Venmo adds support for crypto, ETH in DeFi & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #103​​​ - 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 20th of april 2021. all right let's get into it everyone so we hit 11 million eighth locked in d5 on ethereum uh just before i was i was kind of going i was i was on d5 poles sorry and i was just looking around i'm like oh wow 11 million eighth in d5 that's that's really cool that's crazy and then i went and looked at i guess like eth2 uh how much is kind of locked there it's about 3.94 million so almost 4 million so i guess we're pretty much at 50 15 million uh 8th locked in d5 and e2 which at current prices i mean i don't even know how to do the math in my

head but i'm going to say it's many multiple billions of dollars you know locked into locked into d5 and eth2 there which is really cool i mean it's great to see eth being used as more of an economic asset and continuing to be used as this economic asset because you can imagine there's a lot of people who have eth right they stack e they buy it i mean a lot of you obviously hold eighth i i hope all of you uh hold eth right especially if you're kind of like watching me ramble on every day about it um but like we all want to use our ether things right like whether that's putting it inside maker and borrowing stable coins like borrowing dye against it or putting it inside one of these other platforms like like rv or whatever or compound doing the same thing there

or we want to put it into a liquidity pool on uni swap or on sushi swap or whatever right there's just lots of things you can do with your eth and of course you know you don't want to sell it but you want to do do other things in d5 and maybe you don't have any spare money left i know i don't so what i do is i just like to leverage my youth now of course there's liquidation risk and all that sort of stuff where if you don't have like a a safe liquidation price the eave price can fall fast enough to kind of liquidate you so you know i wouldn't recommend doing that for people that are kind of newer to the ecosystem but for me i usually keep like a very low liquidation price like very very low and i'm talking like maybe

a lot of the time it's under five hundred dollars um so it would take eighth going to 500 for me to be liquidated and i also do it through maker and they have this system called um the peg the peg stability module or something like that or the price stability module or something like that where um or maybe it's called something else maybe i'm mixing up my terms here oracle security module i think it's called where they actually give you an hour to save your position so say you you go underwater and um you know you're going to get liquidated uh it actually won't liquidate you for a whole hour so you have an hour to kind of like pay back some debt uh kind of i guess like pat it out with more eat if you've got more heat to lower that liquidation price so that's

how i kind of do it but again i don't recommend it for people who are um new to this kind of like thing they're new to these things i would recommend doing your own research here and kind of seeing that but you know you can also do other things with it with your eighth like pairing it with something and providing liquidity on uni swap obviously there's risks there with like impermanent loss and things like that too uh but you know there's no there's no risk of kind of liquidation there so yeah but still good to see this and you know it's it's really good to see the eth locked in d5 increase even though the usd price of eight is increasing right because if you think about it 11 million eighth locked um you know and this is an all-time high is is you know

worth much more at two thousand dollars per than it is at one thousand dollars per each for example so you know some people kind of said to me it's like okay well wouldn't we expect the eth locked in d5 to actually go down because uh you know it doesn't not not that much not that much eight needs to be locked to make up for the same dollar amount and i'm like well i mean maybe but like i i didn't bet on that because you know just because the eighth value goes up doesn't mean that people don't want to use the extra money that they have like you know if you have 100 eath and each price doubles well now you have like double the amount of money to work with on a usd basis so you know why wouldn't you you know utilize that if you if you knew how to

do it if you if you kind of like wanted to do it you would definitely utilize it because it would mean that if you know if you're doing yield farming if you're borrowing stable coins against your eth you can basically borrow you know double the amount of stable coins and then get to get double the amount of yields uh so so to speak so yeah i just think that that's what people are doing as well it's like you know they're just plowing in all their ether into these default platforms you know a lot of it i mean if we go to d5 pulse here a lot of it is definitely uh kind of in in the in the money markets and maker obviously leads here uh liquidity is a is a new kind of entrant here which has like a lot of eth in there actually

