Gensler gets grilled, Rocket Pool growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #570 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delivery fuel wake up latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this designer and test the 19th of April 2023. right everyone let's get into it so a bit to talk about actually uh over the last 24 hours with regards to the SEC Gary Gensler and regulation in general so there was a house a financial services committee a meeting with Gary Gensler present and this was the first time that he came before the community in 18 months now I clipped pretty much the best part of that hearing and I shared it on Twitter here you can go uh watch it if you haven't yet obviously as you can see from the tweet it went quite viral over 2.6 million views on this video alone which is which is pretty crazy right uh

well I mean almost a million views on the video sorry 2.6 on on the Tweet not sure how Twitter accounts views there but still a lot of people saw this tweet and watched this video which I mean I didn't expect it to go this crazy but it was it was pretty crazy there now what this video basically shows is uh Mr McHenry here who's the chairman of the of the committee basically asking Gary genslar whether he thinks eth is a security or a commodity and he asks this repeatedly in various different ways you know not just constantly asking the same question he rephrases the question he tries to give gensla uh away you know the easiest way possible to answer this question and of course Gary does not answer the question he just keeps dodging he deflects uh and then and then at one point Mr McHenry here asks him

okay well then how do you think there is Clarity for crypto when you can't even answer a question you know this question about eth because uh against I kept saying things like um we'd have to look at uh you know such and such properties of an asset to declarative security blah blah so obviously I get against I didn't want to uh to answer this question now I'll link this and you can go watch it uh it'll be in the YouTube description below but what this what this whole kind of hearing I think showed was that the I guess crypto generally has become a very partisan issue in the US now uh between the Democrats and the Republicans it's unfortunate that it has been has become like this but I think given that the the US political system is already very

divided given that it's already very tribal uh what ends up happening is that anything that one party is for the other one is automatically against and that happens uh uh for a lot of different issues not just crypto now in the crypto context during this hearing pretty much all of the Republican uh representatives were grilling Gensler right and they were grilling him not for uh not not just for anything but for like literally everything that we've been saying in crypto and what people working in crypto have been saying or the lawyers have been saying that there's no Clarity that the sec's approach to regulating this industry is abhorrent all they care about is bringing enforcement actions against companies even if companies try to go to them and say Hey how do we register how do we do this how do we become be compliant all that sort of

stuff so all the Republicans were grilling against her about this and then you had pretty much all the Democrats doing the complete opposite and they were praising gensla saying that he was doing a good job and there was one uh Brad Sherman who I believe is a representative in California who had his nose so far up gensler's ass you could see it coming through his mouth uh like seriously it was it was so bad I watched that and and um Sherman was just constantly praising gensla saying that he was doing an amazing job all this other stuff and I was like are you like paying any attention at all or are you just saying this because Gensler is abide in appointee and you don't want to go against your your party right party over over country as they say which obviously is what the political landscape is like

a lot of the time especially in the US so while a lot of people were saying that this whole hearing generally was political theater and while I agree with that to an extent I think what it does is it just lays bare exactly where people stand on these issues and exactly where the SEC stands and where Gensler stands so I think anyone with a normal non you know normal functioning brain that is trying to look at this critically would watch this hearing and and and easily come to the conclusion that gensla is not wanting to answer the questions and that means he's either trying to hide something or he has his own agenda that he's trying to push uh and and he's just not open to to basically giving Clarity on anything and once you see that you would uh

potentially dive in deeper and see okay is what Gary Gensler saying true like is there actually a way for companies to register in crypto uh are these things actually Securities uh how are they regulating this blah blah blah and that then shifts votes right that then can shift policy because yes a lot of it is political theater a lot of it is politics but what what can come out of this is a change in policy now of course uh I don't expect Gary Gensler to be to to be going anywhere unless the Republicans win the Senate um and or the presidency uh kind of next year and next year's election uh late next year I believe um if they don't win that then I don't expect gensla to be kicked out I don't

think that the Democrats are going to basically say okay well let's uh get rid of gensla because one they're praising him and two it looks bad right if the if the the um the SEC chairman that was appointed by Biden gets kicked out for doing a job it looks obviously really bad on the Democrats and it becomes a point of attack for the Republicans and blah blah right all the political that we're all used to so really the only chance uh well I mean there's two ways from my understanding that gensla is uh is removed here he either gets promoted which is just hilarious when you think about it but he either gets promoted and goes to the treasury uh Treasury Department uh potentially become replaces uh Jeanette Yellen there or he gets removed uh uh when uh uh when if the Republicans win and then the next

year and that's a kind of two shitty choices right because it's like okay if you're if you're a Democrat and you align more with Democratic policies and I'm not trying to get too political here I'm just trying to give the the context uh yeah and but you're really into crypto and crypto's like you're livelihood in the US well you've just become a single issue voter right the Democrats don't seem to be a progressive on crypto at all they are praising a regulatory body in the SEC they're praising genslar for doing a good job when all the evidence points to the contrary right that they're doing a terrible job at uh even giving any guidance or anything for crypto uh and then you become a single issue voter so let's say that you're obviously your whole livelihood is crypto but there but um you know you're gonna have to if you

want something to change you're going to have to vote Republican but let's say you align more with Democratic social policies for example right so this is again a a really shitty thing about the two-party system in the U.S uh where essentially you have to choose between two shitty outcomes but in saying that uh as I said like even though a lot of it is is theater it does translate into votes it does translate into policy it's just a slow moving machine so I really do appreciate the grilling that these people gave um gave gensla I really appreciate that it wasn't just like the Democrats there just you know and praising guns love for all the apparent good work that he's been doing it was the Republicans actually uh saying hey you're doing a really job because of this this and this reason and we are um uh you know we

are looking to uh basically uh get answers to this and he didn't give them answers now on that note as well there was um I don't know if it was Warren Davidson or no it was uh it was Tom Emma here uh no no I think it's Warren one of them introduced a bill uh to remove gensla I believe I don't know if it was uh Warren Davidson or um or Tom Emma there's two clips here which I'll link in the YouTube description below of them also grilling gensla about his uh he's I guess like shitty work within the crypto ecosystem here and you can watch both of those clips um but yeah they were on fire honestly like Tom got me fired up watching him go uh basically um Grill genslick here and honestly it was a bit of uh of a funny

thing for people in crypto obviously Gary Gensler is like one of the Public Enemies or one of the biggest Public Enemies for crypto because he's not really doing anything positive for crypto at all and we all know we can all see what uh all the negative stuff that he's doing so to see him be you know actually ask the questions that we ask on crypto Twitter like people reply to Gary ganzo's tweets we know he's not going to see them but we reply to those tweets with certain questions and certain remarks and to see those remarks and questions repeated by these uh by these various politicians was uh was really refreshing and it wasn't like it was buried deep in the hearing either the video that I shared here from Mr McHenry happened very very quickly I believe in maybe the first 20 or 30 minutes of of the hearing

so it wasn't hours into the hearing or anything and They Came Out Swinging they really came out I almost was getting the feeling that McHenry was like an eighth Maxi because he was going he was asking gensla so bluntly it's like is eth a security or a commodity and that's exactly what I would ask him if I got into a room with Gary again's line he had to answer my questions I would say I would ask him he's like is it is ether security or a commodity in your view and the fact that he kept deflecting and couldn't couldn't answer speaks volumes right speaks volumes about what um the SEC and Gary ganza's approach to regulating is and what it basically is is regulation via enforcement and also having this kind of like schroding schroding as cat approach to regulation where um you know it when when they're

observing something it's potentially a security when they're not observing it it's potentially not a security or it's a potentially a commodity or it's not a commodity right so this is just a really really way to regulate uh not only crypto but financial markets in general so I'm hoping that this hearing can lead to more positive action here can lead to more clarity but as I said I'm not holding my breath because there's really only two ways that Gensler can be removed I mean there's that third way where you can introduce a bill that gets voted on to remove him but I'm not I'm not across the actual specifics of that but I would assume that it would require a majority of Congress to vote on that and then for it to pass and it's not going to happen because the Democrats aren't going to vote for it right and

the Republicans vote for it and then then there's like a tie breaker that ends up happening or maybe it's just too much one way to another way so yeah I'm not holding my breath for that there but if you want to have a bit of enjoyment watching Gensler get grilled after being so hostile towards crypto and not just grilled for the sake of it but good with facts you can watch these videos from uh Mr McHenry here Warren Davidson and and Tom Emma which I'll link in the YouTube description below and last thing on the on that on that um that hearing uh Phil Diane here from flashbots put out a tweet where he said SEC chair Gary gensla says he doesn't see the opportunity in crypto go for small businesses how about the fact that an 18 year old kid can walk into the community

discussion underlying a 250 billion dollar Financial system and be an equal at the table does Goldman Sachs provide that and this is something that I don't think gets talked about enough within the crypto ecosystem especially within the ethereum ecosystem it's a merit-based system right it's a meritocracy or at least it tries to be obviously nothing's perfect but ethereum really tries to be a meritocracy so what that means is that exactly as Phil says here anyone can basically walk into a community discussion on the research side on the development side and wherever and give their ideas and be listened to as long as those ideas are good there are plenty of examples of anons in this industry that build successful products that do all the great research that do a do a lot of

great uh writing I mean just to pick one off the top of my head polinaya right does a lot of great writing and research on crypto has has has mastered a huge following and um has coined a few different terms and popularize the the modular framework and things like that and they're completely Anon I mean I I don't know who they are I I don't think um most if not all people know who they are right and even when they did uh interviews and things like that they protect their anonymity there so there are various examples of of these types of people that can come into this industry and make a huge impact you can't do that at Goldman Sachs you can't do that at any pretty much any centralized financial institution uh let alone maybe it's centralized institutions in general so that is a

superpower that we have in this industry uh and what's what's even cooler about this is that anyone can submit an EIP so if you think that you have something that could improve the ethereum network at the protocol level well you submit an IP you get it reviewed by by various people you talk about it to various people you do the research and and maybe it gets included one day right you can have a profound effect on a 250 billion dollar Financial system and just to pluck another example out of my head of where this has happened before um Eric Connor my uh my my good friend and co-founder of ether but a lot of you will know who he is of course um a lot of you would have listened to the Into The Ether podcast back in the day he was actually a co-author for

eip1559 and he was uh I mean not to undersell the work that he's done for the ethereum ecosystem but he was an ethereum Community member right he didn't work for the ethereum foundation he didn't he worked at uh at gnosis um which is uh which is an app app player project right he didn't he didn't um uh he wasn't part of the core devs or anything like that he was a regular Community member that kind of worked in the industry that was like Hey erp1559 is awesome you know I'm gonna and then ended up co-authoring it with I believe italic and I think there was a couple others on there comment remember exactly who they were uh and then two and a half years later that EIP went into the network and that's there forever now uh well unless it changes far into the future but we obviously don't think it's

going to change so that kind of profound effect can't have that anywhere else so great tweet here from from Phil Diane uh I believe all right moving on to staking so stakewise V3 has shared an update they say here with chappella officially a success it's time to focus on what comes next for stakewise introducing the road to mainnet for stakewise V3 and uh let's dive in here now I've been talking about stakewise V3 for quite a while now about how you can spin up your own Vault whether you spin up your own private Vault or your public Vault you can mint an LST called OS eth so this basically gives the ability for solo stakers uh or people that are Solo staking to Mint a LST against their their uh their e-stake in a private Vault if they would like to

um and then there are public vaults as well which can basically make anyone into a Lido operator for example right we're essentially to be a lighter operator right now you have to be voted in uh by the the lighter community and it's a permission process whereas at stakewise V3 it's completely permissionless anyone can set up a vault and start getting people sending eth to them and then stake on their behalf which I find very very cool now our stakewise has shared this road to mainnet uh roadmap here that you can that you can see there's a bunch of different Milestones here about when this is going to happen obviously the last part before mainnet launch is a dow vote but I believe they are very close now because they're at the Pacific Public test net for stakewise V3 second

round of audits and patching so they're basically almost at the finish line here with getting this thing launched and I'm super excited for it as I've said plenty of times on the refill before I am planning to spin up my own V3 Vault my own public Vault for the daily Gray community that you can stake with if you would like to and I'll take a small Commission of five to ten percent and that commission will be going towards funding public goods on ethereum uh protocol Guild git coin maybe a few other things out there if I come across them I don't want to send it all to just one thing I mean I I've donated a lot to the protocol Guild so far I think with my rocketpool rewards and the uh first year anniversary um uh uh uh proceeds for the nft that we

that we did I think I've donated maybe 200 000 plus US dollars so far to the protocol Guild so I want to spread that love around I want to spread that to to get coin grants and to other organizations so I'll be looking into that uh as um as I uh after I launched the actual pool here but that's something that I'm definitely very much looking forward to and of course I'm looking forward to stakeways V3 going live because it's another decentralized staking service that uh can take market share away from the centralized ones obviously the we have rocket pool live already which I'm going to talk about in a sec but I I want more than rockapool right like I love rocketpool but I want more than them I don't want to just have uh rockable being the only decentralized staking service out there we need many

and that's not to say that all of them are going to succeed all of them are going to be massive but I would love to see at least two or three of these things preferably preferably three uh of these things having five plus percent uh market share at least on the ethereum um uh Beacon chain I would love to see that just at least in the foreseeable future obviously as time goes on I would love to see the decentralized pools be uh the biggest on the network um uh and and obviously next to solo staking but and the centralized ones be smaller but we'll have to see how it all plays out with the great reshuffling over the next year or two yeah uh but yeah you can go check out stakewise's latest update I'll link it in the YouTube description below and speaking of Rocket pool so uh Rock the rockable

Twitter account tweeted out saying the Flawless launch of Atlas has been a resounding success it marks are great step forward in rockapool's mission to reduce barriers to entry for permissionless staking on ethereum and contribute to its decentralization 28 000 new eth has been staked with 1 000 new Mini pools launched and Jasper also put out some stats saying that in 28 hours and this was in 28 hours to 1pm which is about 10 hours ago now uh 16 480 eighth in staking mini pools seven over seventeen thousand eight in pending mini pools which means that uh over 33 000 eth has been staked uh with rocket pool uh in just the 28 hours since Atlas went live which is obviously a huge milestone here uh for for rocker

pool now this is very cool because as you can see in the comments as well how many net new node operators were spun up there was there was 21 net new nerd operators you want to see that number keep going up right but it's great to see that there's been a massive inflow of each stake into a decentralized service maybe I don't know exactly where this has come from it might have come from uh uh it might have come from centralized exchanges like Kraken obviously being forced to unstake uh it kind of come from lighter and those people sold their Ste for eat and then go and go into rockapool obviously because later doesn't have withdrawals enabled yet it um it could come from binance and coinbase as well uh but uh yeah it could come from anywhere quicker from new stakers coming in because an

eight eighth mini pool is something that they can they can be a part of now or that R8 premium are kind of I think the RS premium has collapsed I believe uh so that more people can get involved with it so so yeah I mean rockables just had amazing growth over the last uh I guess it was coming up on probably 48 hours by the time you watch this video and it's great to see the atlas upgrade has gone off without a hitch I'm planning to convert my mini pools um to eight eighth mini pools very soon I want to add a few more as I've said before I technically I'm going to be adding four new Mini pools to get to 20 because I wanted to get to 10 uh 16th mini pools but now it's going to be eight either mini pool so I'm going to get to 20 there and keep

adding as as time goes on but honestly if uh you you've been sitting on the fence about getting started here and you have the necessary eth required it is so easy to get started as I've said in the past you don't need powerful Hardware um and the smart and rockable smart node stack is very very easy to use uh and I mean I think it's the easiest way to stake honestly on your own obviously the easiest way to stake I I mean for better or worse is just putting your um uh your coins on a centralized exchange and staking with with coinbase or something or trading your eighth for for our wreath but uh in terms of kind of like running the actual software yourself I would definitely say that rocketpool is by far the easiest way right now it's easier than solos staking that's for

sure it's always taking with like a Dap node or a Novato is pretty easy uh but I wouldn't say I would say the smart note stack is probably probably easier than that but that's a close second in terms of like just solo sticking on your own we're setting it up all on your own it is definitely harder than than setting up a smart note stack so this is definitely something that anyone with the required eighth should look into because I'm sure that uh you if you have the required eighth you would be able to get the required hardware as well which as I've said before you can get the required hardware for like 500 US Dollars uh it's not that much that you would have to spend to do that and then you can start earning rewards on your e-stakes start earning RPL rewards as

well um and uh and start contributing to the security of the ethereum network all right Julian here has put out an update on vertical trees so it starts off the Tweet thread by saying what's up with vertical trees we've been working on the com conversion from the current Merkle tree to a vertical tree this is a challenging problem because the amount of data is huge it doesn't find in Ram and needs at least a day for the transaction translation to complete on a beefy uh machine and then it continues by saying to this end the unwavering parathosh and myself have Revisited the options and dumped out thoughts in these documents which is a document titled vocal transition so if you're interested in learning about the bleeding edge of the vertical tree transition going from

Merkle trees to Vertical trees and what that will possibly look like you should definitely give this document a read it is quite technical if you don't know what I'm talking about in terms of Merkle trees and vertical trees then it might not be something that you will uh that you'll be able to understand but probably still suggest worth reading it uh just to get some extra context around this and there's also a thread here from Julian where he summarizes this as well so that might be something that they'll be easier for you to understand there but great to see the progress uh being made here now for those of you who don't know who this person is they are a Geth core depth at the ethereum foundation so they're not just some uh some some random person talking about vertical trees they are pretty much one of the

main people working on this so uh there's not there's there's really probably no one better to to get the information from uh than than someone like him here so yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to go check out all right something I came across uh recently was uh this kind of app called family so uh family they they say here they've captioned this video here with family is it is great at simplifying complex processes as shown in this real swap example that leverages the power of Xerox in the background each step seamlessly transitions into the next providing clear visibility at every stage of the process so basically what they're showing here is a really easy to use interface for swapping tokens uh with zero zero X

being used in the background so you can see here they're swapping eth for usdc which of course is sacrilege you should never do that um but they're stopping it they're confirming it on your iPhone with face ID and then it's all done there very very easily now I've talked about you know all this abstraction that's happening on on the wallet level and how it's becoming more and more abstracted over time uh but it's great to see another player enter The Fray here I believe family is actually a a new wallet that's been launched here um yes the self-custody crypto wallet you'll love so yeah this is something that you can go check out for yourself I don't know no it's not live yet so you can go check out the website and things but it's it's a it's it's arriving this year and I think that they're going with

the goal of being the most quote unquote normally friendly wallet out there um and I guess there's nothing wrong with more and more Nomi friendly while it's going live I think that there are a lot of wallets already but at the end of the day the the thing with wallets is that one you need to win on ux because winning on fees uh is not really an option because fees are just going to Trend to zero over time so you really do need to win on ux and then once you can get people into the front door there you can charge people or make money off of them in in other ways you don't necessarily have to charge them fees but you can do things like payment for order flow in the background which is used in tradfi uh which is basically Mev we call

it me being in crypto but it's basically the same thing um there's value added Services all that sorts of stuff so capturing that that kind of Market is definitely uh is definitely a lucrative if you can do it but yeah as I said you can go check out family just something I came across that I wanted to highlight for you guys I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right last up here is something uh that yq has announced so they've launched uh something called ethgpt.org which is a GPT powered chat bot for up-to-date ethereum information uh they say here we've taken solidity GPT to the next level by integrating resources like Geth and eth research keeping you informed uh and then there's a GitHub repository here so I don't know if this is going to replace me as your

source of ethereum information I hope it doesn't but this is very cool because you can type in any question you want I assume and get uh I guess like information about it so let's type in uh they've got an example here of what's uh the Shanghai shapala upgrade so let's just type that in and see what answer they give us here and how fast it happens uh so it's just thinking right now it's still thinking still thinking I don't know if this is going to be too slow for it to be captured on video here but essentially it's using uh uh the chat GPT technology or open ai's uh kind of Technology here to to run this in the background and to give answers and it's going quite slow I think maybe they've rate limited rate limited it because so many people have been interacting with

it um but let's let's let that cook for a little bit I believe yq continues in this thread with more information on this as well as linking to a GitHub repository that you can go check out for yourself as well uh and actually I'll go to the GitHub repository and see what's on there right now yeah it just basically explains what this is it has the code there uh and you can clone it locally and run it all locally I believe as well and get an API key um which is pretty cool but yeah this doesn't seem to be processing right now still waiting for a response unfortunately so not sure if their rate limited it or what's going on there but you can definitely go check this out I'll link in the YouTube description below but this kind of stuff is very cool I I remember I showcased a couple

of weeks ago there was a service that I think was called crypto feeds that had indexed all of the daily gray episodes on on the podcast and basically you can search uh on there for anything that you wanted and it would highlight where I talked about it on the daily way so that's very very cool and and a really cool way of finding things out previously previously spoken about and I've actually used it a few times when people ask me hey you know when did you speak about this or do you have the link for when you spoke about that and and I quickly find it using that tool um and uh as I said that tool I don't know if I have it uh have it handy with me right now I think I bookmarked it I'm just going to go over here and check uh

yeah Queen feeds here we go it's this website here that I showed it's it's doing a similar thing so coin feeds uh and I asked that what is Mev and as you can see it pops up with a bunch of responses from my own episodes here so I'll link this in the YouTube description uh below as well for you to check out um just in case you haven't seen this before uh but this one you know this this new one here 8th GPT still loading it's not it's probably not going to do so in time for the for the video yeah sorry about that but you can of course check it out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below now I got a couple of minutes here just something that I wanted to quickly uh say I have been seeing all your DMs

about the firecaster invites that I offered to you guys I ran out ran out of invites like two days ago I had so many DMS and I only had 65 invites so I gave them on the first come first serve basis if I haven't gotten to yet apologies I will leave your DMs there and I will get to you once I get more invites I've already asked for them not sure if I'm gonna get them or not but hopefully I do and I'll get back to you uh through the DMS now please if you want firecast to invite you can still feel free to DM me as I said I don't have invites right now but when I do get them I'll be sure to get back to you but but please when you message me just message me your email straight away so I can quickly do it

without having to ask you for your email I had to do that quite a few times and it just slows things down um and and um so yeah just when you message me say hey can I please have a podcast invite and then put your email there and I'll invite you I only need your email for the invite I'm not storing it or anything like that I'm just doing it so I can invite you to the service there and please only uh DM me on on Twitter or on Discord uh you're probably gonna get a response faster on Discord because Twitter is full of spam so so yeah just want to make that very clear for people who've been trying to get an invite uh but I'll let you guys know when I have more invites available uh once I've gone through the backlog once I get the invites but anyway on

that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone