Uniswap volumes exploding, Nexus Mutual drama & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #15 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 15th of december 2020 right let's get into it everyone so i think the biggest news of the last 24 hours was uh the news that uh nexus mutual's kind of founder uh hugh carp was unfortunately attacked and had his kind of ethereum address full of uh the an xm token drained now this was quite a sophisticated attack actually something that was targeted towards hugh so it wasn't just like some random attack it was specifically targeted towards him uh it basically targeted his flow of how he accesses these funds so you can see here on the tweet that

basically who was using a hardware wallet uh the attacker managed to gain remote access to hugh's computer and modified his metamask extension which tricked him into signing a different transaction which transferred funds to the attacker the attacker's own address now this is something that can happen to anyone um and you know it's very hard to tell basically if this is happening to you or not so for example when you uh you know i mean everyone's probably familiar when you use metamask you you you go you know you do a transaction and you have to press confirm on it right that's what's called kind of signing the transaction and that's signing it with your private key to kind of tell the ethereum network that yes you have permission to spend these funds or do this interaction or

whatever now if someone can replace your metamask extension or modify it with a malicious one they can make it look like everything's normal but you you'll end up signing a transaction that you didn't mean to sign now it's exactly what happened with hugh uh very unfortunate very scary kind of attack here there's not really much you can do here especially with metamask because it doesn't really show you exactly what the transaction is doing and even if it did it'd probably just show you the code of it it wouldn't show you the actual like human readable uh kind of things uh to to basically say you know okay funds are being sent from from here to here through to this smart contract or doing this this and this right

um so yeah it's it's an attack that anyone could fall victim to even you know experts in this field even people building d5 products for example like you um but even like coders and programmers and and smart contract developers would fall for this so very sophisticated attack they managed to drain eight million dollars worth of nxm uh the transaction is basically here so if i load this up here you'll be able to see i think it's worth less now um uh yes i guess like it was worth 8.3 million dollars and that went to basically their account so they basically transferred from here to their account and then from there they went on to basically i guess wash it through a bunch of different addresses uh cash it out to

eat through one inch and things like that so they were pretty quick about it they didn't dawdle or anything like that um i guess you know there was a lot of conversations around this for me i kind of thought to myself why was eight million dollars worth of nxm secured just by one key right i would have figured it would be under multi-key security obviously it wasn't uh that would have prevented this attack right because uh you need multiple signatures to execute transactions in a multi-key setup so if you had like a two of three it would have required another person to sign the transaction as well as hugh in order for it to go through and they could have spotted it and being like hey are you meaning to send you know eight million dollars worth of nxm to this random address uh so that would have prevented it but

unfortunately uh you know that wasn't in place and then this attack happened now uh hugh kind of put out a tweet basically saying uh to the attacker very nice trick definitely next level stuff but you'll have trouble cashing out that much nxm if you return it the nxm in full we will drop all investigations and uh and he will grant you a 300 000 bounty so it's kind of like a bug bounty right um i mean i i don't know i don't think the attacker's taking this deal he seems to have just cashed out like a bunch of nxm i think probably more than 300 000 at this point to eth and some other coins as well i think and then from there they're probably going to wash it through tornado cash or something i haven't followed the trail

but this is what i would do you know i'd wash it through tornado cache and then go to an exchange to cache to fit or something but you know given that d5 is so kind of advanced now you don't even need to leave the ecosystem you could cash out to a stable coin you know even die if if you didn't want to run the risk of your funds being frozen like if it was in usdc or if it was in another centralized stable coin you go to die right and be fine you go to eth and and be fine you can kind of live off that sort of stuff there's you know there's a lot of um credit cards now that let you basically load it with these stable coins and things like that so it's going to become easier and easier for attackers to basically get access to

these funds that they end up stealing which for you know i mean that just comes with the territory but it doesn't mean everyone else gets easy access to this stuff but yeah it means that the attackers do as well so you know unfortunate event here hugh is a great guy um you know he's building a lot of really cool stuff with nexus mutual uh he's been in ethereum for a long time uh i i feel really bad that this happened to him i hope that you know he that he doesn't kind of like get too disheartened by this i don't think anyone blames him for this and as i said uh anyone can fall for this kind of attack this is not unique to to hugh i mean if you're targeted and if the attacker is you know is determined enough there's not much you can do to prevent this

unless you're kind of like checking you know every transaction that you sign and like verifying absolutely everything that you're doing yourself uh and that takes some technical skill to do and we can't expect people to do this there are some solutions in the works like outside of metamask like i saw a grid plus talking about their lattice one i saw gnosis talking about their their basically their wallet that they've got the the gnosis kind of multi-sig wallet um so and i mean in general this would have been prevented by having a multi-sig but obviously most people don't have multi-sig accounts for their main accounts because it slows things down and things like that so you can understand why that's not a great defense mechanism for most people but yeah just something to keep in mind

when you're kind of transacting on ethereum um you know make sure that you you know you maybe you have antivirus protection things like that make sure that you know your your your uh your metamask extension isn't like doing anything weird or malicious i mean it's it's it's hard right i mean it's very hard because these attacks are normally done in quietly where you there's no you know it's not obvious that an attack has happened so i hope we can solve this because it is definitely an ecosystem issue i think we can but uh just something to keep in mind when you're kind of transacting on ethereum right towards more positive news here so uh a guy named james fickle put out this uh kind of blog post today

called towards long-term incentives on ethereum and basically what this is it's basically a new kind of grants i guess uh tool that allows you to stream kind of uh you know ethan tokens to a cohort of people over time and you can kind of select how much money you want to send them how long you want to stream it for things like that uh so what kind of james has done is he's basically created a 3 600 eth payment stream that pays out over three years and points to an open grant titled eth2 development as of december 2020 uh so this basically as i said it streams over three years so it's like investing over three years of 3600

eighth which is worth a fair bit of money today um i don't know if it's up in my head i think i think it's worth uh one if i do quick math here i think it's uh uh two million dollars or something like that almost two million dollars uh probably yeah probably around that so that's a fair chunk of change there uh and then he he kind of breaks down here what you know what the money which team the team's the money is going to um i think this is this is pretty cool here right he mean he gives his rationale as to how he basically came to um the allocation percentages for each of these teams and he says they were roughly determined by estimating the entity's impact and quality of work minus their existing level of funding so he says that teku was omitted because

the project is well funded by consensus so things like that right so if we scroll down here we can actually see the breakdown most of the funds is going towards sigma prime that are building the lighthouse client um and you know i mean according to james's research they must have got less funding uh than prismatic uh previous funding because prismatic is also building an eth2 client and pretty much has i guess like a 50 50 split with sigma here so that's that's what's happening there uh danny ryan is getting the third largest chunk at 8.4 of that i think that is warranted because i mean for those who don't know danny ryan is like the lead coordinator of the eth2 effort uh without him leading this effort e3 would have been a much slower process

and it would have been a lot more chaotic than what it is he he has definitely done some of the most amazing work and no one even knows who he is i always laugh i mean no one i guess i gets out of the ecosystem um but i always laugh because you know you have like people that kind of like deride ethereum saying or you know it's centralized around vitalik whatever vitalik says girls blah blah and these same people don't even know about danny ryan the actual coordinator of these things not to say that danny ryan you know that ethereum is centralized around danny but you know vitalik has way less input in the eth2 kind of like coordination than danny ryan does for instance so it's always funny when i see that so great to see him getting a big share there nimbus and chainsafe also building eth2

clients got the the fourth uh biggest share uh equally uh proto lambda which is another researcher within e2 he got a lot here as well so uh good to see that and then there's a bunch of unnamed researchers here that are also getting the remainder if i had to guess who these people are they'll be the core researchers probably miners vitalik since he's already got a lot of eth right um i i would say it was uh justin drake uh xiao wang um there's people that i'm missing off the top of my head right right now um obviously danny ryan's already covered there and then a bunch of other researchers that are less public uh getting getting uh you know funding for their efforts too so this is great and this isn't just limited to james doing this like anyone

can create these kind of streams and and stream them to these people over time um as well so yeah i i suggest going to check this out uh it'll be linked in the show notes but really cool thing that didn't get enough coverage today i think that i that i just wanted to cover so kudos to james for setting this up and i'm not sure if that 3600 eighth was kind of his eighth or if it was like a a basically a pool that he was able to gather together but if it is his eighth uh then you know kudos to him that's a lot of uh money to be to be paying out um you know that that's very very nice of james so really great to see him giving back here all right interesting tweet from santiago santos uh from parafly capital

today so basically he tweeted out that circle is launching a high yield dollar savings account with 8.5 to 10.75 five percent uh apy or yield uh and he's basically described asking you know where does the high yield come from he goes on to say that the funds the borrow usdc pay 8.5 percent to circle and then they deposit into a wiring or rv to earn 15 and capture the spread this off to on chain r will be a liquidity vortex for d5 protocols so basically this kind of i mean arb opportunity and spread opportunity allows usdc that you're sorry circle to offer these yields to um i guess like subsidized yields to uh you know i guess traditional retail

customers basically that aren't in the weeds of d fire or anything and this is like a centralized solution sitting on top of d5 this is going to be a big thing going forward i've spoken about it before but basically i think that we're going to see a lot of centralized services and exchanges tap into liquidity uh sorry tap into d5 because it really is a liquidity vortex it sucks in liquidity from everywhere and anywhere from any asset that is tokenized on ethereum and if it's not tokenized on ethereum someone will tokenize it right you know bitcoin on ethereum wasn't a thing in 2019 we we had tokenized versions but the liquidity was very low um but then this year we've seen an explosion in that now there's i think two billion dollars worth of um btc on ethereum last time i checked something like 130 000 btc

uh so you know these are also centralized btc solutions like wbtc and stuff like that but it's just more liquidity within the ecosystem and that's what companies like circle and other centralized players are going to tap into um so we're going to have this kind of hybrid you know as he says off to on chain kind of ecosystem but also centralized to decentralized uh you know ecosystem as well so really cool to see that i wrote more about this in the daily grain newsletter so you should go check that out for today as well if you want to see you want to hear my deeper thoughts on this as well all right a really interesting tweet from linda shea today so basically the tweet reads it makes me so happy that in a dow with a community treasury

anyone can step up to contribute significantly to the project and get compensated for it if voted on by the community it can even turn into a full-time role this success accessibility is part of why i love the crypto space i mean this is this is great right we've seen this kind of play out with so many communities over the last few months the obvious one being wyon where they basically have a full kind of full-time team on the payroll that is decentralized that wasn't coordinated it wasn't centrally planned or anything like that they didn't raise vc money they just came into this project and they loved what they were doing offered their services getting paid for it um and you know they're i mean they're probably the biggest example but they're not the only one

you know at set i'm working with them on the index co-op which is basically a dow that manages different index products and things like that uh this is the same thing we have a bunch of community members contributing really really valuable content and they're getting paid in index tokens so the native token of the index co-op and they're very motivated by this uh because you know that they obviously by getting paid in these tokens they get a stake in the network as well um i don't think anyone that we uh that we are that that is being uh sorry that is being compensated is full time with index co-op yet so it's like a side hustle for them but it's not like a low a low amount of money either uh some of them are earning up to four thousand dollars worth of index a month

for their work and this is part-time work outside of their full-time role and they're holding these index tokens too because they want a voice in governance they want to capture the upside to you know the future upside because they believe that the the index cop is going to go far and things like that uh full disclaimer here obviously i'm biased with how i'm talking about it because i'm involved with the project i'm also you know in a holder of index tokens too but you know obviously i have a lot of experience with this because of index co-op so i figured i'd talk to that uh but as i said it doesn't just uh you know it's not just limited to one dow like wine or index cop pretty much like every dow can do this you know the compound dow the maker dao uh uni swap dao

like i mean every single one can can do this and reward contributors and basically build an army this is not new but something that i think that not enough people appreciate that you can now kind of work for crypto as long as you kind of i guess put in the effort right and you don't have to be a smart contract developer or anything you can basically be anyone like you can do marketing you can do community management you can do memes right you can do general art like front-end work you don't have to be a back-end smart contract developer so there's kind of a role for everyone uh so i yeah if you're looking for like a breaking crypto maybe it's it's probably best for you to go through the different projects see the kind of like compensation programs

they're running and see how you can contribute uh because it's a good foot in the door for sure i think you know putting this on your resume when applying to crypto companies is actually going to be you know make you shine as part of the candidates because you've already got experience within crypto i know from working with different teams to recruit new people on board a lot of people come into this ecosystem but they don't understand crypto or d5 right they're not crypto d5 natives and that's what a lot of companies are looking for they i mean these people might have like the really great skills but they're missing a lot of the context which makes them less certain the less than ideal candidate that these teams are looking for so you know if you're already in crypto you already know what you're doing you're a d5 native

definitely just go contribute to these projects to bolster i guess like a resume for when you do want to kind of go into crypto full time in whatever role you choose all right so this is this is funny uh finally coinbase is listing uh rve and snx they're also listing b and t b and t here but i think arvan snx has been basically i i mean so the communities of these tokens and and defy community in general have been begging kind of coinbase to list these because it's like you know why don't you have these d5 tokens on there they have all the other bigger ones on there and they finally did it today so you know it's funny to see everyone talking about this finally uh but at the same time this got me

thinking are they an snx i mean obvious over a billion dollar market cap i think snx is close to that right um in terms of like fully diluted cap they both grew to that through d5 mainly right they're on other centralized exchanges i mean binance as well but a lot of this growth has come from d fire and i actually don't think that these tokens really need centralized exchanges to grow anymore because of d5 because of decentralized exchanges but you know it's always good to see these tokens listed on there because they actually give people a way to kind of you know on-ramp or off-ramp with fiat for example and also on ramp and off-ramp uh you know to their bank accounts uh and things like that rather than like a

stable coin uh and it allows people that don't really care to go into d fire whatever to buy these things and obviously you know people holding these tokens you know enjoy that for for example um so yeah good to see coinbase doing this coinbase is normally pretty supportive of d5 so that that's why it was weird they hadn't listed these two kind of blue chip default tokens so far you know finally they have um you know a couple more weeks left of the year maybe you know maybe they'll they'll do some more things i i i'm curious to see how how that goes there but yeah kudos to coinbase for for finally listing these tokens um you know i know that i'm not really focusing on b t here and that's because i mean i don't really think there's a large b t community i don't see them i

don't see them like kind of begging exchanges to list tokens or whatever um and you know it does it's not considered like a blue chip of d5 for example so yeah i think uh arva and snx definitely the standout news here on on coinbase for sure all right some really cool news out of catnip so for those who don't know what catnip is or catnip exchange is it's basically a front end that looks like uni swap that is built on auger and balancer that lets you basically trade different tokens specifically kind of like prediction market tokens um so this was used a lot during the i guess prediction market um kind of like boom during the u.s election right we had a lot of

activity happening there now what they've released today is basically you can buy prediction market shares directly on twitter using xerox's api and uni swap with mask book backed by august oracle so there's a lot of composability and money legos going on here and if i play through the video you'll be able to see they're scrolling through here you know they click on the the ticker and then you can kind of click swap and then you can buy these shares now this is part of mask book that's what enables this so m-a-s-k book is is the app and it's a chrome extension that enables this so once you've got it installed you can click on uh the ticker and then you can actually uh do what the video is showing where

it's like you can trade directly without leaving twitter which is really really cool i mean i don't think i have it installed at the moment yeah if i click through it's just going to bring me to the normal thing but if i did it would come up with this little pop-up so uh yeah it's really really cool um i think we're gonna be seeing more and more of this i actually wrote about this in the daily way now that i think about it i call it seamless finance right where finance is going to be directly embedded into everything that we do online uh because of d5 right because of these open kind of uh infrastructure on ethereum it's so much easier for apps and stuff to plug into it to plug into like a bank's backend and things like that is much harder banks don't really talk to each other

it's slow you know it's it's just built on these old rails and it's like band-aids everywhere so this is kind of i mean this is d5 i guess the main draw of d5 for me and always has been is this thing of basically money legos and composability and that's why it's so powerful so yeah very interesting release from catnip today all right speaking of uh i guess dave fine composability and all that uh hayden adams from unisop tweeted out today that uni spot passed 50 billion dollars in all-time volume last week which is split across 26 000 unique trading pairs and he says we just need to do this 19 more times to hit one trillion dollars uh total volume this is insane 50 billion dollars

all on chain on ethereum remember how i spoke about the total value transacted on ethereum yesterday and it's over a trillion dollars while unit stop accounts for five percent of that alone uh you know that's not including you know obviously there's there's other things that happen but the fact that uni swap accounts for such a big part of this is is massive um so i i think you know it was a slow grind up like you knew what's been out since 2018 we saw it slowly slowly growing and growing then if you look at the charts it kind of exploded in 2020 as everyone knows and that's what kind of like i guess uh this 50 billion dollar volume has come from and then in a follow-up tweet hayden says when will uni swap hit one trillion dollars cumulative volume

most people voted for 2021 and so did i um i i mean i think so it's it's going to be a bit um it's going to be a bit hard in 2021 unless we have another d5 boom i think we will um but when you think about it right even if you think about all the volume that was done on unisop this year you know say 50 billion dollars was done on uni swap this year alone in 2020 you you kind of need to to like 10x 20x that to in 2021 for it to get to one trillion you know dollars of cumulative volume but maybe you know he doesn't mention it here but like unit swap is obviously coming out with unisof v3 that's going to come out with a lot of new features and maybe a layer two implementation as well so if there is a layer two

implementation you're gonna have a lot more trading going on on uni swap so that's gonna be counted as well so maybe we can get to a trillion dollars i i think that would be really cool if we did i'm looking forward to seeing uh if we do i think 2021 is actually going to be a pretty pretty eventful year for ethereum and d5 again just as 2020 was so looking forward to seeing that play out all right that's it for today's episode everyone thank you again for watching and listening subscribe to the youtube channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the daily great newsletter join the discord and i'll see you all tomorrow thanks everyone