if you kind of look here they've only been out for like a couple weeks uh and liquid is basically a similar platform to maker where you can put your ether in you know borrow what's called l usd and do whatever you want with that uh and actually i saw um justin's son put in like a billion dollars of eth into this so a lot of this i think is him uh right now um but still kind of kind of wild to see here and then obviously like the other protocols here that are leading is uh obviously maker compound uniswap and you know then you go down the list here it's interesting to see uh ave it doesn't have as much eat as these other platforms so i actually think that uh for that i think that maker kind of leads here i think compound uh is also at the top because of

liquidity mining but i think maker leads here because of the fact that uh you know you can get cheap debt right by by borrowing stable coins on maker against your eighth you're paying 5.5 percent but if you were to do that through a money market like compound or aver you would be paying uh i think it's like something like 10 right now and it varies of course and and makers stability fees vary as well don't get me wrong but i think that's why you see so much ethan maker and you know the other reasons being security too and you know with with compound it's not like are there um where because compounds paying you comp token so that makes up for the extra kind of like uh apy that you have to to pay to borrow those stable coins um but still maker uh i mean you know is

is the is the cheapest right now i actually think liquid is cheaper but liquid is very new as i said only been around for a couple weeks it's not as many people kind of trust it and really if you're kind of like borrowing a uh sorry borrowing die against your eth paying 5.5 percent isn't really much right depending on what you're doing with it like if you're if you're using that diet to maybe speculate on on other kind of coins and stuff like that and you're expecting those coins to go up like multiple hundred percent in value then paying five point five percent a year to borrow is is nothing right it's negligible um but for me i i make is my platform of choice uh for the cheap debt and also for um the security reasons like it's been around forever you know it's battle hardened uh dye keeps its

peg relatively kind of like well i mean and when the peg does deviate the system does everything in its power to bring it back to peg so i've got those kind of security uh guarantees there as well uh but yeah anyway good to see this uh good to see just the overall growth as well i mean even since just the start of uh the start of this year we basically what do we start the year on uh let me just eyeing it here like 7 million eighth and then up to 11 million so in three or four months three and a half months here we've got another four million each there and then obviously a lot of eth went into eth2 as well so yeah really great to see this overall here all right so uh this is a bit of a funny tweet here from from cz from binance

he basically tweeted out today i love ethereum i just don't like the high gas fees part well i mean we all know this is this is right uh because i put out this tweet here and i said if he doesn't like the high gas fees then he should allow users to transfer their funds from binance to the scaling solutions already live on ethereum such as dydx and loop ring and all the other ones right and then i also said i also hope to see him support generalized scaling solutions like optimism arbitrary and polygon if he really loves ethereum so you know i mean i'm i the way i am is like i just look at what people do right i don't listen to what they say because people can say anything they want they can lie they can cheat no one really cares i mean it doesn't

seem that anyone cares what cz says and he also blocks replies so you can only quote tweet him um you know he he just lets people who kind of he follows reply so he kind of locks himself into an echo chamber here but anyway i just like you know and i wrote i read about this in the newsletter today where i basically said that you know this is what the this is a massive advantage that ethereum has as a platform is that it's credibly neutral right and what i meant by this and what i wrote about in the newsletter is that just because binance isn't supporting ethereum doesn't mean these kind of other exchanges aren't like i expect coinbase to support ethereum's layer 2 ecosystem binance obviously doesn't want to because they have their own platform to kind of pump up in bsc but coinbase isn't going to support bsc

like i i don't imagine coinbase bridging into bsc i don't imagine coinbase listing the bnb token because binance is their direct competitor but from ethereum's perspective ethereum doesn't benefit any one party if if all these exchanges support ethereum they're not they're not they're not basically supporting um these another kind of central party uh because ethereum is credibly neutral it's permissionless anyone can build and do whatever they want on it um and like no one benefits except really if you wanted to kind of like point to i guess like one group of people that benefits eath holders but the eath holders don't have on-chain voting rights on on ethereum and also the east holders are incredibly distributed there is probably at this stage there is probably millions of eighth holders right so from that perspective it's it's there's no

