USDT dominance waning, Loopring growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #154 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cesano and today's the 30th of june 2021 all right everyone last day of the month so let's get right into it so earlier today or yesterday i guess uh for for a lot of you i did a a new show with uh bankless so there's a new show called top signal on bankless uh hosted by david hoffman and michael wong from the bankless day out here and i was joined by uh kevin o'keefe and defy dad and we basically did like a crypto community uh comedy sorry a variety show and it was pretty fun actually like it was the first episode that david and michael were doing here so we didn't exactly know how it was gonna go but we just went with her and it went

really really well so they're obviously going to be having more episodes coming out of this series in the future it won't always uh it's going to feature different guests every time it's not always going to feature you know me kevin and d5 dad here but if you haven't kind of checked this out be sure to do so i thought it was really good it was just it was really just like um us just having fun right just just like having a laugh talking about kind of things that you know i wouldn't call it like anything to do with like fundamental analysis or anything like that it's not you know reviewing projects it's not giving out alpha whatever it's just having fun right it's just like i guess you could say it's like twitter posting as like a video series essentially which i thought was was pretty cool so yeah i'll link this

in the youtube description you guys can go check this out i think it went for about an hour so yeah if you haven't seen it yet i recommend giving it a shot i thought it was a pretty fun uh fun series to do so diversify announced that they're doing their uh new token sale for uh sorry they're token sale for their new token dvf uh on the 7th of july the 8th of july 2021 it's on the 7th of august i always get confused with these dates because like in australia we do the dates differently um but yes no this is the 8th of july so they're actually doing it correctly whereas in the us this would be flipped which always throws me off but anyway this uh this kind of uh token is launching via their new diversified launch market product which uh codenamed dlm

on thursday the eighth of july at three p.m utc plus one so basically this blog post is uh pretty long and it goes to exactly how you can participate in the dvf token sale um you know why i'm doing it through their new dln product is different what the benefits are so i mean i won't describe exactly what the dlm is on here i think you know reading through this blog post will give you a really good idea but essentially it's just a new way to kind of sell a token at the end of the day and to basically do a token sale which i think is pretty cool they explain like how the price discovery is going to work uh and and basically i think it's similar to like a balancer liquidity liquidity pool sale as well um but essentially you come along you you bring your usd t so tether along

to the sale and you put you can purchase dvf tokens uh by doing this here and now you guys know that i've spoken about diversify a lot on the uh the refill before there are layer two based kind of like uh uh decks or centralized exchange but they have got a bunch of other uh d5 products that they're building out as well so not just layer two definitely a lot of stuff working there so if you're interested in checking out this token sale be sure to do so this is not me saying that you should go buy this token or anything like that i just wanted to put it on your radar because some people have discussed this with me before because diversify actually had another token previously called nectar which they announced like a few weeks ago or a couple months ago now uh that would kind of um uh i guess

discontinuing that and going with this new dvf token and creating like a whole new distribution for it and doing liquidity mining and all this sort of stuff because the nectar token had actually been around for quite a while and i think bitfinex owned like a la a very large chunk of the supply because diversify was originally called i'm pretty sure called nectar exchange something like that it was and it was a decks that spun out of bitfinex on the centralized exchange and now they've just kind of like rebranded and are kind of targeting something much larger than just decentralized exchanges they want to have a whole layer two ecosystem built on starkware's technology uh for d5 sort of like what loopring's doing so yeah if that's interesting to you definitely check out the blog post here i'll link it in the youtube description so ryan watkins from asari put out an

interesting tweet thread uh today where he said in the coming weeks it is very like likely that usdt's or tethers a share of the stablecoin to play on ethereum will fall below 50 for the first time usdc is quickly emerging as the dominant stable corner in ethereum in large part due to its growing role in d5 and he's attached to a nice chart here comparing usdt usdc and dye and as you can see usdt or tether has been trending down over time with usd c and dire gaining market share which is exactly what we want to see right i'm not you know i'm not like a tether truther or someone that like thinks tether is going to be like the real he's going to like end crypto okay if it explodes or anything like that but i i you know i i agree with with a

lot of people that say you know it's it's like a central point of failure not just for i guess like d5 but for like stable coins in general we obviously want the stablecoin ecosystem to be very vibrant we don't want any one stablecoin having massive dominance here and i'm just really glad something like usdc exists to kind of offset the balance because at the end of the day it's much much easier to scale and grow a centralized stablecoin than it is to grow a decentralized one so if i as i've said like many times on the refill before if i had to pick between usdt and usdc i mean i'd go for usdc every single time so i'm glad that it exists uh and obviously like i prefer to use die whenever possible but you know i i do use usdc quite a lot um

during my kind of day-to-day transactions uh for various different things uh you know some exchanges that i use uh to cash out the fear uh don't support die uh you know die is is i think dies like just as liquid as usdc but you know sometimes i'm doing payments and things like that or maybe some like angel investments and they usually only accept usdc and not other stable coins so i'm glad that it exists for that reason alone but i'm also glad to see that it's it's kind of like the market share on ethereum for tether is is definitely going down because you can see here it peaked at like what over 80 percent back in you know just a year ago and since then it has now come down to almost 50 or below it uh with usdc gaining the majority market share but die also

growing which is which is awesome to see uh and you know this is also due to i think usdt flowing to tron as well funny enough tron has basically become a i guess like platform for tether at the end of the day because um it's obviously cheaper to use in ethereum because it's like totally centralized so they don't really care about um decentralization so they just got all the scale in the world uh so you know and it's got cheaper fees and things like that because of that so people have just moved across to tron with the usdt and you know why not because usdt is a centralized stablecoin to begin with so who cares if it's on a centralized network or a decentralized one obviously on ethereum you can do a lot more with your usdc you know it's supported by different default apps and

things like that but generally i think the fact that it was so dominant for so long was that was a kind of like a bad thing and i'm really glad to see its dominance waning and in the rest of the thread here from ryan he goes through a bunch of different metrics uh saying that over 50 of the usd supply is actually now sitting in smart contracts which is equivalent to 12.5 billion dollars this is something that i didn't know i hadn't actually seen this before that's really cool that means that over 50 of usdc is actually being put to work uh in some way or another within within d5 uh and you can see like an another comparison chart here like tether is obviously not uh you can see it tethers in pink here and it's not a very large large percent of it is in smart contracts or in d5

i think maybe eyeing it here just like under 20 uh die is a lot higher though it's even higher than usdc with about 60 ish in smart contracts so i think usdt or tether is very popular with i guess like market makers and arbitrage traders between centralized exchanges and it's always been that way uh because i mean the usdt is backed by bitfinex and obviously a large centralized exchange and it's just used to r between different centralized exchanges and for market makers and for all that sort of stuff it's not really used for much else and that you know you can see that play out perfectly in this chart here the people within d5 or within smart contracts much prefer to use die

and and usdc instead of tether which i thought was a pretty cool stat to point out as well and then you know ryan talks about other stable coins that are kind of i guess um making headways as well he did another thread a little while ago on you know all the different stable coins out there i mean you can see here there's so many of them now and they're tackling like different problems trying to solve for different things but yeah i i mean i suggest going and giving this uh thread a read from ryan here i think it's uh it's a really great thread and he's a great follower generally as well he does a lot of good research at masari um but yeah good to see that usdt is becoming much less dominant in the ethereum ecosystem and really i expect this to keep falling

ideally you would love you would like to see like an and maybe an equal distribution between uh usdc and and and dye and all the other kind of like decentralized stable coins that have proven themselves but it's not going to work like that it will be a power law distribution i think um but it's good to see that usdc is kind of edging edging out usdt over time and that die is actually keeping up too i'd actually be more concerned if dai had stayed flat while usdc grew um and you know even though usdt is going down that just means we're like having you know here's the here's the new boss same as the old boss sort of thing like as much as i like usdc and think it's like the best centralized tablecoin if i had to pick one i still don't like the fact that the

ethereum ecosystem or like the ecosystem in general is so dependent on these centralized stable coins i would like them to be more dependent on the decentralized ones and of course you know you might be thinking to yourself well anthony dye is backed by 50 usdc right now so is it really decentralized and i've spoken about before that i actually don't think that it when um dye is backed by that much usdc i don't consider dye to be decentralized because it's just i mean that usdc could get frozen by by circle because they have admin an amin key privilege over it and that means that instantly 50 of the die being issued out there is not backed by anything uh and you know that means logically dye would lose 50 of its value logically it'd probably lose more than that because of all the panic that would

ensue so from that perspective it's like well why not just like uh use usdc then but over time i believe you know maker has plans to at least the dow itself and all the community and everything have plans to get off usdc uh and kind of like obviously introduce more collateral over time so you have a more even spread there but yeah i'll leave it at that for now just really great to see tether losing dominance here so nethermind is a teasing that their girly node is sinking and getting closer to uh london or eip1559 now as i've said before uh the roxton uh test net is live with london uh that went live last week and in another 12 hours from when i'm recording this uh the girly test net will uh fork over to london so that'll be the second test

net and then of course next week we'll have rinkaby and then i think sometime in between this week and next or maybe after it goes live on rinkybee we're going to have a mainnet block given if everything goes well that you know if something goes wrong with any of these test nets that you know the core devs aren't going to give a main net fork date or a mainnet block block number because something will obviously if something goes wrong we have to fix something but yeah this is really cool to see that i mean it's been running fine on robson i've been you know i've been talking about on the refuel it's been stress tested there's been plenty of kind of like um people looking at it and now we get to do that on girly uh and then we get to do that on on rinkaby

next week as well so i'm looking forward to this and there's there's a handy little countdown timer here uh that i'll link in the youtube description you can see it's actually 13 hours and 16 minutes away um and this is in my standard time here so this will be done at about noon australian time tomorrow from when i'm recording this but you can go check out the countdown for yourself to see what time it's going to happen in your local time but you know i'm going to tweet about it once it's live anyway so you probably just have to pay attention to my tweets and a lot of other people's tweets i imagine as well so hermes network announced that their mobile wallet is now live for both ios and android now for those who don't know what hermes is it's basically a zk roll up solution focused on scaling

payments so i think i've spoken about them before maybe a little while ago on the refuel um but basically you'll be able to download this wallet onto ios or android and it looks beautiful i mean it's absolutely awesome and this is just a really cool and easy way to move funds between uh different kind of like um accounts on layer 2 and doing it just from your mobile uh i guess like mobile phone and for those of you who have used loot ring before i imagine this would be very similar because loopering also has a an app live i think it's only live on ios right now i'm not sure if they have an android version uh but this is what we need for mass adoption of kind of like payments i believe because at the end of the day most people do their payments on mobile most people do

most things on mobile these days so if we have like a very nice layer 2 experience for these people on on mobile to to kind of like interact with the ethereum network and move funds and pay people and do whatever they want then i i do believe that we're going to get a lot more adoption through that rather than through a web wallet or like a chrome extension or something like that so so really cool to see this and for those of you who don't know what hermes network is as i said they're the zk roll up kind of solution their blog is full of uh information about what they are so you can go to their blog and learn more about it of course they'll be linked in the youtube description and they're pretty active as well uh they've got a pretty active community on

discord and on telegram and things as well which you can find links to uh on the website of course and on their twitter but yeah i'm uh and you should go download this if you have obviously you have either an iphone or android phone maybe you're one of those mythical windows phone users are they even a thing i don't know but yeah if you have an ios or android phone definitely go uh or an iphone or sorry an android phone definitely go uh download this check it out play around with that and experience the power of ethereum's layer two ecosystem for yourself so frank chaparra from the block put out a tweet uh today uh referencing one of the pieces that the blog put out where anthony scaramucci uh plans to launch an ethereum etf or at least uh i guess launch an ethereum fund first a private

ethereum fund and then file for an etf uh for ethereum now for those who don't know anthony is the founder of a sky bridge which which is a um alternative investment firm uh they've been kind of like i guess talking about bitcoin and if you're in digital assets for and crypto assets for for quite a while now uh so yeah this is another player getting into i guess like the private ethereum fund game but also getting into the etf for ethereum game now you know what i find really funny the fact that the sec has left it so long to approve a bitcoin etf that i actually think that there's a decent chance that when the time comes they're going to approve an etf for both bitcoin and eighth at the same time because a lot of the um i guess organizations and institutions

and businesses uh that are i guess like um applying for a bitcoin etf are also just dual applying for an ethereum atf at the same time or an ether etf at the same time and i think that's being done strategically obviously because that you know they all have are in competition with each other they want to be the first one that's approved but i've spoken about it before how basically the sec by waiting so long have um you know tied themselves itself up here because they can't just approve like two or three of these etfs they have to approve all of them at once because approving two or three basically makes them a king maker and it will give preference to any one company over another so i believe they're going to have to approve all the bitcoin etfs at once uh if they want to keep things fair if

they actually want to do what they're mandated to do um and you know and and maybe they approved the etfs at the same time if not i i reckon it would come very shortly after that because once you do the bitcoin one you know the eighth one's very easy to do and then you know you basically already kind of i guess open the open the kind of um can of worms there so yeah i think it's it's going to be really cool to see that play out but i guess good to have people more people that are in the traditional finance system pushing this because that's what we need for things like the etfs but i mean generally like you know you guys know my opinion on traditional finance i think it's slow clunky old i don't really care much too much for it but an etf will give

people an easy way to get into it with their uh to get into eth or bitcoin i guess with their retirement accounts and this is a big deal and this is why people make a big deal out of etfs is because you can't actually buy any products with your retirement account right now that are good products you can buy the ethe e or the gbtc products from grayscale with your retirement funds or your 401k in the us or whatever but they are very different products to an etf those products suffer from premiums and discounts i'm sure you've all seen the discount that was on gbtc for a while i don't know what it's at now but i think it went to like 20 discount so you were underwater and then the premiums you might end up buying it you know buying bitcoin or ether like a

massive premium to what it is on the spot markets so an etf doesn't have that problem because an etf has to trade um at its net asset value and it gets arbitraged away so if an etf's price gets ahead of its underlying then it just gets arbitraged away by whoever wants to kind of like cover that and uh it stays at like a similar value to what the spot value is of it and that makes it a much better product to own and by earning it in a retirement account or a 401k or whatever you get the tax benefits too and that's why a lot of people love owning these assets in in that thing so um yeah i guess like it i think it's essentially tax-free by owning like an etf instead of like having to manage it yourself like if you do a self-managed

kind of retirement fund and buy kind of like eighth spot i'm pretty sure you have to pay like some sort of taxes on that whereas in a uh a proper like retirement account it's it's usually tax-free i'm not exactly sure how the u.s system works but in australia i think like you can still do a self-managed fund and kind of like buy any asset you want with it um but i think and then it's tax-free or at least like minimize tax but i think with like a 401k in the us or something like that maybe someone can correct me in the comments an etf is just much better than any other other products out there and if you buy spot with it you don't get those tax benefits like spot eat for example so yeah cool to see this push coming out of uh as i said traditional finance people

and we'll keep an eye on this and see how it goes so loopering is nearing two billion dollars traded on their layer two uh decentralized exchanges here which is awesome to see i mean i've spoken about loopering plenty of times on the refill before i've said to you guys to not sleep on layer two exchanges like loop ring because they're gonna you know um be able they're gonna their trading volumes are gonna keep growing as time goes on as more and more and more users get priced out of layer one of course and it's just like the onboarding gets easier for these sorts of things so this is lifetime volume i believe are not like 24-hour volume or anything like that but i think that even their 24-hour volume has been steadily increasing over time and you know i i i think that uh over

you know the next coming months when more people get kind of like i guess eighth peeled on the layer tweaker ecosystem they're going to be going to things like loop ring as well uh because there are the evm compatible generalized i guess um layer twos out there like that are going live that i've spoken about plenty of times like arbitrary optimism and zk sync and starkware and all that sort of stuff or maybe not starkware they're doing a different slightly different thing um but loopring and you know i mentioned diversify earlier they're building out their own like you know i guess like siloed ecosystem where they control the user experience and they're able to give people just like a there's one app whether it be loopering or or diversify uh where the the or even like dydx for example too where users can go there

they know what they're getting and then the loopering team for example can focus on just on their products instead of having to i guess like focus on everything else that's that's sharing the same infrastructure as them which i think there are benefits and drawbacks too but um you know for looping it seems to be working they they you know as i said they've been doing two billion dollars traded so far i know this might not sound a lot compared to something like uni swap on layer one that's doing i think still doing a billion dollars of 20 of of trading volume every 24 hours or at least around that which is which is insane but i just think that a lot of people haven't moved to layer two yet still it just hasn't been there hasn't been like a massive push about it yet i think people don't realize that layer

two is here they're just waiting for those generalized solutions to go alive and then i think the narrative will definitely shift around that so uh brantley here put out a tweet where uh basically saying that him uh and his team are looking for a skilled person to lead an effort to standardize the sign in with ethereum uh a kind of initiative here and they can pay a grant for the work so basically what needs to happen is they need to survey the current practices write a spec best practices etc make an oauth implementation uh if this is something that you are interested in doing you can dm brantley um his profile will be linked in the youtube description but i did want to kind of explain what this signing with ethereum thing is and why it's very important and why is potentially a game changer for ethereum

basically brantley did a thread on it that was very very popular that you can go find it'll be linked in the youtube description uh about exactly what signing with ethereum is and you know why it's so powerful but i'm going to give you the tldr essentially what this is is that you know when you go to different websites and they've got like a an option to sign in with google or sign in with facebook or sign in with x and y and z or whatever this would be another option on their website but you were signing in with your ethereum wallet so say you have your meta mask when you log into web3 apps what are you so like sorry let me take a step back for a bit when you interact with web3 apps and you know this includes pretty much every dfi app

you click sign in with and then you click meta mask or your ledger wallet or you know wallet connect or some other wallet out there and then you sign in with that wallet and then you know it's not asking you for username or password anything it just asks you to sign a message now what's actually happening when you sign that message is that you're using your private key to sign a message to prove that you are the owner of that public address and then you basically get to sign in now if you expand that out to not just like d5 and crypto native apps but to everything it basically means that you have a way to authenticate yourself with all these different services without having to store any data or without having to store any usernames or passwords or sensitive data on uh their servers right on their

centralized servers of this kind of service so you can essentially control all your data control your credentials and everything and revoke it and at any time as well um with signing with ethereum so that's what this initiative is all about we basically want to make this uh ubiqu ubiquitous across like the web generally not just within crypto because this can literally apply to every website out there already all the website has to do once this is built out is implement it into their kind of like stack and allow people to sign in with their ethereum account rather than signing in with something else as an authentication tool here which i think is going to be more and more accepted as time goes on i think there's a lot of companies definitely out there who don't want to have to store user credentials because we've seen all the data leaks

that's happened over you know over over like the i guess like last few years especially where storing all these data in like one giant centralized database is a very very tasty thing for hackers to to go after and for people that are just kind of like trying to exploit different systems to gain access to this data so what if we just had everyone own their own data and then they can choose who they want who they want to give it to and then if they're compromised well it's only their data that's that's uh i guess like um lost it's not everyone's um and you know as i said like these services don't have to hold this treasure trove of user data for hackers to get access to so this would actually fundamentally solve a fundamentally huge problem with the web but not just within crypto within like basically the

whole web and i'm really hoping to see this happen so if you're interested dm brantley and you can kind of like get started on this with him uh he works at ens domains as director of operations at ens um so yeah definitely a very smart cookie uh and you know i'm really looking forward to seeing this deployed more broadly all right so the final thing i wanted to talk about was this a map of the bankless nation that the future is down on twitter posted so you know for those of you listening on to the podcast you won't be able to see this but you can go to the youtube description and check this out but this is basically an image of you know basically the ethereum kind of like ecosystem or the crypto ecosystem not not just ethereum there's a bunch of other stuff going on here

and i just love it i mean it's so creative like look at look at even the things like the little details like the top left where they have um the ethereum logo on on the compass there or like the the the bottom right where you have uh kyc being this giant kind of like squid that's going to attack you and then they've got like uh the the centralized crypto banks basically walled off from the rest of uh i guess like the bankless nation because they're like the you know we don't want to we don't want to go near them it's like centralization harbor we need you know we need them but we don't like them sort of thing um and then you know you have all these other stuff like the kingdom of eath and mountain doge and that the chasm of lost uh private keys

which i thought was pretty funny i just i mean the more you look at this image and the more you kind of like view it the more like these little easter eggs and little kind of like things that you find like the charts being the mountains in the background and you know hard cap hills and i mean ruins of mt gox there it's just really really funny but aside from that i did want to kind of like i guess touch on what i think i've touched on the refill before about how i mean ethereum in particular or i guess like crypto and generally right it's like a new nation at the end of the day like we're all citizens of this new nation that's being formed totally digital it has its own sets of rules and laws if you consider the protocol rules to be

laws which i mean they're not laws but in the legal sense but they're the laws that the protocol follows right there there are certain things that the protocol can't do and can do and it follows that if all the full nodes you know exist they're in sync with each other and you know uh the everyone agrees that that's the current state of the chain uh and then there's everything built on top of it all the apps are like all the different companies built on top of it and you can go and interact with these different companies um you can use uh the basically the reserve currency of ethereum which is eth for example uh and then you know you can use different kind of uh tokens on there which are like equity in different companies or at least they act like equity in some some ways um

and yeah general and we have like our own memes and things like that we have our own kind of like law we have our own history so really the crypto ecosystem as a whole is definitely its own kind of nation digitally native internet born and bred and basically doesn't really exist in the real world right there are conferences and things like that but that's like i guess an extension of what's happening in the digital world it's digital first like a majority of things happen in the digital world uh and i just think it's really really cool that that you know this this image was put together i just it's it's awesome i would actually get this framed if it was if this was available so i guess the future is down if you're listening you should definitely i guess like either nft this or put this up for some for people

to be able to print this out and get a print of it like a post or something because that's something that i'll definitely be interested in purchasing because i just think it's really really cool but anyway i'll stop falling over this for now um i think that's it for today yeah i've got nothing left no no more tabs left here so thank you again everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone