Gitcoin Grants live, stablecoin news and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #7 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the last 24 hours in the ethereum ecosystem and going over the latest news in the cryptocurrency space as a whole i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 3rd of december 2020 so there's a few big things to talk about today uh there's a bit of stable coin regulation going on uh and a bit of more positive things on the stablecoin side as well but before we jump into that i wanted to give a quick market update of course now we can see here at time of recording eighth has actually over the last i think three hours or so uh started to move up again it's back above 600 it's at about 615 dollars uh and it is still going up so you know this is really positive to see

as i as i've been saying right every day now i expected the the uptrend to continue and that's exactly what we're seeing here i'm going to be interested to see what happens over the next few weeks as we approach you know the holiday period people are probably going to be home more talking to family you know maybe maybe they um they they all buy because one one member of the family's like really into crypto right and says hey you should buy some some bitcoin or buy some eath and uh you know because it's going up or whatever it's funny i actually had uh uh someone made a comment to me yesterday it's like oh it's going up again like like someone that's not in crypto obviously i'm like yeah yeah it's it's it's going well uh and like litecoin as well and i'm like yeah yeah they usually go up

together and you know i kind of died a little inside when i said that because it's like you know why do they all go up together right it should be going up on its own but you know this is crypto and unfortunately the fundamentals don't matter as much as we want them to right when it comes to prices you just need to look at the top 10 uh by market cap to see that in action so but is what it is people are going to make money where they're going to make money and you know not much we can do but i know where you know i pack my money obviously in eighth as i have for years now so yeah very encouraged to see that going up there you know bitcoin's going up as well right if we we pivot over to the bitcoin

chart here uh it's it's you know it's back up above 19 000. it's at about 19.5 at time of recording anything over 19.5 is basically the last cycle's all-time high so you know people thought that 20k was the all-time high but in general it varied from exchange to exchange you know the 20k price was literally like a touch for like maybe a few minutes and then it dumped off that and never went back there so you can consider anything above 19.5 kind of all-time high on bitcoin will we see another re-test here will we see another dump because you know people are selling it all-time high who knows um we've already done it twice uh and actually the last cycle uh that bitcoin went to all-time high again when it was like 1100 was its last all-time

high uh it actually rejected it twice and fell a lot stronger than it did this time the first time it felt like 30 percent so if bitcoin was to fall 30 from 20k i think that's like 14k or something so will we see that i'm not sure it doesn't seem like we will you know we dumped down to 16k the other day and then straight back up right as there's just a lot of strength in the market right now so very curious to see where what happens when bitcoin touches 20k again as that's like the psychological level that people look at and they're like you know oh well it's 20k and maybe a good time to sell because everyone else is gonna sell and it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy so to speak d5 on the other hand is doing well as well as i mentioned yesterday

d5 to me is gonna follow eth right it's going up d5 is going to follow it uh i think that is playing out nicely you know tokens like wi-fi got back over 30k you know 30k has a pivotal thing for for wi-fi and that's just kind of like following eth up uh as well um i do think that if bitcoin rages up so if it like passes 20k and goes to like 25k or something you know eth and the and the d5 tokens and all the other coins are just going to bleed into bitcoin again um so they'll kind of be flat maybe against us dollar us dollars but on the ratio charts they're just gonna bleed but uh as i've said i think december is a big month for ethan d5 so hopefully that kind of um continues and we can see some continued growth

there all right so today bitcoin grants round eight starts or yesterday i think it is uh for most people so uh for those of you who aren't aware bitcoin grants is a platform that you can actually donate to your favorite projects and it'll get matched by a kind of matching funds so this time around there is one million dollars worth of matching funds up uh for grabs i think they've got 500k matching already but they're trying to get to one million this round and you know i think they're they're almost there um from what i've been hearing which is really really cool so yeah all you have to do is go to get coin dot co slash grants you can load this up here you can see the nice banner up the top

with all the sponsors here it's really cool to see the exchanges in this like binance and kraken right you know they're not actually typically ethereum friendly exchanges uh you know kraken's typically a bitcoin a bitcoin kind of friendly exchange and binance is i guess like you know how they have their own chain and they like do everything so it's not like you know they're eth maxis or whatever um but cool to see those those kind of uh those kind of entities sponsoring this round and then we have uh you know balancer labs here we have wiring here like return kind of entrance synthetics of course and the ethereum foundation of course as well but each round we've just been getting more and more donors here which is really really awesome to see so kudos to those teams and those institutions for doing this

so yeah if you scroll down here you can basically see you know all the grants like uh in i mean for those of you listening you won't see this but basically there's different categories here so there's an infrastructure category a community category a dapper category category and then a few like seasonal categories um you know the community category basically consists of uh you know a lot of the the ethereum media so to speak so uh bankless uh the daily gray of course uh ethub um you know on that note if you did want to support the daily grade this is the best way to do so all you have to do is go to my git coin grant on git coin you can just search it on the search bar the daily gray you'll find it uh and then you go check out check that out there and and the the mat

the way the matching round works is it's quadratically matched which means that uh depending on how many people donate to a specific grant the the the funds can be matched by up to 200 times so if you donate one die it becomes 200 worth of matching so it gives basically people much more of a voice and lets them donate to a lot more projects if they maybe only have a hundred dollars to give and have that amplified a lot a lot more so very cool system uh and it's very easy to do as well you just have to go on here with your metamask you can either do it on layer one or layer two they have a solution for layer two with zk swap uh which is really cool as well so yeah uh and don't you know obviously community is is what i'm a part of and the grant what

my grant is a part of but go check out all the other categories especially infra and dap like in the infra category if we click here the infrastructure category and we you know we wait for them to load here we go there is a bunch of stuff in here that you kind of need to donate to in my eyes like this is the stuff that is not monetizable but it's critical right so you have stuff like uh ben eddington's edgington sorry uh annotated specification of ethereum 2.0 that's that's critical work right we want people to be under be able to understand the eth2 spec uh we have like the nimbus client here ethereum on arm uh you know turbo geth dap node um there's there's a bunch more i think if we scroll across here at the top we can

see uh these are things that yeah as i said very hard to monetize so they need all the help they can get but very important infrastructure so go check that them out as well and then finally at the top here we you have categories or carts that people have put together so i've actually got one so called sassel's cart of love um it's got 42 different grants in here so if you don't know what to pick you can literally just add my collection to your cart and then it'll automatically donate to all of those projects uh you know and you can select how much you want to go to each of the projects or you can just scroll through the grants that are in this collection and add the ones that you want to donate to to your cart as well so you don't have

to copy my card or someone else's cart you can just use it as kind of like a curation mechanism where you where you see you know what i've kind of like put uh belief in and what i think is worth funding and kind of like copy me like that i haven't updated it yet for this round so i'm probably going to add more to it here um but i've basically been a part of every bitcoin round you know um tried to donate every time uh and obviously i have my own grants there like the ether one and the daily guay uh but i think every round people should be donating uh you know i i think you know no matter what you you kind of have you should be donating it and it can actually be favorable on your tax as well now insult your tax professional for this

don't listen to me on this but from from my reading because it's a it's a donation you can actually claim it as a donation on your tax and you get some favorable tax treatment but it depends on your jurisdiction wherever you are in the world i'm in australia probably totally different tax laws to someone in europe for example so definitely consult your tax provider before doing it as like a tax advantage thing but even if you can't get a kind of tax discount or tax benefits from this just donate anyway like it's just i mean it makes you feel good you know you're doing something great you're giving back especially if you made money in d5 summer you know it's it feels good to give back so i i can't encourage it enough and you don't have to donate to uh the daily grail ether or anything

like that you can donate you don't have to donate to anyone really no one shames you into donating to anyone you can donate to who you want to and that's the best bit about it i think all right oh gotta get rid of this uh so yeah there's a so one inch the dex aggregator everyone knows one inch um i i presume uh it basically aggregates across a bunch of decentralized exchanges and gives you the best price so it says here that they've raised 12 million dollars in a soft sale which is a soft stands for simple agreement for future tokens this agreement is basically just a legal document that allows teams to raise with a promise that in the future you know they're going to pay out tokens to their investors so this was uh i think this was led by

um where was this led by one inch round okay was led by pantera capital who is a pretty old investment fund within crypto one of the first i think they've been around for a while uh with participation from parify capital which is a heavy d5 fund uh blockchain capital again been around for a while nima capital spartan capital securities among among others as well so some big names on there that they're raising from uh and obviously one inch is going to have a token coming out soon enough uh but yeah this this is a pretty big cash injection right 12 million dollars is is is huge uh that's going to give them they've got a team of 28 that's going to give them a lot of runway now so cool to see that happening at the same time they now have

competition as well there are a bunch of other dex aggregators out there so you know it remains to be seen how this pans out i think aggregators are are going to become more and more of a hot thing uh in the future especially as we have like all these liquidity pools sitting on ethereum that you know people want to aggregate that right you can get the best price by aggregating it so curious to see how this plays out uh and full disclosure i am an investor in a competitor to one inch i guess you could call them which uh decks.ag which is now called slingshot uh i'm an investor in that so just full disclosure there but again i i mean i i don't think there's any winners yet i think there's just tons of competition now uh i use one you know i tend to use

whatever kind of aggregator that i get the best price on so um yeah and i've been using one inch for a long time as well they've been around for ages and you know i really liked recently they actually refreshed their their front end for those who haven't seen it if i go to one inch here um just quickly to show those viewing uh once it loads up i think there we go uh yeah there we go sorry this used to be totally different this interface here and it's much nicer now so you know obviously they're gearing up to professionalize more with this with this new money i'm curious to see what other features they have coming uh but yeah congrats to the team on raising that money there quick announcement from andre yesterday

so andre's keeper network which i've spoken about before has uh basically it allows kind of it's trying to decentralize keeper functions now for those who don't know what keeper functions are it's basically hitting different functions on on smart contracts to do different things so doing a function to liquidate someone's position on compound is something that a keeper would do for example so just a very basic example but these functions are everywhere and they do require manual calling on the smart contract anyone can call them but it require yeah it requires you to do it manually so this post from andre basically announced that they're going to be scaling keeper using chain links oracles andre has not been shy about his fanaticism for

not fanaticism but like he is a fan of chain link's kind of infrastructure and their oracles they're highly secure always available and fault tolerant as as he kind of describes here so yeah he's going to be using that within keeper to scale it up and scale up their operations the blog post i'll link in the show notes of course you can go give it a read but i just wanted to make a quick note about that one as well uh which looks to be pretty cool all right on to i guess there's two bits big pieces of news i'm gonna discuss today this is the first bit so visa is kind of partnering up with usdc or center or circle the issuer of usdc uh to basically uh do a variety of things i think what i don't

think goes into too much detail about what they're going to be doing but i think they're going to be working with usdc to do a bunch of different things uh with uh with you know on ethereum right because usdc is on ethereum so i think this is part of the innovation arm at visa i think they want to try and get ahead of you know what this kind of stable coin ecosystem is doing and growing into um i'm not you know sure where this is going to go you know you can basically i mean you know if visa wants to you know make this really big they could basically say anyone with a visa card could spend usdc right that's just huge uh and you know they could do that from their private database for example they don't even

have to use the ethereum blockchain to do this because you know obviously the transaction fees are high they can basically just have usdc in a in a um in a bank account uh sorry not in a bank account in their database as like an entry in their own ethereum account and then they can just let you spend it on like your visa card and just transfer it between merchants and things like that and obviously they can do it on on the ethereum chain as well and move and move coins around so pretty big news it's a pretty kind of lengthy post here so i'm going to link that so you can go read it obviously i'm not going to read it on the on the video here but yeah that was uh the the i guess i think i would call it the second biggest news let's do with stable

coins the first piece of biggest news was that there's some new legislation that has been kind of published a new bill by some lawmakers in the us that aims to basically require stable coin issuers to secure bank charters and either obtain fdic insurance or maintain full reserves to operate in the u.s this is some heavy-handed regulation that's for sure and from the comments that we saw on twitter today which i'll go through soon from the people who propose this bill and from the people who supported it they do not understand ethereum they do not understand stable coins this to me and i made a tweet about it here is all

zuck's fault so mike zuckerberg because what facebook did as everyone knows is they introduced libra like a few months ago right and that caught regulators attention they didn't like it they're like what the hell are you guys doing like what what is facebook do you trying to issue your own currency uh when you know they're obviously issuing a stable coin peg to the us dollar but they could maybe issue their own currency down the line so that's why regulators are now laser focused on this if i was to bet all of the representatives here and the people involved with the bill uh if i was to ask them how to make a die work for example i don't think i'd be able to get an answer out of pretty much a majority of them uh if i had to ask them to name all the stable coins on ethereum

they could probably only name usdc and libra for example the most popular ones and maybe tether so there was a lot of heated debate around this on twitter today you know you can see here uh this this uh assistant professor rohan gray he you know to his credit he was replying to people but man he had some really poor takes on this so he starts this threat on twitter off where uh basically this is in the middle of a thread there's a lot going on here i'll link it so you can you can go check it out yourself but basically he he's asked the question how do you intend to police nearly 9 000 globally dispersed ethereum nodes that don't have the capacity capacity to selectively identify and filter illegal contracts

because the context is that he was saying that you know people running these smart contracts uh illegally that don't have like you know fdic insurance and aren't registered or whatever with the legal system uh we're going to regulate that and then uh rohan goes on to say there's a simple solution to this uh the val the um the nodes just can choose to not validate blocks that contain deposit contracts and he was kind of i think he was kind of referring to uh i don't know what he was referring to with stable uh sorry deposit contracts here but it was just like a weird comment and then jacob franek here kind of like said that this would be equivalent to holding all isps liable for all activity happening on the internet it's dangerously broad and displays a

profound lack of understanding of how the technology works please educate yourself this does right you you can't a full node uh by definition cannot selectively filter what it wants to verify right you can't just say hey um i don't want to verify this transaction here uh ignore it whatever that that's not this is not how it works right uh miners if they colluded could do this right this is where kind of 51 attacks come into it but that's a whole other kettle of fish right that's got nothing to do with this so basically the point here is that this is unenforceable this is a regulation if it goes through and goes into law it's completely unenforceable it would it would it would um force all of the

companies in the u.s that are building protocols that have to abide by these rules to just leave the us i i don't see a universe what you know why that would actually stay uh in the us you know once this goes through it stifles so much innovation uh you know and then rohan goes on to say no like he's disagreeing with jacob's comment here and he says no it's holding actors who engage in banking liable for engaging in banking which is which is beyond silly right like people running full nodes are not engaging in banking they have no control over what goes through their full node the network is neutral right anyone from anywhere can send transactions and it could be for whatever purpose

i can send a transaction to buy drugs if i want to you know not that i'm doing that but i could do that right no one can stop me if i'm using a decentralized asset no one can stop me from doing that uh you know and in the same vein i can purchase something legal as well using a stablecoin or any other token on ethereum so again jacob goes on and i mean the ratios here are just incredible right for those who don't know a ratio is when your comment uh gets more likes than uh than the one you're replying to so rohan's comment got zero likes but jacob's got 68 so that's a pretty epic ratio right um and and then this this conversation goes on for a while uh it's it's really weird um you know dc investor says here it's like it's a

global network are you trying to regulate everyone you know how can how can you like the us doesn't have legal reach in every single jurisdiction right uh yes it does in some others that aren't the us because they're allied but good luck you know getting china to listen to the u.s right if someone's running a theorem full node in china or in russia or something like that so yeah generally this is just so unenforceable right uh and you know there's some other silly kind of logic behind this as well so the congresswoman who's leading this charge uh rasheeda to labe i think that's how you say her last name um was basically saying that they're doing this uh as well to basically prevent cryptocurrency providers from repeating the crimes against uh low

inc low and moderate income residents of collage traditional big banks have uh you know um have kind of like done these crimes against them basically disenfranchised them from using stable coins and then channeling god ratios the hell out of her here um by saying how exactly have stable coins disenfranchised low-income people or people of color in fact they've done the exact opposite by providing equal access to financial services regardless of who you are this bill will do exactly the opposite of what you're saying it will please educate yourself i just love the the last thing there please educate yourself right it's just repeating the pattern but he's exactly right like what i don't i i just this is this is such a

mind-boggling thing for me because basically what uh the congresswoman is saying is that blockchains can be racist right or people who kind of like issue stable coins can be racist like how right i could be no not i mean i'm obviously white right um but you know i could it just as easily be another race and you would have no idea because my ethereum address is not tied to my real life identity unless i somehow dox myself i can do it anonymously right um and not just on that front like why would the stablecoin issue issuers do this right it's just bad not only is it bad business but it's just like it doesn't make any sense like i'm actually have like you can probably hear to my voice i'm struggling

to kind of reason about this at all because it's so insane that someone would actually use this as a reason for regulating stablecoin issuers the fact that they're saying that you know we're going to repeat the same crimes that banks have are you serious like what we're building here is bankless technology this doesn't require a bank it's decentralized no one can control it right if you're using the right assets obviously if you're using usdc you know you're under the purview of coinbase and circle and all that but again coinbase and circle aren't monitoring the blockchain tying people's ethereum addresses to their identity and then saying oh this person is you know this race we're not going to let them use usdc anymore right that hasn't happened i i highly

doubt that's ever going to happen it's just so insanely just dumb right if i'm if i'm being honest so you know maybe enough on that one i just i don't i don't know what's going on here i i really i mean it's funny because my evolution through the political kind of spectrum has been funny over the years as i've been more in crypto i used to be what you could call hardcore left right i was all for like you know regulate everything it's it's great you know people can't be trusted whatever but you know that was maybe when i was in my younger years and i was i was i was less mature than i am today but the more i see of these like really dumb financial regulations because it's particularly in the financial space the more i just you know i go towards

the center right of the political spectrum and uh the more i believe that like most financial regulations are just complete crap right it's just a way to control people uh because it doesn't protect anyone right uh you know who who did the what did the financial regulations protect against in 2008 in that crash right um you know i just i mean i'm not going to go into a whole kind of tirade about this but this is what cryptocurrency is built on the fundamental things is that we can't trust the banks we can't trust the governments they're not doing what's been our best interest we're just going to go around you right and you know if this i i mean i highly doubt this bill goes into law but if it did good luck good luck good luck in forcing this it's like trying to influence

enforce copyright infringement it's just not going to happen you know it's it's unenforceable fundamentally so yeah i mean for those of you who saw this on twitter today i would just say that there's not much to worry about here i really don't think this is going to go through but just be aware that there are people in power who hold these insane views and who think maybe they think they're doing the right thing but they're uneducated it's our job to educate them of course but some of them don't want to be educated some of them just want to push through what they think is the right thing to do and as i say the road to hell is paved with good intentions right so we'll be keeping an eye on this i'll be keeping an eye on this i think following regulations around define

general is probably a good use of your time because uh some of these are going to get through some of these regulations are going to get through and they're going to be heavy-handed we're going to have to deal with them you know the prices of certain assets might crash because of it people will leave their country because of it it's going to get it's going to get gnarly right it's going to get ugly over the next couple decades i reckon because we are fundamentally disrupting all these institutions and in a decentralized way and we've seen what happens when you do that right people do not like that the incumbents do not like that uh copyright you know what what happened with the internet is it allowed media to be downloaded by anyone the people at the top hated that right the people in the media companies absolutely hated

that so they tried to fight against it and they've kind of like done so to an extent but yeah i think this is bigger than that because it involves money and anything that involves money is is gonna be you know it's gonna be ugly when you try to regulate it so i'll i'll keep you guys updated on how this goes uh i don't know if we'll hear too much about it going forward you know government moves slower and everything of course but yeah i'll keep you updated on it and there's a few other threads from like lawyers and things like that as well that i wanted to point out quickly um from ruben here he basically kind of says that the stable act which is the act which is the name of the bill is a confused attempt at regulating perceived harms that are not actually

caused by the technology but are ironically inherent in the existing financial systems that current crypto currencies are designed to replace that was exactly what i was just saying right it's just like it's not protecting anyone it's not doing anything good for anyone it is just uh doing the opposite of that so go read ruben's thread here he gives more color i'm not going to read the whole thread um of course but yeah it's it's great to see him chiming in here uh lastly here if you want to support the fight against this uh in in the us um coin center is who you should donate to so you can go to uh what is it coincenter.org donate you can donate whatever you want in btc or eth or

other cryptocurrencies or via credit card and these guys will do the fighting on your behalf they are mainly focused on bitcoin because that's what regulators are kind of like looking at because obviously they don't have time to dive into the nitty-gritty of things but i've seen them pay more attention to stable coins and d5 in general because that's another thing that's fundamentally disruptive and that the the policy makers are going to have their eyes on so coincident is like a think tank that aims to educate these policy makers and make sure none of this bad regulation gets through so i highly recommend donating to coin center if you haven't already all right that's it for this one everyone a little little bit of drama in today's update unfortunately

but that's the way it goes in crypto i hope that you are all uh up to date now with everything that happened uh and a little bit less confused maybe about it i'll link everything in the show notes and the youtube description for you to go check out and don't forget to subscribe to the youtube channel subscribe to the daily newsletter of course and don't forget to donate to get coin grants any other grants that you want to donate to the easiest way to support me of course is on get coin grants at the daily guay and at ethub and yeah i will see everyone tomorrow thanks everyone