central party there's no the ethereum foundation doesn't even benefit from this uh yes they have a a nice stack of eth but it's not like it's a huge amount i think the last time i checked it was a few hundred thousand each it's and there's the total supply of it's like 115 million dollars right now um so yeah from that perspective if but if cesar really loves ethereum then support the layer twos that's it simple as that you know funnel your millions of users into these layout twos just have a bridge to polygon like i don't understand why they don't even have a bridge to polygon um i mean i do understand it like don't get me wrong maybe me saying i don't understand he's the wrong thing i know exactly why they don't do it uh because of the fact that they're supporting bsc uh and that's what they

want to see grow here but if that's the case then stop with the right stop saying you love ethereum stop saying that you just don't like the high gas feeds because you know cz could take a lot of the load off ethereum and put it onto these layer twos by just supporting the bridges in and out of his exchange here so yeah at the end of the day i just think that this is is crap and i'll call it out when i see it i'm not going to sit back and kind of like just be nice about it at the end of the day this is this is war right these these networks are in competition with each other and there are a lot of vested interests that don't want to see ethereum succeed because having a credibly neutral platform means that these um you know these centralized entities or

these incumbents can't take advantage of that right you know cz has no power over ethereum he can't do anything to ethereum he can't control the network and that probably annoys him so that's why he created bsc a basically centralized version of ethereum that he can control uh but anyway i'll leave it at that i won't i won't harp too much on about that and i actually really like the comments on my on my tweet here obviously i have a very ethereum kind of um ethereum heavy following but it was encouraging to see people kind of like agreeing with me on this and and kind of like even i mean anti-pro synthesis said here you know obviously you know it's not part of his short-term value extraction mindset to support these things he just wants to squeeze his space for everything it's got and i mean i i said

yeah of course i i know this but i i figured i'd still ask i figured i'd still put it out there because the signals need to be sent people need to understand that you know just because people say something just because caesar says something doesn't mean he actually kind of like means it because he doesn't he doesn't love ethereum he hates ethereum uh and and from that perspective i would just rather him see to support layer two than just sit around and kind of like talk crap at the end of the day like i'll just call it as i see it but anyway leaving that for now on to more positive news uh so peter from the uh i mean uh the lead developer of go ethereum the death client a lot of you will know him he basically put a tweet out uh earlier

today saying with berlin behind us uh with erp2929 included which was what i spoke about yesterday the aip that basically increased the um the the op code costs uh to mitigate against the os attacks uh uh so with that included and geth by default running snapshots i don't have any immediate objections to raising the gas limit to say 15 million uh not saying two or not to just that i myself see no instant threat of doing so now there's some context needed here firstly peter is the most conservative core dev when it comes to the gas limit the gas limit is ethereum's block size by increasing the gas limit you increase ethereum's block size you increase the size of nodes you increase the state size you make it harder for nodes to sync right we've all heard

this story before from from bitcoiners and it rings true if you increase it too much then only a small subset of kind of nodes can be run this is what bsc did they just increase the gas limit a lot they shorten the block times to three seconds and voila you have like this scalable kind of system but it's completely centralized because no one can run a node except these super nodes which are all controlled by binance so that's why we don't want to just like increase the gas limit to 100 million yes it would like make the fees like very low maybe in the short term maybe not in the long term but it would basically centralize ethereum at this point in time so for peter to say this it's a great signal and and he's not like going crazy either like the current gas limit is 12.5

million so an increase to 15 million would be a 20 increase and i'll be honest here i don't think this is gonna do a whole lot i think maybe we might get some very short term uh you know fear relief but it's not going to do anything like it's this concept of kind of like i guess i mean i know a lot of people there are some people who hate like this uh this this kind of like comparison of induced demand which is the concept of you know if you if you like the common kind of example here is that you know um highways if you know you have like a three lane highway and then you make it four lanes you know it doesn't actually increase the throughput of the highway because uh it'll just it'll just make more people drive right and then

it'll just get filled up again so it's this kind of like no matter how much you increase it the demand always outstrips the supply and that definitely applies to to blockchains because there's so much demand to use ethereum right now that the gas fees i mean they're over 200 way and they've been that way for like 48 hours now or even longer than that so if people are willing to pay that ma that high of fees right to use the network then it doesn't matter how high you increase the the gas limit here it's just going to get filled up like people are just going to use the network still and and the fees are going to be right back to where they were uh in the in the kind of like maybe maybe maybe if you increase the gas limit enough it takes a couple of months

but it's still going to get back there so the long-term scaling for ethereum and is definitely layer two right there's no question about that uh if we want to retain ethereum's decentralization properties that is but in the in if we if we can safely increase it we should safely increase it uh and and because it will give us i guess like some i mean by increasing it it also gives us a little bit of scalability gains for layer twos as well because layer twos obviously use layer one and they're limited by layer one uh as well um you know they don't have unlimited scalability they still rely on layer one to an extent they just like expand the size there so from that perspective this would benefit layer twos as well but yeah really really great to see that from from peter because as i said he's

the most conservative core dev when it comes to this and if he thinks it's good to go then definitely good to go here uh one of the uh my big mining pools bitfly put out a tweet supporting this as well uh and for those who don't know how the gas limit gets increased it doesn't require a hard fork basically the miners can vote up the gas limit so essentially i mean the mining pools can basically just you know set this kind of like i think it's a client kind of a command where they basically say okay well we're going to increase the gas limit to 15 million and then you know if enough of them do this then it increases the 15 million essentially that's like the tldr of how it works um and you know obviously they don't want to increase it too much either they they do i mean as

much as like i've given minor in the past um i think they do uh still act in rational self-interest and then they don't want to kind of like cause any adverse kind of harm to the ethereum network because that could lead to an um a decreasing eth price which means their profits go down so i expect them to always kind of or at least you know most of the time act in rational self-interest and we saw like all their threats over eip one five five nine nothing kind of materialized there as a you know i remember i i said this like it just it doesn't make sense for them to do that so from that perspective you know i'm looking forward to seeing them just increases the 15 million here we can monitor the network see how how it's all faring see if everything's going um securely and safely

and then maybe we go to to 17.5 million and 20 million maybe we just keep slowly increasing it and as i said the demand's still going to be there and it's probably not going to do much for gas fees but it's going to increase the overall scalability for layer 2s as well so yeah that's a really cool thing about it too so i think this will go through i don't know when uh you know if there's enough signaling from the community from the miners from the core devs it can probably happen i mean it can happen right now there's no there's no like limits on it there's no waiting times it could happen right now if we wanted it to it just depends on people coordinating to make this happen so we'll see and you can actually monitor this on ether scan you can go to the

the blocks and the blo it'll tell you like the gas limit of that block and you can actually see and i think they've got a section that shows you like what miners are voting it up and which ones aren't and you know what the average kind of blocks that the gas limit is and things like that so you can check that on ether scan if you want as well so big news today from venmo so for those who don't know venmo is basically a payments app in the us in the us i don't know if they're anywhere else but i know they're definitely very popular in the us it's owned by paypal uh but today they enabled users to buy and sell crypto on the platform now i think we knew this was coming and they had already promised this but it wasn't activated yet and they have 70

million customers so this is quite a big deal so currently they support btc ltc and bch which is like the safe assets to support i guess and it's just hilarious because when i look at this i'm like ltc that thing's just a cockroach like it's just never gonna die i thought i mean i i don't have anything against ltc but to me it's just pointless but all these platforms keep supporting it so i think from that perspective it's just gonna be around forever um at this point in time but anyway this is 70 million uh people that now have access to buying these things through venmo maybe there's you know maybe not all of them are new to crypto maybe they've already bought some and they've already got like a coinbase account or whatever right i'm sure there's overlap there but this just gives them another way to do so and

it exposes it to more people like venmo i'm i'm sure it's popular with younger people but i think it's used by by older people as well and they aren't as exposed to crypto assets like i think at this point like the younger people maybe even in their 20s like that market is becoming like super saturated i think like a lot of people in that age bracket already kind of know about crypto already owned a lot of crypto and like the next frontier is getting the i guess like the older generations into it and buying it and these kind of apps do so like paypal and venmo and all these sorts of stuff so yeah bullish news it may have been the reason why we stopped bleeding today uh like the price the price was was bleeding you know it felt looked like it was going to go back to

2000 but we kind of bounced up and you know i'm not sure what it's going to be when you're watching this but if i just check my chart it's at about 200 right now um but you know we'll see i mean i i don't know what the price is going to do in the short term but uh you know this is only positive for for the price of these assets i think and it's cool that more places are supporting crypto purchases here so d5 saver released a new tool called the recipe creator which they're calling an advanced d5 transaction builder what this allows you to do it allows you you to combine any number of actions from different d5 protocols as well as flash loans and swaps into a single transaction so you know you may have seen things about like flash loans on ethereum where

there's like you know a lot of transactions uh happening in kind of like one transaction or a lot of sorry actions or a lot of kind of like um mini transactions happening within the transaction so so to speak um and i mean they're calling them actions here that's probably the the right term to call it and then at the end of the flash loan as long as uh as long as like there's there's um the money's paid back then the transaction is valid and people obviously use this to make profits and sometimes it's used for exploits and things like that uh but you know d5 saver makes this easy for anyone to do this with like a a gui kind of a graphical user interface for people to to make these recipes themselves and to basically do this themselves not just with flash loans but to do anything you

want like any kind of like thing you can think of where you string together a bunch of actions to form a transaction you can do with defy saver here so if that's something you're interested in doing definitely go check out the d5 saver platform here uh and they you know this isn't just their their only product they've got a bunch of other products out there they're most famous for their product that allows you to basically set up ways to protect your positions in case they're going to get liquidated as i was talking about before you can get liquidated by borrowing funds against your collateral uh d57 has tools for that as well so yeah definitely go check them out if you haven't already so stakewise announced today that uh they have enabled trustless staking for their new

stakewise pool uh i thought in the stake wise pool for new deposits i should say um the the the swise which is their token or sys token contract has also been deployed ahead of the airdrop that they're doing and the airdrop is has been extended to include include stakewise v2 beta testers so if you're looking for another kind of like staking platform as i discussed yesterday you know coinbase staking is going live and there's a bunch of other staking services out there but if you're interested in one you know especially a trustless one here you can go check out stakewise uh you know they describe how it works here in this blog post i won't go over it and kind of like i guess the the trust assumptions and things like that and anything got to do with i guess like you know how they achieve

what they do and how they're actually kind of doing it so yeah definitely go check them out if you if you haven't already if you're interested in staking and things like that but there's you know as i've mentioned before there's plenty of these services out there some i mean a lot of them are centralized because of the one-way bridge some of them distributed like lido some of them offer trustless staking as well but it depends on what they're doing in the background too and as i said there's other solutions like rocker pool coming out that are promising decentralized staking but they're still not live yet it hasn't been kind of like um tested in the wild yet they do have a lot of test nets that they've been running and it's been working and they recently redid their their tokenomics but you know we'll have to wait and see

how that kind of plays out for sure so terrence from the prismatic labs team a team building an eth2 client uh tweeted out something today about the beacon chain had passed its one millionth slot now this is i guess like a vanity metric i mean it just shows that the beacon chain has been live and active for one million slots which is you know i guess the beacon chain went live december 1st 2020 so it's been i mean it's already been what four months now or you know over four months sort of thing since it's been live and it's been running so smoothly the the eth2 beacon chain there has been you know slashings as they should as they should be if someone does something wrong like double signing or if people go offline um or or if kind of there's like an

activity leak due to people going offline and things like that um and you know it's it's just been doing everything like just very cleanly it's been processing validators in and out um it's been kicking people out that have been doing bad stuff it's it's been inviting new validators in i mean it just i actually to be honest like the fact that it's just gone so smoothly and i've said this before just inspires so much confidence in the researchers and developers that made this all happen and this isn't to say that eth1 isn't like this it is we've seen this play out um you know eth1 is i mean i don't think the ethereum network has ever gone down there's been zero percent up uh down sorry 100 uptime even during what i mentioned the other day the shanghai dos attacks at the end of 2016

where because we had the multi-client architecture our parody was able to pick up the load after the geth nodes went offline and was able to kind of i guess um keep the network going so from that perspective the ethereum engineers and researchers here are just like phenomenal world-class and this is what you really want in these systems you want 100 kind of uptime right uh you ideally i mean you know you strive for 100 you you know you might not get it but if you do get it that's amazing and the fact that the bigger chain got it and this is like a brand new novel kind of consensus mechanism brand new code brand new chain is absolutely incredible and it inspires so much confidence and it means that the merge can go through with with low risk of um you know some security issues

happening you know the eighth one to e2 merge i know that the researchers and developers wanted to see the beacon chain live at minimum for six months before before doing the merge ideally 12 months to make sure everything was running like super smoothly because once the merge goes through obviously the eth1 chain is going to be relying on the beacon chain to validate its blocks and processing the transactions and all that sort of stuff so we want to make sure it all goes right so yeah the fact that we got to a one million slot with no issues at all um you know i think the the network participation is is quite high still yet not i mean 99.5 point six percent this is just incredible like i i mean you know i've covered this in the daily grade data pump before about the stats around this and how this

all works but the fact that you know the validators are just like online doing their job um you know we've had like perfect kind of um running of the beacon chain for so long is is a huge testament to to everything that we've been trying to build here and a huge testament to the resiliency of these kind of protocols too and and and the you know casper pos uh implementation on the beacon chain works as we expected it too so yeah really great to see that i'll stop kind of like gushing i guess like i go i go a bit fanboy here over these sorts of things because of the fact that i mean i think i do it because there was so much hate for eth2 for so long or people said it was never going to launch it was never going to work

proof of stake is a pipe dream and whatever and i was just like just wait just wait and see and this is the same thing i say about layer twos as well is that layer two is already live but just wait and see what until what we've got like with optimism and arbitrary and zk sync with their evm compatible layer twos wait until those things go online you're gonna see how far we can get ethereum scaling because when you really dig into these sorts of things you see that it's not crap right it's not it's actually true and all of this stuff works it's just that a lot of people don't see that because they don't want to dive deeper and you know you guys watching the refill every day have all this information available to you i try to relay this information to you

as much as i can because you you kind of like need to be at the forefront to keep up with this sort of stuff so you know and i hope i inspire a lot of you to educate the naysayers as well whenever they bring up something i hope that you know you maybe think back to something i said and kind of correct them uh because i think education in this space is you know is is the most powerful thing but it needs to be a distributed and decentralized thing it can't just come from me it can't just come from just bankless or you know the defiant defy that ether it can't just come from like uh you know a bunch of things it needs to come from a community of people and i think that's ethereum's main strength so uh yeah but i'll leave it at that for

now the last thing i wanted to talk about was dydx's growth again i know i go on about them a lot but i just it's it's just kind of like blown away all my expectations to be honest like i knew and i've been saying that layer 2 is going to blow everyone away for a while but the fact that dydx has been live for what like two weeks now in a public mainnet and they've already done over 300 million dollars in trading volume um on on a platform that is brand new right uh that it you know needs to kind of get those network effects out there only has five assets i'm expecting them to add another two assets this week because they said they're going to be adding two extra assets each week going forward uh is absolutely amazing so yeah great to see this growth

from from dewa dx here as usual um and i just as i said i can't wait to see them kind of scale this up to 100 million over 24 hour volume right and then up to a billion and even further than that i i'm most looking forward to doi dx uh basically disrupting you know bitmex and like these other kind of centralized perpetual exchanges because at the end of the day if you can have the same scalability and reliability of a centralized exchange but on uh you know on a decentralized exchange like dydx with the security guarantees of ethereum with self-custody of your funds with being able to move in and out of things like really quickly um why wouldn't you use the decentralized option right there is no reason to use the centralized option

then uh so yeah i mean from that point of view really encouraging really exciting uh and i'll leave it at that for today so thank you again everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone