Google showing ETH balances, Layer 2 growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #466 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Deadly gray refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host the analysis Center and today the 12th of October 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so there was some news about PayPal that came out of the last few days that I haven't covered yet on the refill because I was just waiting for it to soak a little bit I wanted to see where it ended up here but basically uh PayPal um as you can see here Ian miles um I put to put out this tweet saying PayPal released a press released and a walk back of its threat to find people 2 500 for this information but it still finds people with 2500 for discriminatory and intolerance uh this is the page now it's live and the policy is active so a bit

of context better background here is that a few days ago PayPal put together a new uh I guess line in their terms of service where they basically said that if you're spreading this information they're going to find you 2400 or take 2500 out of your PayPal account now there was confusion around this whether it only applied to your PayPal account balance or that applied to your bank account that was connected to PayPal I don't know what came of that but basically there was a lot of backlash obviously uh and then PayPal walked this back but I mean they didn't walk it back totally this it seems to that they've just kind of changed it to discriminatory and intolerance and rather than disinformation which is still very dystopian I mean I think when looking at this sort of stuff it's

obvious why crypto is and and and is becoming more popular as time goes on is because you see as time goes on that these centralized companies they do things that uh I mean worse than what you would expect them to do like you expect sometimes for these centralized companies to shut people's accounts down for various different reasons or you expect maybe one day for you to get banned for whatever reason and that's bad you know itself and that shitty in of itself but you don't expect them to start taking your money for from you for uh spreading this information or at least what they consider this information because that's the Crux of it really there is an Arbiter of what is this information and what isn't and what is PayPal that Arbiter in this case what

if they get it wrong right are they supposed to be some kind of Kangaroo Court that basically says hey you were spreading disinformation so we're going to take 2500 from your account as a penalty which is just bizarre right I'm obviously very dystopian so enter crypto as the solution to this if you own your own Keys you own your own coins um and not of all crypto is created equal either I'm really only talking about Bitcoin and ethereum here and I'm really only talking about b2c and eighth because at the end of the day we know that there are stable coins such as usdc and usdt that have back doors that essentially allow their issuers to arbitrarily freeze whatever amount wherever it is on ethereum or other chains that they're on so they're not a solution either the solution to this is

building a mindless ecosystem and a truly defy ecosystem but a lot of defy isn't true D5 yet a lot of it tries to say it is but it really isn't and if you're using usdc or usdt for example to escape something like this happening to you well it's only marginally better I wouldn't consider it to be that much better I would actually maybe consider it to be worse in some scenarios because all your usdc could get Frozen even in your own wallet right whereas with with this PayPal thing if even if they're trying to take money from your bank account if your balance is zero or less than what they are trying to take it's not it's not going to work and also you can disconnect your bank account

obviously and things like that right and this sort of stuff it doesn't like when I look at this I I think to myself is this going to hold up in a court of law I I don't think so I mean but I mean PayPal is a big company right going up against them would be quite difficult um but yeah I mean when it comes to protecting yourself from stuff like this it's really only Ethan BTC that you can hold as a truly decentralized crypto asset that's obviously liquid and that you can have relative certainties going to be here for a long long time right so the thing about uh uh what people say you know crypto solves this I hate when people say that for those reasons that I just outlined because you when you say crypto solves this it doesn't I mean 99 of crypto does not solve this it

actually probably makes it worse or makes it worse in other ways whereas there is that one percent that is being built as I said such as Bitcoin and ethereum that is truly decentralized and that he's trying to offer an alternative to people and you know obviously um on chain there's a lot of active Financial activity happening on ethereum people refer to this as like a shadow banking system or a uh I guess parallel banking system now the word Shadow has always got negative connotations attached to it but I don't think it should because it really is a shadow banking system right because it is outside the purview of the traditional Finance system for the most part obviously there are bridges there but it it acts kind of in its own little bubble there and it basically lives in the shadow of the traditional Finance

system because it's much much smaller and it's also I mean you can call it a parallel system because it's also a parallel system but like let's not kid ourselves defy and on-chain finances and anywhere near where it needs to be for a number of different reasons but it still exists it's liquid enough for a lot of people that's the thing like people always say oh it needs to be more liquid I mean yeah okay it's pretty liquid right now for regular people I mean maybe not for Mega whales who need to move around hundreds of millions of dollars but for regular people who are moving around thousands maybe even tens of thousands of dollars the on-chain finance ecosystem is very very liquid for these people uh thanks to those I guess whales in in large part as well but it's there and uh and again I go

back to people saying crypto is the answer uh just because things are liquid just because you're able to use them without kyc doesn't mean that they're not centralized like usdc you can use without kyc but it is super centralized and at any time at any point of the issuer of usdc could choose to arbitrarily freeze your funds just like PayPal can arbitrarily Take 2 500 from your account uh for I guess now discriminatory or intolerance which just is like a whole can of dystopian worms that when you really think about it gets uh gets really dark really really quickly but yeah I just wanted to hide that one explain some context around explain how I view these things obviously I'm in ethereum Maybe not maybe not obviously to to newer listeners and and viewers but if you

know me you know that I'm in ethereum to make the world a Freer place to make sure that people have the freedom to do what they want to do with their financial services with their money because I don't like how I guess centralized the financial system is I mean it's so centralized to the point where it's not bad because it's centralized um like it's not necessarily bad because it's centralized but that's in initialization leads to a lot of negatives uh which we've seen play out over the last few years especially as well so yeah anyway I'm going to move on from that one there's a couple of other big announcements to get to but uh yeah it's uh very I mean very frightening very scary to see this from PayPal but I guess not unexpected all right so Google is now showing

ethereum wallet balances this was pointed out on Twitter yesterday and then the block put out an article showing this but basically I don't think this applies to everywhere in the world with Google I had to open an incognito window to get it to show for me I'm in Australia I think it's maybe only applying to the US right now but essentially if you search for a ethereum wallet address not an ens you have to put the whole address in here it'll come up with a blockchain address uh it's saying that it's a blockchain address but with the ethereum balance and then it links to etherscan here so it's obviously pulling the data from etherscan now this is cool but also I mean it's kind of shitty because I guess it's just another index of everyone's addresses and balances but again that's because we don't have privacy anyway and

ether scan is already indexing this stuff so we really shouldn't expect any privacy there but it's cool to see Google putting their weight behind ethereum even more here because you'll remember that they had a merge countdown going which uh which was very awesome very surprising but a welcome surprise and now they have this wallet a balance here which is which is pretty cool and and the fact that it links to Ether scans really cool as well because it means that Google trusts etherscan as a source for this sort of information and then there were some rumors circulating that uh maybe Google wants to acquire eat the scan and look to be honest I wouldn't put it past them to acquire either scam but this either skin want to be acquired who knows I mean either scan is one of the best things that we have

in the ethereum ecosystem I like that it's not part of any big Corporation any big company but if Google was to acquire it I wouldn't be surprised because if and it fits exactly into what Google does is indexing data right and we should and obviously like there are private things on either scam such as when you log in you can have like watch lists of your addresses and stuff like that and if you signed up within a if you have your name on there or if you have an email address that can tie back to you or that potentially that data could get uh you know integrated with the Google servers which could basically docks your addresses right and docsure docs your real name and your addresses and Link them together and just like what we saw with with the Celsius data leak or data or um uh that spreadsheet

that came out the other day so yeah I mean there are negatives to consider of course with everything but yeah I will have to see I mean as I said these are just rumors there's no confirmation or anything like that but as I said if Google was to acquire etherscan I wouldn't be surprised but very cool to see them having this ethereum balance show up and the fun thing is is that this doesn't apply for Bitcoin so you can't search in a Bitcoin address and have that show up right now maybe they'll add that later but they added ethereum first so people like Google are definitely big ethereum fans uh that's for sure all right so speaking of Google just another announcement so Google and coinbase have partnered up on a plan to offer crypto payments for cloud services so basically you will be able to uh pay

for cloud services from early 2023 using crypto and I'm guessing they're going to be using coinbase's Commerce a service in the background to do this yep yep Columbus's comments product which is really cool because I mean a lot of people use Google cloud services uh and they obviously use Amazon AWS cloud service as well but Google's right up right up there too and a lot of crypto companies use them so you imagine these crypto companies if they're able to pay their cloud service bills in crypto it'll make their accounting a lot easier and drop that friction as well so huge I guess very huge news here and coinbase has been a kind of uh Renaissance over the last year or so they've been doing a lot of really great stuff um they add their documentary come out recently uh the coinbase documentary I

haven't watched it yet from what I've heard it's it's it's pretty good but I mean I can't help but think it's kind of like a PR move which is fine I mean companies do this all the time uh but I think coinbase got a bad rap for a while for a bunch of different mistakes that they made but they seem to be trying to repair their reputation which is which is cool I like that uh but again I mean they're a centralized service they're always going to be a centralized service they play a key role in the ecosystem uh but there are obviously negatives that come with being a centralized service and also being such a visible service I mean they are the world's largest crypto exchange uh in terms of uh sorry the the US's largest crypto exchange the world's largest is binance obviously but

coinbase being in the US they have to trade a much finer line than something like binance does on multiple fronts especially because people consider coinbase to be a flag bearer of this industry I don't think people consider binance to be a flag bearer in the same kind of Calabar uh but coinbase definitely so cool to see them partnering up with Google to offer these services all right another big announcement comes out of France so it turns out ethereum really is the future of France so EDF uh which is a French public electricity company has announced that he's managing over 150 ethereum nodes for itself and customers so nodes here I think should be validators so they're not running 154 nodes they're running 150 uh staking validators but this is really cool guys

like the funny thing about this so there's two major things here one it's a big French public electricity company running ethereum validators and being public about it that's awesome two I mean it makes sense for an electricity company to do this uh because we're on proof of stake now you know they're not going to get attacked for this could you imagine an electricity company being like we're running miners right like we're running uh ethereum miners or Bitcoin miners they probably cop some Flack about that because of all the environmental concerns and also uh people saying oh you're just you know gonna give yourself like cheap electricity in order to mine Bitcoin or ether or whatever I mean there would probably be bad narratives around that but with this there's not obviously because it's running proof of stake and

also uh they get all the good publicity from the ethereum community as well because this is pretty big news and this isn't the first corporate to run ethereum validators it will not be the last I think that so actually I should take a step back here and talk about staking in general for a sec so I think that I mean EDF won't be as I said won't be the last uh won't be the first one but the last sort of thing um but I think that it's funny how the demand for staking hasn't actually gone up very much and I think it's definitely due to the bear Market but I would have expected more eth to be staked post merge because the yields are quite High I mean seven percent ish or six seven percent issue with the fee Revenue going up now so the yields are either

nominated yield is quite high but I think because rates are going up people aren't buying risk assets and rather sit in cash or buy bonds and things like that um and you know to get obviously a quote-unquote risk-free rate or whatever what have you but I'm curious to see what the staking uh I guess like ecosystem looks like in a bull market post withdrawals as well because we may end up having withdrawals before the bull market comes back which is gonna obviously throw another variable into the mix but yeah I mean I wouldn't say I'm disappointed I would say I'm just surprised because of the fact that the yields are so good but I guess it just speaks to how much fear there is right now in the market so many people are just sitting in cash not wanting to buy a new eth to put into staking because I

would suspect that'll you know maybe the eat that's going to staking now the little bits that are trickling in is probably people that uh already have eighth and are just finally staking it but I don't think there'll be many of those because those people have had a long time to stake it so I think that any stake I mean there's already 14 million eighth in there as well so I think that any stake any steak to eat that comes in well most of it will probably come from new purchases but that's probably not going to happen until the market heats up again and we're in this eternal crab range right now which is just it's it's funny how much it reminds me of 2019 especially because right now Devcon is taking place and I remember being at Devcon in Osaka and I mean no one was really talking

about the price or caring about the price back then but I remember I went to to Japan right um and then I stayed in Japan for three weeks and the price of it was pretty much exactly the same as when I left right and when I came back and it's reminding me of what's happening right now where the price of e seems to be just staying around 1300 uh BTC around 1900 to 20K it's like kind of like that range that's happening there so I I mean it makes sense that people are just like flat and they're like oh I'll just buy there's no you know rush to buy eth right now they're probably waiting being like I don't want to buy now because what if it goes down further because of all the macro uncertainty and that plays into how much ethyl gets staked but

we'll see we'll see how that plays out we'll see how that shakes out as time goes on obviously we don't know when the Market's going to come back but I obviously believe that it will uh we're just it's just a timing thing now all right so crypto Spanglish had a really great thread out that they put out yesterday that day came out just after this yesterday's refill so I'm covering it today but basically they start this thread by saying since June when the bear Market hit I've seen some people argue that ethereum is dead due to the record low gas fees instead I'll show you how ethereum is modular and roll-up Centric approach is already a success now you can go read this thread for yourself but there's one chart in particular that I wanted to focus on here that shows uh how l2s are growing

so on this chart basically shows ethereum Armature optimism and roll Ops as a percentage of of the um ethereum layer one transaction so you can see at the top ethereum layer one transactions is uh pretty steady right uh I mean it's it's come down a little bit but it's pretty steady and that's simply because ethereum layer 1 is always congested I've gone through this before on the refuel there's only a certain number of transactions that can fit into there because of the gas limit same is true for layer twos but they have a more scalability than ethereum layer one right now at least I believe Arboretum does I'm not 100 if optimism does but arbitrim definitely does post Nitro optimism would post Bedrock but I'm not sure pre-bred Rock but you can see here that other German optimism has have been

growing and also they've been growing as a percentage so they spiked at about 59 of uh ethereum layer 1 transactions in Q3 uh and then they're about 44 I think right now of of layer 1 transactions and that's growing as you can see here from 11 in June uh at the start of June week one of June to 44 today so this is obviously a very nice way of visualizing that layer twos are growing and I think that people often get the wrong idea about layer twos in that they look at them and they're like oh they're not really growing you know the fear of a news low all these sorts of stuff and I've I've said before that I do obviously believe that fear revenue is a is probably the best metric we have at

measuring growth but there are other ones that you take as well as fear of a new to paint a better picture and that's exactly what crypto Spanglish has done here and on top of the is when you look at Fair Revenue the layer twos aren't going to generate as much fee Revenue as layer 1 ethereum is because they are dictated by layer 1 ethereum so at least right now before Proto dank sharding comes out so let me explain when layer 1 gas fees go up layer 2 gas fees go up why because call data costs four layer twos goes up because they it's part of the ethereum layer 1 gas fee market so if the gas fees are 20 gray on ethereum right which they are right now on layer one then uh the layer 2s will reflect that 20 graph if it's 10 well layer 2

should theoretically cost 50 cheaper now because if you're on there one costs 50 cheaper right so when you look at it like that it makes a lot of sense that obviously layer 2's are never going to generate anywhere near as much fairer than you as layer one maybe if they get extremely super congested and everyone's bidding for the block space but the whole point is that they don't get to that point where they're super congested if they uh if they are seeing that consistent demand then we can scale up the layer 2 much easier than we can scale up the layer 1. now in a Proto dang shining World it gets even more pronounced because the layer 2s will be settling their uh their um their data using blobs on ethereum layer one which is has which will have its own fee Market which means that it's not going

to be affected by the rest of the free market on layer 1 ethereum so even if layer one ethereum goes to 100 gray the layer 2 fees should I mean they'll still be affected somewhat because of the proofs but it won't be uh as pronounced as it is now it'll be considerably less as I've said before it's 10 to 100 times Improvement that's the the kind of ballpark estimate we have for that so because of that the fear of renewable layer twos are going to be is going to be pretty muted compared to layer one so you can't just look at fear revenue of the layer twos to measure growth you have to look at so many other things and we can see from this chart and from a bunch of other metrics that I've thrown around on the refill before layer twos are growing and this is just arbitrary

and optimism this isn't talking about any of the other ones right now well I mean if you throw up throw in all the other ones here the percentage of transactions of ethereum layer 1 probably exceeds 100 uh if we throw in all those but this is just arbitrary and optimism and there to collectively at 44 right now which is almost half which is really awesome to see but yeah go read this thread from crypto Spanglish I'll link it in the description below it's a great one all right so speaking of arbitrim they are teasing something here on Reddit um Reddit on Twitter that I don't know what it is but it looks exciting so they've put out a turquoise heart or a blue heart I guess an orange heart plus question mark equals soon uh people are

speculating that this is a token launch I don't know if it is or isn't as I said I don't know exactly what this is I think it's going to be announced uh very soon obviously because they're at Devcon hasn't been announced yet just went to the Twitter profile to check so maybe it's been announced by the time you're watching this uh watching the refuel and I'm I'm obviously outdated here uh but yeah these these teasers always make me uh very excited because the arbitrim I mean the the layer twos they tend to tease things when they've actually got something to show uh for the most part which is obviously very exciting but I've got absolutely no idea what this could be I mean outside of a token like what else can it be I mean Nitro is live um are they announcing another major

partnership like with Reddit however they acquired at a company or have they acquired another layer to a company or something like that or have they made a big hire I don't I don't know you know what I mean like it could be anything right now uh maybe there is probably a code here that I'm completely missing but I'm sure you're gonna laugh if you're watching this after it's been announced maybe I got it right maybe I got it wrong we'll we'll see all right so Xerox splits has introduced waterfalls today which is tiered payout so waterfalls are a new type of contract that allow you to easily Define the order in which people get paid just like splits waterfalls are composable gas efficient and completely free to use now I've covered Xerox splits all the splits protocol before on the refuel uh one

because I'm an investor in them but two because I think it's a really really cool little protocol here so just the recappa what splits allows you to do is basically have a smart contract that splits payments into different addresses that's like the basic very basic um explanation of it and with this new waterfalls feature it's uh it's adding tiered payout so you can see here in the screenshot that the tiered payout is you would send the first to eth to Alice Dot eth and then the next 1.5 eighth would go to bob.eath and all the residual eighth that's left over will be split three ways between uh goes to a three-way split so you can see how these things are very composable because you never split within a split and then like a waterfall within a a waterfall within

a split and you can have this crazy stuff going on all totally automated all on chain all gas efficient as they said and I think this is a like a really cool little feature here and and this is being used by a bunch of different projects I think the protocol Guild is using this to distribute out their funds uh from memory I've used a split feature before uh not this one because I don't think it was out yet but when Kidder and I did the daily wear anniversary nft we used mirrors split feature in order to split the payment and it worked quite well when it worked I mean it was a bit clunky because we had to do some back-end stuff and they had to do a custom deployment for us um but generally these things work really well especially because they're automated once they're deployed on chain

you can have them be immutable so there's no way to kind of change it and you can imagine using this for something like your I guess protocol revenue from your ethereum validator so you could set the recipient address to a split and then the split has the code coded language in there to basically say okay put you know put all this eighth in here I'll put this in here I'll wait for it to stack up to this much eighth and then split it into here split into there and then at any time you can change your recipient address uh so your fee recipient address of your validator to something else and then that split basically just stops processing anything maybe you want to redeploy the the split maybe you want to change some parameters you can do that which I think is very very cool but uh yeah go check out this

blog post it Dives a bit deeper into what waterfalls are and how you can get started using them I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so the quicks and if I think I'm saying it right Quicks optimism nft Marketplace has announced today that they're introducing the optimism nft bridge I remember they teased this a while ago someone was teasing this a while ago so basically uh this has been developed by the quicks team in partnership with optimism the bridge allows users to trade ethereum nfts on optimism where the average transaction costs less than 20 cents in gas and is up to 100 times faster than mainnet and you can use it right now it's it's live right now this is really cool because there's been a debate about I guess splitting liquidity between layer one

and Layer Two because there's a lot of nfts that it were issued on layer 1 ethereum and that are very popular and are traded on there on openc and things like that uh but now I mean quixes on optimism openc is also on optimism but now they have this nft bridge where basically you can send your nft from ethereum layer one to layer 2 and trade with it on layer 2 and enjoy those cheap gas costs and everything like that now it is a bit harder when you're bridging nfts across because you have to bridge it individually right they can't just be all bridged together I mean you could set up a thing that automates the bridging process but still they all have to be bridged individually to the layer 2 and then one could exist on Layer Two and and not be on layer one uh anymore

because it's been bridged over but actually from from memory I think that I mean I can't remember exactly if it works exactly like this but from memory I I think that the way it worked was that it would just like clone your nft or something so that you could still use it on layer one I don't know if that was gone if that happened that way I don't know if basically when you bridge it to layer 2 you can't use it on layer one anymore or if it's cloned so to speak where you don't have two of the same to sell but you can sell it on either or you can TR I guess do whatever you want with it on either optimism uh or or ethereum layer one and it would kind of keep the accounting um uh between those two but I don't know

if that's been implemented i i as far as I am aware I suspect this is just a one-way bridge but still it's very cool that this exists obviously for those of you into nfts much more than I am this will be relevant to you I am just so not into nfts actually I was thinking about this before like I don't know what it is like you guys know I'm into my collectibles you can see them all behind me I don't know what it is about nfts that I mean I I love the concept I I um I see the the value prop I see the use case but like speculating on them collecting them doesn't really tickle my fancy at all besides something like a pop like pop-ups I love collecting I'm not hardcore about them either but still I love collecting them I love um getting

all the hard to get ones and the unique ones and and and and the ones that uh obviously will be historic like the merge nft uh the merge pop-ups and stuff like that but jet the general kind of speculation and being in discords and being on Twitter and following all the nft stuff that just doesn't really appeal to me and then and the thing is it nothing has ever appealed to me in that way except maybe ethereum itself right like obviously you guys know I follow a lot of ethereum protocol development the only Discord I really look is the eighth r d Channel I look I read a lot in there and then I look on Twitter for ethereum protocol stuff but I don't look any nft discords I don't work uh uh nft Twitter or anything like that or participate in it I just did

never grabbed me but it's obviously extremely popular and that's totally fine and I I really like that that's that that's the case because it means that there are use cases out there that that I mean I used to be about all about everything on ethereum but there are use cases out there that I'm just not going to ever be really involved in and that's awesome because it means the ethereum network is just so much bigger than it used to be uh but yeah if you are into your nfts then definitely go check out this Quicks nft Bridge from ethereum layer one to optimism now I have a couple minutes left here just want to make a quick note uh about the newsletter now for those of you who've been following me for a while the daily way actually started off as a newsletter in mid-2020 the YouTube channel didn't

come till late 2020 so I think it was five months after or something like that but for the last month ish I haven't put out any news letters it's usually supposed to be a daily newsletter I'm gonna say it's because I got busy it's mostly because I hit a wall to be honest I I mean I've written over 500 editions of that newsletter since uh mid-2020 and around the merge like the last one I wrote about the last one I wrote was about the merge um once the merge happened and then I hit a wall and I'm like oh my God like I don't know if this is writer's block or what but I just kind of hit a wall and I said okay I'm gonna get back into it when I feel like it's time and well it's time today I'm publishing a newsletter today so you

can go subscribe to the newsletter um if you haven't yet and go check it out there but uh yeah I just wanted to make a note on that because I didn't really say anything uh it just kind of happened and I think that I'm trying to get back into the daily Cadence of things it may just be kind of a Buy Daily thing maybe every couple of days or something like that maybe one Monday Wednesday Friday sort of thing or maybe Wednesday Thursday I I don't know like it just depends at this at this stage I think I've I've overloaded my brain so much at this point with ethereum stuff obviously doing the refuel and just keeping up with everything and then the newsletter I was like oh my God and sometimes I get really stressed about it because I'm like I really got to put out

a newsletter but I just can't find the words right now um but yeah there's newsletter out today so you go check that out but that's it for today thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone