Stripe integrates crypto, ETHMAXY launched and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #333 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where you cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony susana and today's 11th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so before i get into a few of the things that i wanted to go over today i do want to spend a little bit of time talking about general i guess kind of like regulatory stuff how governments are reacting to cryptocurrency what i think the future of this industry is going to be in that regard because it was something of a discussion that was happening in the discord channel today that i caught caught a glimpse of i think a lot more discussion happened that i haven't read through yet but it was requested that i covered this on the refill today so i think i'm just going to talk a little

bit about this now i've got to profess this by saying i'm not an expert on these topics i i'm not an expert on politics in general but i think that from everything that i've seen i can pretty much form a coherent view on what i think the industry is going to see over the coming i guess years so for starters i want to say that i don't think any western government is going to outright ban crypto or even go anywhere near as far as that uh i think at this point in time there have been kind of like pockets of harsh regulation here and there obviously within the us the sec has been quite harsh in who they've regulated they've been quite harsh in in their stance on cryptocurrency and they've also been scaring a lot of teams away from doing certain things due to

non-existent uh i guess like guidance on things that is very different to something being banned outright or to crypto being banned outright and you know people always always worry about things are these things and so what you know what what's stopping governments from banning crypto uh they could do it you know straight away there are centralized uh points of failure like centralized stable coins and centralized exchanges and all that sort of stuff and look i've discussed this before centralized stable coins are the path of least resistance for governments to go after and heavily regulate they're already regulated to an extent but they could be regulated a lot more right there could be um the government could require you to have kyc wallets in order to use these stable coins like usdc for example um the government could require exchanges to kyc people's addresses to

even withdraw to your to your wallet and this is something that south korea seems to want to implement um but they just had a change in uh in kind of like leadership there so i don't know if that's actually going to go ahead uh go ahead but i think the overarching theme from the western western government front on with crypto is that it makes a lot more sense for them to just kind of like regulate parts of it and the parts of it that they think need to be regulated or at least to appease kind of like the the regulations that they're supposed to be putting in place or that they that they kind of feel they should be putting in place and leave the rest of it uh to its own devices in order for innovation to bloom and this is what kind of like biden's executive order was

about was basically doing some kind of like research on this entire industry from all kind of i guess aspects of regulators in order to better understand it so as not to over regulate it and as i've said last time we have a very good opportunity here to educate these people and to make sure that they don't over regulate this sort of stuff because whether you like it or not guys some form of regulation is coming and and you know there's already regulation in crypto but it's going to get more and more kind of like burdensome with the regulation there but you know the funny thing is that's actually a good thing because it just means that you know governments don't ban something that they regulate and i was also saying this in the discord channel today think about the amount of money the government's going to or he's already making and

stands to make from cryptocurrency tax revenue alone right not talking about anything else just the tax revenue not the economic um activity that can be spurred due to crypto not all the efficiencies that can be have not all the revolution revolutionary technology that can be had just the tax revenue in the us alone it'd have to be easily into tens of billions of dollars right if if if not hundreds of billions of dollars at this point in terms of cumulative tax revenue now obviously the us ha you know generates trillions of dollars of tax revenue uh a year but uh this is kind of like a huge chunk of that that actually registers there's not some kind of like footnote that begins to register uh so you know that alone is reason enough for them not to ban it because they're getting a lot of money out of it so why

would they ban it right um and secondly you know a lot of um uh governments out there that you know democratic governments i mean crypto speaks to to democracy right democratizing kind of like access to uh to just kind of like certain tools making it fairer for everyone making it so that people kind of like have a choice and have freedoms you know that is the pillar of a lot of kind of like western democracies out there whether it's it is in practice or not is another thing but it is definitely what a lot of them kind of like pride themselves on especially places like the us so that that to me is another reason i think another big reason why they they kind of like won't outright ban it is because the industry is is already so big right if they okay let's do a thought experiment here for a

second if the us government was to just outright ban crypto and i mean literally it's illegal to hold crypto trade crypto use any of the apps use anything or to do with crypto it's completely illegal right i mean putting aside the fact that that's pretty much impossible to police but let's just say they made it all legal they would instantly port tens of thousands of people out of work probably more than that right um and they would instantly lose all that tax revenue instantly um uh i lose all the economic activity that's being generated and they would just seed that uh i guess kind of lead the us has in the cryptocurrency space to other regions around the world and it would be a very very bad thing for them to do on all those fronts so if you look at it from that perspective it

literally makes no sense like you just got to look at the game theory of it it makes zero sense for this this to be banned like as i said the governments can already heavily regulate the points uh like centralized stable coins the centralized exchanges and they already are doing that and that should be enough to satiate them they don't need to get involved with all the on-chain stuff just like it's impossible for them to regulate the internet right there are regulations in place on the internet in certain ways but could you imagine the government going after everything going on on the internet and trying to regulate every little part of it or trying to police every little part of it or ban it or whatever it's basically impossible look at what happened with piracy they really went hard after piracy and they haven't been able to stop it

because it's just too um that the technology just does not allow for this to happen and that's exactly what we're building with with um with crypto with with defy we're making it so that finance is as unstoppable as information is in the world right obviously sending and receiving of information is very very hard to stop in today's world like you can cut off the internet from your country you can you can try but you can always reconnect because there's satellites now flying overhead and things like that you can block them out you can shoot them down and but still it's very very difficult to do and the whole point of crypto is to make it just as difficult to stop people from doing whatever financial transactions they want to do from to stop people and make it hard to stop to uh for governments to kind of like seize your

wealth or to take your money away from you to freeze your accounts or anything like that basically to make you a self-sovereign bankless individual that is kind of like a major point here not just on the finance side but also on your information as well obviously with um signing with ethereum and and digital identity and all that sort of stuff too there so i think those you know putting that all together the main themes to me are it makes zero sense for governments to ban crypto if they actually care about uh generating more economic activity for their country generating more tax revenue and putting more people in in work uh two it's basically impossible to ban crypto like yes you can ban the the fiat on ramps and and and all that sort of stuff there but the actual on-chain side of it um is

basically impossible to ban or outlaw or anything like that good luck controlling that because at the end of the day it's just bits and packets flying around on the internet uh and uh and you're gonna have a very hard time trying trying to police that so that's those are the two kind of like themes there so whenever someone kind of like says to me like aren't you worried about governments banning crypto i have zero worry about these guys like i pretty much think it's a zero percent chance that it's going to happen and by governments i mean like western governments you know obviously we've had the china bands crypto thing like a million times but even that turns out and turns into a nothing burger over time like they've been bitcoin how many times like 15 20 times over the last 10 years no it doesn't seem that they're

actually banning it it just seems like there's a lot of disconnect between uh you know chinese media and western media and things just get lost in translation there obviously there was a big thing where they kind of like quote unquote like banned or outlawed bitcoin mining um and that moved offshore but that's the thing like if if one country bans something that'll just move to another country it's not like it's just going to go away especially when there's money to be made here so but just government syndrome talking about like kind of like western governments that we're all used to obviously most of you are probably in a western government whether that be in europe or the us or or or or even australia right or canada or wherever else um you're definitely leaping under that i can see that in my in my stats on my youtube channel so

from that perspective guys like i just don't think it's something to worry about i really think that crypto is at this point in time too big to fail too big to be controlled too big to be banned uh i think that we should only really be worried about the heavily heavy heavy regulation of centralized stable coins and potentially potentially i said it's potentially and this is a low chance still but potentially um some governments basically doing what south korea did and requiring users to kyc their ethereum addresses before they can withdraw uh coins from an exchange to their own ethereum address or to any other address um on any other crypto network again i think that's a low chance of that happening in the kind of like western democracies i think that from everything that i've

seen on the regulatory front besides the sec the us has been kind of good with it like i don't think of anything off the top my head where besides what's happened with the sec where they've been actually harsh about things and in australia where i am it seems that policymakers and lawmakers and regulators they're actually pretty open to this sort of stuff and at that that blockchain week that i spoke to two guys about last week that i'm going to be attending and speaking at they actually got a very um a very heavy kind of a presence from regulators from government people there um and you know one of the people running it is part of that whole world so i think these people are humans at the end of the day they they kind of like see the benefits of the technology they're not some kind of like evil uh uh

i guess lizard people trying to control every move like i don't buy into any of that stuff and i just think that worrying about governments banning crypto is just not worth worrying about at the end of the day so so yeah anyway i'm gonna leave it at that for now i spoke about that for about 10 minutes hopefully that gives you kind of like my view of things and why i think that um everything's going to be fine in that arena but i do i am very curious to see what regulate proper kind of like regulations and guide and shake out over the coming years because it can still be bad you know relatively bad it's not going to be outright bans but it could be could still be shitty right it could be um kind of like um restrictive but that's why you know we have kind of like

dialogues open with these kinds of things we have organizations like coin center going about for us that's how these kind of like things come together it's not just some kind of like i mean the us isn't a dictatorship for example right it's not like some person that just goes okay well this is happening with this this is this and no one else can kind of like question them that's not how it works in the u.s guys so or in any kind of like civilized western democracy so you know trust in the process uh obviously you know governments are not perfect right i'm not defending governments here but uh to think that they're gonna outright ban this stuff i i don't know i just don't think that's the that's the right thing the right way to think about it all right so on to a tweet that i put

out today so i said uh today i remember in early 2017 my friend and i were discussing what price we thought eath would go to that yeah it was 20 at the time our absolute moon shot was 100 similarly in 2018 we thought 600 was the absolute bottom moral of the story don't try to predict tops and bottoms so obviously as you guys know in 2017 eth went to 1400 well technically first week of 2018 it was 1400 and then in 2018 it went to uh 80 bucks as the bottom there not and it didn't just stop at 600 i just wanted to make a quick note here is that i see a lot of people trying to time these tops and bottoms trying to catch the falling knives trying to buy it you know buy in when it's like really frothy and trying to you know pick the

top and so they can sell and stuff like that it doesn't it's hard guys like it's hard if not impossible to do that and i was discussing this in the discord channel the other day you have to have your own strategy for buying in and getting out right no one else can kind of like give you your strategy because at the end of the day everyone's individual position when it comes to investing is unique you have your own circumstances you may not need the money you may be able to hold something for five years without worrying about money at all maybe you have like a constant income coming in you have a nice little nest egg that no matter what happens you're fine but then there are other people who over invest and they need to get out and they kind of like either you know panic sell because they need to

get out or they sell too early because they you know they see some money that they've made like oh i made some money let's let's let's get out now so as i said like everyone's situation is is very is different you can't just uh kind of like listen to me i can't tell you uh kind of like what i did i mean some of you know what i did over the years with my investments i was just long and strong as they say for basically the whole time i didn't just you know invest in ether i missed in other things as well and you know actually the funniest thing with with my case is that my biggest return on investment both uh economically and socially was investing in myself uh investing in growing my presence in educating and making sure that i added a lot of value um and you

know i've made more money from doing that than i had from investing on my own into like eighth and other things so when you kind of like think about it like that as well investing doesn't just involve putting money into something sitting on and that's it you can get involved in a lot of other ways as well so i know a lot of you guys are newer to the ecosystem still you know first cyclers so you're still kind of like getting used to this sort of stuff and obviously we're in a bear market right now so this might be a bit scary it might be a bit fearful for you and maybe my best posting doesn't help with that but just you got to formulate our own strategy guys your own buy-in and your own take profit strategy if you don't ever plan to tell sell then that's

that's that's fine you mean it's pretty easy just buy in and that's it right but if you do plan to sell you do want to take profits i think it's always prudent to have a strategy and stick to it from early on don't just wait until the mark gets hot again and then start formulating a strategy and being like okay well if i make this much money or if this price gets here i'm going to sell here don't do that do that when the markets are quiet when you're more level-headed when you're not kind of like affected by greed and fomo and that sort of stuff i think that way you get to kind of uh formulate something that actually makes sense and that can actually be stuck to because that's the one thing i think a lot of people make the mistake of is

they don't stick to their plan they get greedy there's fomo and then they're kind of like miss out there so just wanted to kind of like give that piece of i guess like not investment advice but just just general kind of like my view on on these sorts of things all right so 10 million eighth has now been deposited into the deposit contract so for those of you who don't know what this is the deposit contract is the smart contract on ethereum that you send your eth to in order for your ease to be deposited or i guess to be staked in the the beacon chain so we've now crossed 10 million i mentioned the other day that we had 10 million each on the beacon chain that included the staked eath and the eighth that was accrued as well as kind of um rewards and now we have 10

million eighth staked on the beacon chain as steak so as the you know 32 per valet or sort of thing uh and this is awesome i mean 10 million we're not even close to withdrawals being enabled withdrawals are at least another nine months away guys and we're still going up there's still people staking here still people very confident in staking their wreath and and wanting that kind of like ethernomina return and also getting those tasty yield burgers that i talked about kind of yesterday with regards to being able to kind of like stack staking yield and get more yield on top of that as well so very very cool to see this and obviously as more eath gets staked on the beacon chain the more secure it becomes and the more valid it is we have and you know once sharing is in place the more scalability we have

for layer two so very very awesome to see that so we have this thread here from preston van loon today who works at prior labs about uh the 10 million eighth being at stake so he said now that the ethereum beacon chain has over 10 million each at stake while prism is still the majority client let's talk about how a pry labs handles this massive responsibility so i recommend giving this thread a read i always think it's good to hear from the client teams themselves they you know the people from the client teams they're kind of quiet i think uh you know the core researchers and developers are kind of quiet you really only hear about the main themes that we that i talk about like the merge and sharding and and the eips and stuff like that but it's always good to hear directly from the source so

i just wanted to highlight this thread for you guys to go give it a read um and i think that you know i've talked about client diversity a lot before i think that the prior labs team is acutely aware of the fact that you know their clients awesome you know that's why so many people are using it but they don't want it to be the super majority for reasons i've outlined in the past so i'm very i respect this i really think that this makes like the core developers i guess stronger as a as a whole in that you know they're competitive i guess because they want their clients to be the best but they also realize that it's a team effort it's not just you know let's make prism 100 of the network yeah it's awesome no no it's a team effort it's it's kind of like building up that

resiliency of the beacon chain by having multiple clients or a multiple client architecture um so yeah definitely go give this thread a read i'll link it in the youtube description for you all right so as i mentioned yesterday git coin grants around 13 is uh now live and i wanted to highlight one grant in particular from trent van epsier because this one has got to do with public uh with um supporting new models for public goods so you can see here this is called protocol guild and what it is it's a curated split contract that gets dollars directly to individuals working on the core protocol so as i said guys core protocol stuff this is you know this is what we want to be funding this is what we want to uh kind of like be rewarding not just in dollars but in eth terms as

well making sure that these um these people are fully bought into the ecosystem fully on board fully aligned in every which way so i just wanted to highlight this this is in my castle's cart of love on git coin as well so you can use that cart in order to donate to you know all the all the kind of like ones in there uh but yeah this there's in the description here about what protocol guild has been doing over the last three months and you guys know about trent venept i've talked about him a lot on the refill before he's uh he works at the ef as an ecosystem person he's pretty much in everything got to do with ethereum quarterback i mean he's all across that sort of stuff there um but yeah it seems that they've already raised eighteen thousand dollars from 29

contributors we've seen 600 of matching funds coming so very very awesome to see that you know it's funny i wonder if someone did like a rather big donation donation here to get them to that 18 000 mark because only as i said 29 contributors and i'm just scrolling down the list here to see if there's if there's kind of like anything here maybe i won't be able to find it live yet i'm not going to bore you with that but anyway if you want to support ethereum core developers definitely go check out the protocol guild git coin grant which will be linked in the youtube description below all right so some massive news out of stripe today so john collison co-founder of stripe announced that stripe now supports crypto businesses exchanges on-ramps wallets and ft marketplaces not just pains but payouts kyc and id

verification fraud prevention and lots more so it seems stripe is going all in on crypto now for those of you who don't know stripe is a payments processor they are one of the biggest payments processors in the world uh definitely a a kind of like uh 10 billion more than 10 billion dollar company like multi-ten billion dollar company so this is a very very big deal so from what i've seen they support right and this is this is in partnership i believe with ftx the exchange so they currently support i believe a bunch of different kind of like assets uh in their kind of like um in their payments infrastructure btc usdc eth and solana of course solana because ftx is partnered here and ftx is a big solana backer but they're not just stopping there right they're doing nft marketplaces they've got like a toolkit

for crypto businesses to set to set things up i mean look at all the features here this is this is a pretty big deal guys because stripe as i said is not a small company it is a web 2 company it is a fintech company as we traditionally know it but now they're integrating crypto and they're doing a full integration not just like a little thing here and there a full blown integration so if you want to learn more about this you can go check out uh the website or links in the youtube description but i think you know as i said guys like the funny thing is is that there's someone at stripe i can't remember his name he's doesn't i don't know if he if fighting crypto is the right term but he's always got a bunch of threads about crypto and about how

he's like bearish on it and i'm pretty sure he's high up at stripe um but but as i've said you guys before crypto is inevitable it doesn't matter what certain people's opinions of it are you know we saw a lot of this at the nft hate it's just the level it's going to happen whether people like it or not because as i said there's too much money to be made there's so much money being made there's so many opportunities for people to kind of like work on new things there's too many cool things being kind of created and developed and and worked on um there's a lot of kind of like integrations that can happen sort of like what's happening with stripepr so i think that it doesn't matter how many haters crypto has as long as uh kind of like the business opportunities their businesses are going to support it

and i'm very very glad that stripe has supported here obviously shopify has an integration they're not they have their own kind of like way of doing things they're obviously an e-commerce giant but you know there's paypal as well which everyone seems to have forgotten about by the way but there was the paypal integration which was a huge deal at the time mastercard's working on layer 2 stuff visas working on layer 2 stuff they bought a crypto part i mean all these kind of kind of companies are getting involved and you may be wondering but but anthony like these are centralized companies why do we care about them and as i said before crypto acts as a forcing function to basically get these centralized companies to use our rails so right now the centralized fintech companies are using the traditional finance rails which are horrible right they're

inefficient they're shitty they're decades old no one cares like they're so slow no no one wants to use them if they don't have to so by forcing these companies to use the crypto rails it basically starts the i guess slow transition over to for them leaving the old kind of like technology behind and adopting the new technology you know going even going as far as having ethereum as that global settlement layer and then building on top of that and kind of like having layer two stuff on there site change all this sort of stuff going on so so yeah anyway cool to see this from stripe as i said i'll link this in youtube description you can go check it out for yourself all right so galion dao has a new product out uh today called the ethmax yield index which is now live on the

ethereum main net it is called ethmaxy is the ticker which is i think a pretty good ticker there it is built using set protocols infrastructure and of course guys disclosures here i'm an investor in galleon and i'm an advisor to set so obviously a bit of a bit of a kind of skin in the game here but uh yeah this is just another way to earn a kind of like yield on on your east so the eighth as we described here the ethmax yield index is a new structured product built natively on the ethereum network to enable traders to gain three times leveraged staked heat yield exposure via ste through lido and other obviously as this is a leveraged staked eighth token either it carries extra risk here but if you're the kind of person that likes risk likes a tasty yield burger well then you can get that with this new

product here so right now st if st is paying five percent staking api uh so this is how it kind of like gets calculated so for example if st which is staked ethelados token is paying five percent staking apy while the borrowing rate for eighth is less than one percent ethmaxy would be able to achieve 13 to 15 apy the highest uh api rate seen in d5 whilst maintaining full composability and simplicity of a regular erc20 token and you can exit and enter a position using unispop that's it there so this is similar i guess to a product that i highlighted um yesterday or the day before the rocketpool one with the curve pool as well um and we're going to have to see where these apys level out out as i said because it's early days for for these products you

know they become they're a bit more more lucrative than they will be in their solid state and it depends on a wide range of kind of like factors here of course but i think the main one that uh we want to be kind of like concerned about is just what that apy lands out it's obviously going to be variable it's not going to be fixed i mean you can get fixed apys through other kind of like applications and stuff like that but this sort of stuff is just going to be variable so if you're interested in earning more on your eighth and you're happy taking the risk on your stake teeth then definitely go check out uh this blog post here to read more about the product and check out the eth max yield index which as i said is live on ethereum and now

all right finally here i have a team that i wanted to kind of like talk about and highlight that i am an investor in uh have been for for a little while now but they haven't been as public lately now this team is called boot node and they're celebrating their first birthday today so what is boot note well it's basically a software engineering kind of like studio that does work for uh you know protocols in ethereum for example like that what they'll do is they'll kind of like go out they'll offer their services like they're kind of like a dev workshop they offer their kind of like services to application teams that kind of like need the extra help whether that be you know on the kind of like development side with solidity and things like that um and then they'll kind of like work with the team to be an

early partner there and and kind of like it makes a lot of sense because it gets to be that kind of like separation there as well and bootnerd basically gets to be kind of i guess like a community member so to speak of the protocol they're not part of the core team but they get to kind of like be building it and they get to kind of be rewarded for that as well with the the alignment of incentives there so um i just wanted to highlight them because i think they're doing amazing work guys like seriously it's just the thing is like a lot of this stuff you don't see in the foreground but i see it in the background because i get updates from them they have added you know a lot of value to a lot of projects they um they were they they helped um

out lyra a lot with with kind of like their work there well i believe they've helped out a bunch of other kind of like projects as well i don't know which ones i'm allowed to talk about which ones i i'm not sort of thing but as i said they're kind of mostly in the background working in stealth but if you're a project that is interested in kind of like um you know getting boot note on board to help you with these sorts of things and you need this kind of like talent on board definitely reach out to them they're always kind of like happy to help there but i just wanted to kind of like highlight that highlight them today because i think they're really cool but as i said i am i am a small investor it is listed here in the thread anyway

but um obviously i have skin in the game there but i as you guys know i only really only i like to invest in things that i actually believe in that actually has value and and actually you know is is is a really cool thing um uh but yeah i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check it out now again i have a few more minutes left here um i wanted to talk about uh one other thing i know i talked a lot about the um regulatory stuff at the start but i wanted to talk about one other thing and that's got to do with more of kind of like on the personal side of things so you guys know i'm going to kind of like amsterdam next uh next month um and you know there's other conferences coming up and stuff like that

i i want to know what you guys think about this it's going to be hard for me to kind of like do the newsletter and do the refuel when i'm traveling and especially if i've got shitty internet obviously i'm not going to be able to upload videos if the internet's really bad um but i want to get your opinion and comment on the discord channel if you if you have opinions on this um do you think that i should just do kind of uh just try to do kind of like episodes here and there when i'm when i'm traveling like let's say i spend two weeks in amsterdam do you think i should try to do you know episodes whenever i can or do you think i should just save up the content and do like kind of like a mega episode of the refuel at maybe

you know once a week while i'm traveling so you know for those two weeks you would only have two episodes but they would cover basically everything i want to know what you guys think because i you know the funny thing is the refill has only existed during during uh a covert times it hasn't existed when i've been able to travel so i've never had this problem before um and i don't want to kind of like leave you guys hanging dry because i know you know you love the updates and things like that but thinking more about it when i used to go to conferences it was like get up in the morning go and not don't get back until like midnight um of the local time wherever i was be super tired be super worn out just hit the you know hit the hay and then get

back at it the next day so i really don't think i'm going to be able to do daily video updates um and newsletters and stuff like that i'm going to try my best to but i think the better approach would be to kind of like just do the mega episodes um and kind of like over time there and with the newsletter just do that when i kind of like can or do it kind of like every few days or something like that um uh but yeah let me know what you guys think just comment in the discord channel tag me in there i'll be sure to kind of like read those comments and everything and you can dm me as well that's fine um but just as i said like amsterdam's coming up in in kind of like a month and a bit now so definitely want

to make sure that uh that you guys don't get that i don't rug you guys and stuff like that so i wanted to kind of like start the discussion now but i think on that note it's gonna be it so thank 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 newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all in next week thanks everyone