tornado cach is not sensed it is censored by some portion of the network but it is still available people can still use it um and it is never even ever since the sanctions came into place it has never been 100% censored there is a certain percentage that is censored um and then I think right now it's like what 70% on the Builder side sensors it or something like that um and then on the relayer side it's it's the opposite basically it's like 30% % censored and 70% uncensored but regardless of that and and because tonado cach is not a time-sensitive thing you can wait a few blocks for it to be confirmed and you're happy with that um so that's the first

point the second point is that who do you think is still using torado cach right now it's certainly not US citizens right unless they they really want to play with fire it's certainly not the people that you would consider to be the good guys right or the people that are trying to preserve their own privacy I would bet the vast majority of people still using tornado cach are the Bad actors that the TR wanted to stamp out to begin with so I'm sure there's probably North Korea still in there right the and North Korea was was cited as like the biggest entity that um caused them to basically put these sanctions in place and I'm sure there's plenty of other of these I guess like Bad actors or what the US was consider Bad actors still using tornado cach so while they've been able to stunt I guess

the use of it or at least kind of like kind of uh collapse the use of it to some extent they haven't stamped it out completely here and that's because torado cash is actually truly sessen ship resistant on on ethereum here now obviously I'm not saying for anyone to go out there and use it especially not if you're a US citizen or person definitely not um and if you're outside of the US it's it's kind of a massive gray area depends where you are in the world and stuff like that but the point I'm trying to make here is that these kind of things don't necessarily work because the bad guys are already breaking the law right they're already breaking the laws that you've imposed on that that you're saying they're breaking so to them it's kind of like well who cares about these sanctions laws like

I'm already breaking the probably the toughest laws in the US in terrorism financing moneya laundering all that sorts of stuff so I'm not going to care and especially if they're North Korea like they're not going to give any shits at all about this so they're definitely still using it right but I guess like the goal of it is to try and uh um significantly reduce the usage and and stuff like that but the bad guys will always find a way to mix their assets I mean you you can see now that a lot of them uh or a lot of the the the hackers like to use uh forchain where essentially what they do is they have e and this happened recently the FTX hacker he they sold like 100,000 eth to BTC and on on on eth uh and and and then they kind of like went through Thor oh

or did it through thorchain where essentially they went from eth to BTC and through thorchain they got the BTC on on bitcoin and they use the Bitcoin mixers in order to observate their Trail and they do this because one there are more mixers on bitcoin right now than there are on on ethereum um and two Bitcoin has uh the liquidity for them to Essen exit right so if they can successfully anonymize their BTC uh that they've that they've kind of siphoned off here they can use uh the legitimate exchanges to cash out to Fiat and then withdraw to their bank accounts wherever they may have them so when when you look at it like that they're always going to find a way here right and actually speaking of thorchain one of the front ends Thor swap um came out and basically

said that they were going to implement some controls around this and I'm sure they got the knock on the door from one of the the agencies in the US about this but you know and then it begs the question of uh is the US going to sanction Thor chain itself right because if they see the you know North Korea for example using Thor chain it's not confirmed they are using it but if the US says that they are right um are they going to sanction Thor chain and then what does that look like does thorain is store chain censorship resistant and decentralized enough in order to resist that I don't think we're going to know until it actually happens and it may not ever happen but the point I'm trying to make here is that the bad guys are still being bad guys it's a lot of the it's

the good guys that have really been punished by these sanctions because now no one in the US can legally use tornado cash in order to protect their privacy and they have to do it in in some other way right and even outside of the us as I said it depends where you are in the world but it could be illegal for you to use it as well and it just sucks right it just sucks for the regular ordinary person that wants to preserve their privacy it wasn't doing anything wrong but anyway I'll leave that one at that um there just wanted to hide those those couple of things there now I'm at the 30 minute Mark already but there was a tweet from Brian Armstrong that I wanted to quickly kind of speak to today he said at coin base we don't care if crypto is in a winter or if people are

pivoting to some new hot thing we just keep showing up every day to build progress toward important Milestones takes decades and we'll have lots of ups and downs along the way persistence and determination pay off now this if this was coming from basically anyone else I would say that they they're kind of virtue signaling to an extent but the fact that it's coming from Brian Brian and I guess like him talking in the context of coinbase uh resonates strongly with me because for those of you who don't know coinbase has been around for over 10 years years now so it's already been around for a decade and they are currently and I guess like into the future building things that will will potentially Outlast coinbase itself right they're building base a layer two on ethereum and they're building it to be decentralized they're

building it to be open and public and for people to to build on it with them and to to host the core infrastructure in a decentralized way all that stuff there um they're expanding coinbase to other jurisdictions around the world of course um and and expanding it in a legitimate way they're fighting uh I guess like The Regulators in court right they're doing all of these really great things um and coinbase I I I I believe over the last you know more than 10 years has been probably the company that has brought the most amount of people into crypto out of all of the crypto companies I can't think of any other company but maybe binance that has brought more people into crypto um than coinbase and and honestly it's probably coinbase because they existed at least I think 5 years before binance did right

so they've definitely brought in especially when it comes to Americans obviously a lot of people into crypto here um and that's why I believe as I said Brian is not virtue signaling here he truly believes this he is a cipher Punk he is some a Crypton native right he is someone who believes in the things that we all believe in um and he's someone who's building towards that yes he's building a centralized company but within that company he is supporting efforts like bass right he is supporting um efforts like their coinbase wallet for example which is user self- custody all those sorts of things so when he says this I take that to be truthful at face value I've never really gotten any bad vibes from Brian to be honest I know there's been some drama over the years with coinbase and Brian in particular I

guess in the Bitcoin kind of community in 2017 where I think coinbase supported a fork to raise the block size limit for Bitcoin which ended up just resulting in the Bitcoin Bitcoin cash for because they backed out at the last minute but I think generally overall there've been a very positive net good Force for uh the crypto ecosystem there but anyway on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone