Fed CBDC, Optimism explorer and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #126 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 21st of may 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so the biggest piece of news over the last 24 hours was this report that came out uh i guess this news article that came out that said the u.s federal reserve plans to publish a paper on a potential issuance of a cbdc or a central bank digital currency this is very bullish i think i don't think cbdc's in general or anything like super interesting i think that they're you know classic kind of legacy kind of i guess like tech here um that institutions are trying to kind of create

on board but the reason why i think this is exciting and why i think this is really bullish is because of a tweet that i put out that may have confused some people here where i said cbdc's uh legitimized crypto and we won and by week one i mean crypto one now some people would have just disagreed with this saying you know like dan here that cbdc's and crypto are completely different things and i don't think that's the case i think that to the general public uh crypto and digital currencies and cbdc's and all this sort of stuff it all means the same thing to them right it essentially means digital digitally native money right because money in a bank account people don't really uh associate that or all kind of like think of that as like

purely digital money right they think of that as like an iou for the cash that they have in a bank account somewhere in some vault right even though you might not ne you might not even have access to most of the cash or ever like basically withdraw you know you know your savings from a cash account or whatever like that um you still think of it as like physical right because you grew up with it and it's just you know what's ingrained into your head whereas with crypto with truly digital native kind of things you don't think of the physical aspect of it like when i think of eth i don't think of a physical kind of coin or physical aspect you know i know that a lot of the bitcoin articles they might use a physical coin to represent bitcoin but no one ever really thinks of it like

that it is truly digitally native so what a cbdc is it's a digitally native uh you know central bank currency essentially that's the whole goal of it at the end of the day um and you know it's not going to be decentralized right it's going to be completely regulated and controlled and like really locked down but the point is is that by governments nation states institutions all kind of embracing crypto in their own way like you know government's embracing it with cbdc's institutions embracing it by buying some on their balance sheet uh some legacy legacy kind of companies integrating you know crypto and all that sort of stuff just by uh i guess like integrating with it and working with it it legitimizes it and basically sends a signal to the entire world

that this stuff is here to stay they're not going to ban it right they're going to regulate it of course and they're going to regulate like the fiat on ramps which they've already done right i mean there was a report that came out yesterday that said uh exchanges are now gonna have to report anytime a user does like a transaction over ten thousand dollars or whatever i actually thought that was already the case to be honest like i think that anytime i do anything on a centralized exchange it is just completely monitored and recorded and it's just all those records are there for any government that wants to access them like i i don't have any notion of financial privacy on those things and even within ethereum if you're not using a privacy protocol you know your address is exposed to the world you shouldn't have any uh kind of

like allusions to privacy or anything like that so from that point of view i was just like well and i think to myself like governments and nation states and whatever they don't regulate something that they're gonna ban like you can think about smoking for example uh smoking in particular in australia what what the government did to curb people from from from smoking cigarettes is that they just increased the taxes on them they didn't ban it because they knew if they banned it it would just become a black market so instead of banning it they just regulated it so by the government not banning it and by by kind of like embracing crypto they're basically saying they're saying two things they're saying well we can't ban it first of all because it is impossible to ban it it'd be like trying to ban the internet or trying to

ban like uh peer-to-peer networks in general like file sharing and things like that so i think that you know they they they probably understand that that part of it and secondly they also kind of i guess at least not the whole government but like some parts of the government see the value in it that's why they're commissioning papers on cbdc that's why they're looking into all this crypto stuff that's why they haven't strangled it completely yet and they also realize that the economic benefits that these kind of things can can bring to their own country and to the world are immense and shouldn't be strangled it's the same thing that happened with the internet right i think the internet is like a a perfectly perfect kind of like uh predecessor and p and and precursor to crypto that allows all these kind of people to to see what

happened with the internet and be like okay well we don't want to make the same mistakes we did with the internet where we kind of thought it was a joke kind of thought it wouldn't get very big because a lot of companies and institutions did that and they were left behind and they lost out and they got disrupted by all these startups so i think these days people look at disruption and things like that and the kind of um and new technologies and they go okay well we need to get ahead of that that's why you see a lot of these private blockchain stuff spinning up like and all these sort of stuff like that's that's all noise right in the long term private blockchains aren't going to win everyone's just going to be on this public shared kind of infrastructure but this is exactly how the internet

evolved too but i think at this point it's like every company has every big company has like an r d division and any time there's some some kind of new technology that comes out that's relevant they kind of do commission research papers on it they do mvps they uh they do you know proof of concepts and things like that uh and then uh you know as they do that and as time goes on we get to the point of like okay well that was a waste of time well that didn't work let's focus on the things that do work but as an industry as a whole i don't see governments banning crypto uh you know even even stricter governments or like governments that are viewed as like um i guess like uh like china someone who's basically said well we're going to ban crypto and they've said that or ban

bitcoin they've said that like 30 times probably at this point and every single time it has just been someone somewhere saying it or it's been fake news or whatever they're not going to ban crypto like even the most heavy-handed uh i guess like um nation states or even like literal kind of like the dictatorships like north korea they're not going to ban it i mean like north korea is maybe a bit of an extreme example here and i'm not i don't know the geopolitics around this but in general like by banning something and by by by denying your citizens uh access to it you're essentially hamstring your own economy especially if it's something that's going to be huge and you know i know countries like china basically created their own internet right they can still talk to the public

internet but they have their own versions of different um different apps and stuff like they have their own facebook and and kind of like twitter and and all that sort of stuff and google and things like that that that's fine and maybe they have their own blockchain i don't know there was i remember back in 2017 people were speculating that neo was going to be the ethereum of china and there were some other ones out there and i i don't know if that's going to be the case right i don't know if if um the chinese government who have actually been doing a lot of um experimentation with cbdcs i don't know if they're just going to fork ethereum and create their own evm chain right for example who knows what they're going to do there but i think the underlying theme and the and the the kind of like summary here of

everything that's happening is essentially that outright banning it is not a path that most countries are going to take like i can guarantee like there might be like maybe a handful like five or less countries that actually ban this stuff and when you look at like i guess like countries in general you have to look at the ones that are like third world countries or war torn or developed you know where they kind of are and and who has access to them like a dictatorship like north korea you know their citizens aren't going to have the same access to you know even the internet as we do nowhere near the same um and and and things like that so i think when you just take a holistic approach the world is complex many nation states make it up there's game theory that plays out everywhere

i think the game theory of crypto at the end of the day is you don't ban it you either embrace it or you heavily regulate it um and and you know every government nation state is going to have a different approach to this sort of stuff but anyway i think you know the genie the rabbit whatever is out of the heart jenny's out of the bottle uh this isn't going away i think governments know that and i think that the more proactive and democratic ones aren't going to ban this they're just going to either embrace it it's going to take them a while like governments move slow right um and even if they regulate it that's still going to take a while i saw that that that rule about that over 10 000 rule wouldn't even go into effect until like 2023 if it went into effect at all and it's

like okay well that's like two years away right that's an eternity in crypto like think about where crypto was two years ago it was uh it was uh what may 2019 right like very very different so we'll see what happens there and i'd love to know how they handle d5 in that case as well but yeah so that's i guess my like overall thesis as to why i think something like a cbdc just legitimizes crypto as a whole and he's really bullish for crypto overall it's not something that interests me like i'm interested in open public blockchains like ethereum obviously interested in assets like eth that had fully decentralized um but i think in general like these nation states and governments can issue these things they can basically have a fully

digitally native thing that exist within the crypto umbrella and that's just going to legitimize the whole sector for a lot of people so yeah but i'll leave it at that for now lots more to get through in today's episode another i guess like another government related thing here is that a a member of parliament tom oh man i'm gonna i'm gonna fail pronouncing his surname so i'm gonna try it i'm just gonna claim tom uh he he mentioned the flipping in parliament in the in the uk parliament here what what like literally he said um something about like uh eight flipping bitcoin and i was just like no and then this video has has the clip of him doing that and this is posted from his own twitter account so definitely go go watch this it'll be linked in the youtube

description but when he said that i was like this is crazy and then i saw other people saying that in later in his speech he spoke about how he listens to bankless as well uh which i thought was hilarious it's like wow that's awesome like we have these members of parliament in you know in the in the uk that are listening to to bank less and getting kind of like as i like to call it eighth pills right and defy peeled and all that sort of stuff and even saying things like that the flipping is going to happen that's just crazy to me so i think in general like i mean this is just what i was saying before about how governments you know obviously they're made up of of a lot of different people but like when you have members of parliament like saying stuff like this it

lends a lot of legitimacy to it people get excited because they're like wow our leaders you know are actually saying things that that are that are true right they're actually embracing this technology and it just adds so much legitimacy to everything so yeah i thought this was really cool i highly recommend going and watching this little clip here it's only 51 seconds of of of tom saying it um i i was just taken aback by it because i didn't think we would get here this fast like the flipping is like such a crypto meme right it is it is such a crypto meme that i think most people don't even know about it even in crypto like i think it's it's something that is a spoken about when eth is gaining on the ratio right against bitcoin but you know it's spoken about a different context too like bitcoiners

will say it and joke about it and and you know say it's never going to happen and like this is just um you know either heads being ethe heads and you know ethereums will celebrate and be like yes this has always been the case and and things like that but to hear someone kind of i guess like outside of our little bubbles uh say this on parliament floor in the uk like this isn't a small parliament this is the uk right at the very large western democracy um is is really uh really really exciting i think and and kind of like just i think speaks to what i was saying before about how governments are going to embrace crypto in many different ways different members of parliament will have obviously and members of of congress wherever whatever country it is are going to have different opinions on

things but i think that the main theme is that they're all going to embrace it one way or another so we finally got some news from optimism here and why am i not following ether scan that's weird i thought i was anyway so optimism announced that they are collaborating with etherscan there is now a ether scan that tracks optimism's layer two now obviously there's not a lot going on there right now because optimism is only synthetics right now but this is what i was talking about the other day about how i can't remember which refill it was on maybe it was a while ago but i was talking about how optimism had to delay their launch because they weren't ready with things like this this is the critical infrastructure that needs to be in place before you can launch something like a layer 2 or a side chain right and

and even polygon for example uh they've been teasing that they have an aether scan implementation coming but they've only got a very simple block explorer right now which is which is you know way behind what etherscan gives you in terms of features so i think etherscan is building itself a little bit of a moat here of being a basically a um a really great uh a block explorer uh for different kind of layer twos and different chains what side chains or whatever like that because everyone's used to it right everyone's used to eat the scan everyone knows how to navigate it so just cloning it and tracking different networks is really easy to do but the reason why i think this is so exciting is one i mean we finally get an update from optimism but two as i said this is one of the

fundamental building blocks before these layer twos can start taking off i think we're going to see uni swap on layer 2 very soon and someone posted a a screenshot in the delegate discord today from the optimism discord basically uh one of the team members i think of optimism was teasing that unisop was going live very very soon and i think that just falls right in line with them releasing this block explorer here so i wouldn't be surprised to see uni swap live within the next two weeks it could even happen any day now could happen next week i would say within the next two weeks we would see unisop live on on optimism's layer 2 here which is super exciting as well i've spoken about in the past how i think that uni swap at layer 2 just changes the game in general because unisop is such a a

well-known product it is the most used app on ethereum by far and it is also an app that pretty much like everyone uses right everyone trades tokens everyone uh you know i mean that's like the main use case of a lot of ethereum right now is like token trading and things like that so and obviously that takes up a lot of gas on the network i think 35 between univ 2 and v3 so yeah super exciting i can't wait to see how this shakes out uh i think this is really really cool and it seems like they do have i guess latest transactions going on here uh but their l1 batches seems to be lagged here but i think maybe that's just because they they that's just how frequently they do or maybe they just haven't done it because uh you know even though it's on main

it's still very closed off thing only synthetics is live for now uh and things like that but still very very cool and this is probably going to be uh block explorer to watch for an alpha leak on which uh projects are going to be uh are launching and they just haven't spoken about launching on optimism yeah i haven't announced it yet but anyway uh this is really cool to see uh i'm i'm really happy we got news out of optimism because i was like you know they've been so quiet for so long i love this team but like come on give us something throw us a bone and they did and as i said if you sit in their discord channel you're going to get free alpha out of there as well so yeah really cool to see this from optimism so speaking of block explorers uh tim baiko

tweeted out today that buy cool baikal cool i don't know how to pronounce this uh block explorer now shows full one five five nine transaction data which is really really cool so i don't know what bikel is i'm assuming it's some sort of ethereum test net that they spun up for one five five nine i somehow missed this um but anyway what this uh what this kind of like screenshot is showing is the full one five five nine transaction data as it will look like once it's live on the ethereum mainnet so obviously you have a bit of difference here you still have your uh gas limit you still have uh you know your gas used by the transaction and guay and all that but now you have uh the max priority fee per per gas which is the kind of like max way you will pay for the transaction

or what you're willing to go up to um and then max fee per gas as well uh which is basically you know times multiplying those two together here um so and block info is also available so as uh tim says here this block which he links to here but 63 000 uh uh 65 000 gas times seven which is 441 000 way which is which works out to i think oh man i'm not going to do the head math correctly here but yeah there was some eighth burnt here but that's another you know metric that block explorers are going to be tracking now right is how much eth was burned in in each transaction which is going to be so cool for screenshots imagine like all those big kind of like fee transactions that we've seen in the past and then just seeing the amount of heat that gets burned

on a lot of them which i thought was was really really cool but uh yeah um it's funny like peter from geth is saying um we you murdered that field can we just call it max tip and gas and obviously like as tim says here uis are gonna be improved over time and things like that uh diff depending on the wallet depending on the block explorer as well but still cool to see this i mean one five five nine is hopefully less than two months away now i know everyone goes on about july 14th being the the date is going live i do want to just caution again that that's a target date anything can happen any you know there there's a possibility that it could be delayed for whatever reason you know i don't think so i think everything is is is in place right now i

think the only thing that could delay us is maybe the ecosystem projects and the infrastructure not being ready to support one five five nine but you know they've still got plenty of time to integrate so we'll see how that goes there so zk sync today detailed their three factor approach to security in zk sync 2.0 and this is the strategy that they're using to keep funds safe so they have a few different things that they're doing here so essentially what they're doing is they're setting up security by isolation and redundancy so what this means is that uh zk sync 2.0 relies on multiple independent mechanisms to guarantee security um you know in addition to their zero knowledge proofs here uh they have all of their transactions being verified naively by z casing validators before being included in a

block uh they have trust minimized upgradability so they'll be able to upgrade the contracts of course but uh they they want to do that in a very trust minimized way and they also have uh the zk sync security council which is a collection of 15 respected members of the ethereum community that will have power to uh basically shorten the notice period so that the time lock that they have here which is a four week time lock uh but like this security council can shorten that you know in cases like some critical bug or security issue or something like that this is really cool that that uh zk sync is kind of detailing their security architecture here i think this is very important uh because obviously we want to get the scalability and decentralization at layer 2 but we also want to make sure

it's secure we want to make sure that you know the rug can't just be pulled from from under us right and things like that and as you can see here a lot of names you all be familiar with people that are that are joining on uh you know the are they core teams joining it from from argent here i'm not going to read them all out but you can see here michael from curve and steven stefan from nos gnosis and and a few others down here as well so yeah really cool to see this from zk singh i'm glad they're taking security very seriously here i think all the layer two teams are that's why they've taken so long to launch is because they want to make sure everything's secure and that user funds are safe so really really cool to see this from zksync

so yearn finance announced one of their biggest product releases yesterday i think which is their synthetics snx staking vault so essentially what this allows you to do is stake your snx in a urine vault and it will automatically manage the entire process for you now obviously snx taking has been very popular in the past for a lot of people but the main concerns were around gas fees which layer two of course um alleviates but still there are some problems around um kind of like uh gas fees on layer one and debt management of course as well uh so what is what this vault will essentially do is that it'll claim uh your snx rewards for you weekly so you don't have to do them manually yourself and you don't have to pay the gas fees because all the claims

are done in batches or done on a batch sorry um and then with uh with your susd that you borrow it'll be automatically deposited into yearns as you as they vault to earn yield here which is really really cool so uh i mean this is awesome jern is like by far the leader in yield aggregation here and just like creating these vaults that make everyone's life easier not just from an automation standpoint but also from a um you know gas fee savings standpoint and just like quality of life overall kind of standpoint for people here so really positive to see this and if you're an snx taker and you just want to put it on autopilot then i highly suggest checking out this product so robert miller from uh flashbots here tweeted out a a metric uh i guess like a

chart that shows daily minor profit in eth from mav now it reached an all-time high uh i think yesterday or the 20 on the 20th of may here obviously because of the volatility within the markets and you can see here that uh miners are essentially not miners but like mav extractors in general um uh oh wait no no mine sorry sorry i was i was thinking of something else there the the the basically the minor profit uh from from flashbots is up at over 1400 aethia and you can see the growth over april and may has just been you know quite explosive as opposed to earlier in the year and that's because flashbots allows miners to take advantage of mev now instead of uh just living it up to people to to basically do it and bypass miners or whatever and just go through

the public mempool i won't talk too much about flashballs because i've gone over that plenty of times in the past so i won't kind of go into detail here but essentially this just means that miners are making even more money so you know remember how they were all complaining about one five five nine and things like that well you know the mev that they're extracting here is more than enough to make up for the revenue loss that they're going to suffer with 1559 at the end of the day and i think this is a really great way to address that so obviously they've been fast on the uptake here i think over 60 of hash rate now uses flashbots so i think that's just going to continue to grow as well so some really cool news out of the index co-rpr the d5 pulse index is now

listed on kucoin a very popular centralized exchange and i think this is the first uh centralized exchange that has listed the d5 pulse index or at least the first major one which is awesome i mean i've spoken about the d5 pulse index plenty of times in the in the past and i think it's the best way to gain broad exposure to d5 so now that it's available on essential on a major centralized exchange is even better because you know it's all well and good that it's available within d5 and within unisop and all that sort of stuff but a lot of people don't know how to to use that or don't don't really want to use d5 and just trust using a normal crypto kind of exchange or a normal centralized exchange so the fact that we can now have users buying dpi on centralized exchanges you know maybe

they know of d5 they just don't really use it but they want exposure to it it's really really cool and i hope to see you know more major exchanges especially things like coinbase would be really awesome for them to list something like this because it means institutions can start now uh now start loading up on on dpi as well and just basically further cements dpi as the standard when it comes to d5 indexes and i think it's going to remain that wild that way for quite a while so yeah if you're i don't know if you don't want to spend like uh if you don't want to play in d5 don't want to buy dpi there you can always buy it from kucoin now which you know is another option for for for acquiring dpi here so our mc dex or mcdecks uh successfully closed the seven million dollar

investment round which was led by delphi adventures and alameda research here with participation from a bunch of different people you can see the list here but i think the more exciting thing is that they've announced that they're actually deploying to arbitrary's main net on may 28th when the uh developer mainnet goes live this is just another project that's chosen arbitram uh to deploy to which is really really cool they are currently on arbetrim's test net as well which is awesome i think a lot of people asleep still sleeping on arbitrary they're sleeping on the fact that arbitrary has a lot of apps that they're going to be launching with on their layer 2 optimistic roll-up that are major apps and not just like little ones you know i think balance is going to be on there um i think you know mcdex now and there's a few other

projects that are confirmed chain links obviously going to be on there and stuff like that i can't remember all the projects that are going to be on there but i think people are going to be blown away and i'm speculating that there's going to be ones like ave on there as well because i don't think ave is just going to deploy the polygon and that's it they're going to be on all the other different scaling solutions so yeah really really cool to see i mean congrats on the raise to mcdexie but even cooler to see that they're going to be deploying to albatrom's mainnet on may 28th ready for end users when arbitram opens up their mainnet to everyone in sometime in june hopefully so alchemix's audits are finally in here so the as they say here in addition to three months of being battle tested in

the wild their audit from certic has confirmed that alchemics is secure so you can read the full medium article for a breakdown of what was audited what it covers and and the major findings and all that sort of stuff and any critical or major issues or anything like that and and everything that was uh that was addressed here so i'm not going to read the audit report of course but just really great to see that they finally got these audits back because alcomix is again i've mentioned this before it's one of my favorite d5 projects and it's also uh one of the most popular d5 projects right now with lots of money inside it so very awesome to see that they finally got these um these audits back and they're also teasing that uh alf is coming very soon hopefully like i mean i want it now but like hopefully it

doesn't take too long maybe in the next few days couple weeks if that uh because that's going to be really really um cool to put my ether into because i have eight spread out everywhere right now people often ask me it's like what do you do with your eat like how do you do yield farming i keep it pretty simple like i don't do anything too crazy most of my eighth right now sits in makeup so what i do is i put my eat into makeup i draw dye against it and then i put that dye into uh alchemics and i draw ar usd against that and then i put a al-usd back into the curve pool then i put the curve lp tokens into alchemix to generate yield there okay maybe it's not as simple as i as i said it was but it's just like a few

different actions to do that and then uh some of my eighth is in staking of course uh but i would love to put my eighth into an al eighth volt as well here so i'm really looking forward to that uh and it's really really cool to see that alchemix's final is audited as well i love using protocols that you know i consider to be safe i don't really you know ape into the newest protocols or whatever i i tend to take the uh the safety of my funds very seriously but yeah that's kind of like what i'm doing right now i do have a few other yield farms out there that i do i found the 8th alcx pool uh on on uni swap sorry on sushi swap and i also uh farm a few other ones out there i'm not going to go through them

all but like people were wondering and asking kind of like in discord the other day i think like how do i sustain myself and they're asking me on twitter like if i don't have a normal job or a salary and i don't make any money from the daily guay well i just sustained myself from yield farming right from crypto uh so yeah that's basically a little bit of an alpha leak there um but that's that's essentially what i do and as i said just keeping it simple at the end of the day uh but i think that's it for today's episode so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone