Visa building on Ethereum, Coinbase x Rocket Pool - The Daily Gwei Refuel #638 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 11th of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today's episode is a bit of regulatory news so today the SEC announced they have settled with bitrex Incorporated here uh they find them I believe 24 million dollars but bitrex um didn't admit to any wrongdoing or anything like that now I think the best take I saw came from Rodrigo who does legal and policy at Paradigm here where he said uh the bitrack settlement like the wahi settlement before it is effectively a total capitulation by the SEC that makes you wonder why they even brought this case in the first place for context the SEC sued bitrex after a

six-year investigation and once the company had already entered bankruptcy uh they also sued the founder individually and alleged he had made over 130 million dollars in compensation from running the exchange yet they settled with no admission of guilt for a 24 million penalty payable by the already bankrupt company and this is kind of funny to me because I've said for a while now that I believe the SEC has basically turned into a mob and defines that these companies pay is really just protection money because who exactly did the SEC protect in this scenario right they find bitrex 24 million dollars which is already bankrupt right um and uh they alleged that the founder it's that the founder themselves made

over 130 million dollars from this so I mean there's no one being protected here there's no kind of like victims it seems from from this it's just the SEC seemingly going after a company like this uh especially after such a long investigation and just settling with them uh because they know that they're probably not going to fight it right because they're already bankrupt so they're just going to pay a fine and the SEC gets to basically write that down as a win but again they didn't protect anyone uh it's not a win because there was no mission of guilt or anything it was literally just a fine that was paid so you know legally speaking it really just uh was a fine and as I said it definitely looks like a protection racket going on here like where you pay protection money um or else you know they'll burn down

your business but in this case the business was already burnt down and I guess like now it's being paid out of the the bankruptcy uh kind of claims here it's it's just wild right this is just kind of more of the the SEC is doing and continuing to do here and why I said before that I believe I strongly believe now especially post the Ripple um kind of results that coinbase is definitely going to win their case against the SEC I I don't know if coinbase would actually settle for a fine because even if that included not uh admitting to any wrongdoing or anything like that I think coinbase uh at least is very ideological driven in this in this kind of pursuit so you can imagine a scenario where the SEC consists to coinbase hey we'll leave you alone if you pay us like 100 million

dollars or something as a fine and you know you don't have to admit any wrongdoing but just pass the fine basically right and that's that's basically what they did with the with bitrex here right um and I don't think coinbase would do that yes it would probably make coinbase's life easier but it wouldn't eventually it wouldn't kind of further their goals which is getting regulatory Clarity passed through Congress in the US like that is their ultimate goal right that's that's a big reason why they're fighting this but I mean another reason why they're fighting it obviously is because it's their business on the line as well but uh but yeah I mean I'm very confident that coinbase is going to win their their suit against the SEC generally but uh yeah the SEC continues to be act more like a mob than any kind of I guess uh institution that protects

investors here because I don't see any investors being protected from this result uh with bid Rex all right on to some positive news today so another major fintech company that has been quite involved with ethereum uh kind of development for a little while now and building on ethereum is Visa now I remember I highlighted a few things from them over the years one of them being they were interested in building a layer 2 Network on ethereum um like a Visa layer 2 Network they also had some stuff they were doing uh earlier um uh that I can't remember exactly what it was but I remember there was there was some other stuff they were doing uh but today they have shared their experimental solution for paying on-chain gas fees with a Visa card now the reason why this is very exciting is

because essentially what they're doing is that they're abstracting away ethereum gas fees using a Visa card so the tldr of how this works is down here where they say uh the our experimental implementation accomplished oh sorry they start off by saying our solution places a pay Master at the core a pay Master is a specialized smart contract that can sponsor gas fees for user control contract accounts this solution phrase users from needing to Halt or Bridge native blockchain tokens just to cover uh just to cover gas fees so the solution itself is detailed in this kind of thread and and uh little uh little diagram here which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh but the ultimate I guess like end result here is

that uh people with a Visa card would be able to pay the gas fees owed using money already on their Visa card so they wouldn't have to acquire East to do this East would still be paid ultimately at the settlement layer at the ethereum layer but this is this is the abstraction uh layout that I've been talking about on the refill for quite a while now where essentially the gas fees would be extracted away from from the end end user here which is very very cool because that is the way to mass adoption right that is the way to getting more and more people on chain making sure that they can pay for their fees and whatever they want to because like imagine a world where everyone's just using stable coins right well obviously if you're using stable coins as your kind of unit of account as your

money like usdc or usdt or PayPal stablecoin you're not going to want to have to make sure that you still have eighth for gas fees on your payment account maybe you invested in each somewhere else and you have it in cold storage or something like that or it's on a centralized exchange or whatever but you're not going to want to have to keep going back and forth and being like Oh do I have enough Ethan here to do my grocery shopping for example let's you know let's think more further into the future here so that's where Visa comes in and basically says well no you can still use your Visa card with your stable coins or whatever tokens you basically want and we'll just abstract away the gas fees for you we'll just let you pay the gas fees in whatever kind of token that you want uh obviously stable

coins would be very popular to do this and they'll handle that in the back end using their paymaster web service yeah so as I said you can learn more about this I'll link in the YouTube description below and there's also a uh verifying paymaster contract on the ethereum girly test net right now so you can check out the contract uh yourself and they were able to and Visa was able to successfully send user operations with off-chain gas fee payments uh which you can see actually linked here on the girly test net which is very very cool to see I'll link that in the YouTube description below as well for you to check out but yeah just another I guess big kind of company big fintech company building on ethereum right like as I said we had PayPal now we have Visa I know MasterCard has done a bunch of

experiments on this as well there's various Banks doing experiments around stable coins ethereum really is quickly becoming that global settlement layer that I've been talking about for quite a while now where essentially all these big companies trusted enough to start building on it and start putting into uh and start testing with it and hopefully kind of productionizing some of this stuff so that their existing user base obviously Visa has a massive user base right can get the benefits uh benefits out of this so it's it's kind of funny when when you look at it like this and look at how fast it seems to be happening because I think that there's just a Confluence of things right the infrastructure is there uh the the kind of like uh the trust is there right the reliability is there as I said before the merge is was a massive de-risking

event for ethereum generally not just for you know each staking not just for ethereum on-chain kind of like stuff that us ethereum is doing us us um crypto natives do but also for companies outside of the ethereum ecosystem that may want to use ethereum so yeah very very cool to see this you can check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so parathos has detailed the new whole ski test net that I've talked about a bunch on the refuel before and what the plans are for this so this will be a long-lived test net that is replacing sapolia that will launch uh roughly on September 15th which of course is the first anniversary of the merge so pathos continues and says we've had two coordination calls and the test

net aims to give client teams a platform to test clients at a larger scale than mainnet and for homesteakers to test their setups without risks so girl parathos continues and says that Gurley is currently the biggest test net with 500 000 validators but whole skit will be launching with I believe 1.4 million validators so around double the current mainnet validators and obviously almost triple the current girly validators and that is being done because they want to stress test the ethereum can set this mechanism they want to stress test the network on on this test net especially as concerns have Arisen around what these kind of um what what the ethereum network looks like when we have you know one million 1.5 million two million validators you know what does that look like for especially

um you know home stakers and people running software as running Hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or Rock 5B you know on on networks where they may not have a lot of upload uh bandwidth as well so that's all kind of going to be informed by this and I've talked about before how there are plans in place in order to reduce the the number of validators on the network while still maintaining the same security it's just that instead of someone having to run like 20 validators uh they could run one because they could consolidate all of their stake into one validator and you would still get the same the same security guarantees and everything because it's the same e-stake but the bandwidth um cost would go down the overhead on network would go down generally and we would make a much healthier stable and secure network by

doing that there so you can check out parathosh's thread here for more details on new holski test net that will be hopefully launched around September 15th which isn't too far away now it's actually just over a month away now which is um they're coming up fast yeah one year almost since the merge man how time flies right even in a bear Market but anyway you can check out this thread we'll link it in the YouTube description below all right speaking of ethereum validators uh super fears updated us today and said the beacon chain churn limit has increased to 11 validators per epic or every 6.4 minutes this effectively means we're adding one a validator every 35 seconds now you can check this out at validatorq.com or when merge.com it will track the kind of Entry queue and exit queue for you you

can see here that the entry queue has come down quite a bit you know we will persistently above 80 90 000 validators for a little while there but now we're down to only 67 000 pending validators and the wait time is just under a month at 27 days here and as superfuse mentioned the churn is now 11 validators per Epoch which means that there is one validator being added every 35 seconds so and you can see how the on this site validated queue.com the trend over time of the entry in exit queue and what what it's going to look like it's it's kind of funny because I think that everyone kind of promote in after withdrawals were enabled and now we're kind of tapering off but I actually think that's a good thing I would rather us not add too many more validators before we have

those kind of like improvements in place to make sure the network can handle these validators because I think that the amount of people staking and the amount of validates coming online caught the ethereum court developers and researchers off guard a little bit because I think that they expected this to happen in a slower Pace but it's obviously happened a lot faster and those solutions that have been in the works for a little while probably going to need to go live sooner rather than than later here but uh yeah thanks to Super fears for shouting this out and and kind of like highlighting this and as I said you can check out when merch.com as well they have various metrics around this this is a very cool art here actually you can see on on my screen uh for the uh the Cancun upgrade or the dencoon upgrade that's coming

with erp4844 uh this is really cool artwork I I I've long said to some people who have asked me if I would ever get a tattoo that if I did it would be an eighth tattoo and I would only do it when eath got to 10K and it would have to be something funky like this right where you've got kind of like a Day of the Dead themed eth logo um like maybe I'd get it on my arm or something like upper arm or something like that but yeah that's the only tattoo I don't have any tattoos right now but that's pretty much the only tattoo I would consider getting is is an eighth tattoo and probably at 10K to celebrate the fact that you know I've been saying that I think he's going to 10K since 2019. if it happens in like yeah 2024 or 2025 it'll be like five or

six years since I've been saying that so yeah I think I deserve to get a tattoo anyway I'm going I'm ranting I'm going off off topic here anyway you can check all this out in the YouTube description moving on uh the protocol Guild has been updated uh and the zero and the splits registry member registry has changed they have added 13 new members and removed three with all weights adjusted here so this is the fifth quarterly update since their launch in May 2022 and as the as the Tweet says here consistency is key to to the protocol Guild maintaining its legitimacy as a Commons funding tool now you can view in-depth Financial dashboards uh here which I've uh for the protocol Guild which I've showcased before about what this looks like so you can actually see

who the donations uh sorry who's getting the donations like and what addresses that they're going to what their kind of share is and that's down here you can see he'll remember weights and funding at current value and you can see each member their weight and how much has been distributed uh based on the current value and what's what's kind of vesting out to them and the total looks pretty good it looks like you know this is doing a really great job here because it seems to be that uh they're getting you know uh I think this is since you know may 2022 so it's a it's just over a year you know the the Top members seem to have gotten uh for a total amount so far of 220 000 US dollars so that is that is really great on top of what they already get um

because I'm sure a lot of them are working within the ecosystem and getting paid for their work but this is like a bonus on top of that from the community paying paying out to them here so yeah the protocol Guild as you guys know is one of my favorite initiatives in the ethereum ecosystem it really just speaks to everything that I stand for and everything that I think ethereum stands for but this dashboard is amazing so you should definitely go check this out I will link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right coinbase Ventures has some exciting news that they announced yesterday all today I guess uh they have purchased RPL tokens I think more RPL tokens from The Rocker pool team I think they have done this before and as you guys know coinbase is also an Odell

member here but the coolest thing isn't that they purchased RPL tokens the coolest thing is that they plan to spin up uh several hundred nodes on the rockapool network uh using um unit four four one ten here they've kind of um linked to their Twitter account here that to me is much cooler than buying RPL obviously buying RPL is a requirement for uh for being able to stake uh with the rocker pool Network because you need to collateralize each mini pool with some RPL uh and that's exactly what coinbase Ventures is doing here so very cool for them to be doing this especially because they run a staking service right coinbase runs its own staking service I mean they are number what three or something or or two in terms of uh market share I'm just

bringing it up yeah they're actually two yeah um so they're number two just spot only behind Lido here is the entity that has the most share on the network and they're at at 10 percent now uh it kind of begs the question of like if they're running these validators does it get counted under rocker pool or does it get counted under coinbase I mean I think it gets counted on the rocket pool right because they're running it as part of the rocket pool Network they're not running it as coinbase they're not they're not minting CBE against it or anything like that so it definitely goes under rocker pull here so running several hundred uh kind of like validator series is is very awesome or several hundred nodes I should say is is very awesome so I guess like kudos to coinbase for continuing to push here and

push decentralization of ethereum staking even though it kind of goes against their interest right because they are uh they already have as I said their own staking uh service which is a pretty big one you know 10 of the network right now um so yeah very cool to see this from coinbase Ventures so a really interesting announcement out of dbank today so for those of you don't know what dbank is it is a web 3 portfolio tracker and what they've announced today is something called D Bank chain which is an OP stack chain so they're building a layer 2 on ethereum here so the test net is live today and they're planning to launch their mainnet in 2024 and they're they're calling this the asset layer for social so essentially what this uh what this kind of seems to be is that they're going to

be supporting they say yeah the new account system supports transactions assigned with dedicated uh L2 private key reducing the use of L1 private keys in Social scenarios and enhancing the security of users L1 assets so essentially trying to create I guess this account obstruction wallet uh uh at Layer Two and a carton abstraction experience at layer 2 using the dbank a portfolio tracker and kind of wallet service here there is more info I guess on how to get involved in the thread where they say here uh how to try out the test net with rabbi Robbie wallet has integrated the dbank test net and features a built-in gas faucet so every every Rabbi user can easily access the test gas the open source code is available in GitHub of course and there

is also an Explorer live right now for you to go check out now I kind of find this funny because I guess even just like maybe 12 months ago if someone was launching a new chain that would launch it as an L1 right they would Fork Geth or something and launch it as an L1 but as I've said for quite a while now once the L2 infrastructure got to a point where it was it was very easy for people to spin up their own L2 chains they would almost certainly you know nine times out of ten pretty much almost 10 times out of ten choose to go the L2 route rather than the L1 router and I've said this for various different reasons obviously because I believe it's cheaper economically um it's definitely uh kind of easier to

do you don't have to worry about spinning up um a kind of like oh you know issuing a token and and kind of like paying out validators and stuff like that uh and you can just use existing infrastructure like the op stack to to enable you to to launch this L2 here so that makes probably over 10 chains that I've seen using neop stack right now as I've said before I don't think you know there's going to be huge amounts of these l2s that are super successful but it's still great to see that happening as an L2 rather than rather than L1 as I've wanted to see happen for quite a while now you know I think we're all sick of our ones at this point we're probably gonna get sick of l2s as well to be fair but uh but yeah I much rather see this

than the kind of continuation of all the L1 crap that's been going on for many years now unfortunately but uh yeah you can check out dbank's tweet thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of Roll-Ups and l2s I put out a rather cryptic tweet on Twitter today where I said roll ups unlock the long tail of apps now when I usually put out these tweets I do expand on them on the review as you guys know I'm not just putting out these cryptic tweets to like be cryptic on purpose it's more just a springboard for me to talk about this stuff on on the refuel here but what I mean by this is that I've I've discussed this on the refill before but basically what ended up happening with ethereum L1 is that because it's so limited in its available

block space and because it's in such high demand everything every single app except the highest value apps get pushed off so what takes up the most kind of block space on ethereum L1 well of course it is D5 right it's everything Financial it's speculative because at the end of the day the speculative app apps command the um the most amount of money because you're more than happy to pay a thousand dollars for a transaction uh sorry uh you're more than happy to pay a hundred dollar transaction fee if your expected value from that fee is like a thousand dollars right whereas obviously the the apps that aren't speculative or aren't as speculative the apps that have a I guess um lower speculative bass if you want to call it that get priced out and get pushed away to traditionally other

layer ones but now to l2s and roll ups so what I mean by Roll-Ups unlocking the long tail of apps it basically unlocks all the apps that have been priced out uh of of layer one essentially and a good example of this is something that actually launched today called friendtech and you may have seen it on Twitter amazing people talking about it I tweeted about it with some invite codes for people I don't have any more invite codes by the way so please don't ask me right now um but essentially what it is it's like if you guys remember bitcloud um bitcloud launched a little while ago it was this layer one social token thing where essentially you could buy tokens in your favorite influencers and the token price would go up and then it would give you access to things with friend Tech gives you access to an

exclusive chat room with the the person right um so it's it's that but that is on base it's on the layer two networks on on bases roll up it is not on layer one it would never work on layer one it would get very very quickly priced out of layer one because there's no way to do any kind of micro transactions it costs too much in gas uh it people would get really annoyed that it would it was costing them so much to do anything on there it's not one of those apps that um a speculative at the base and specially I mean it obviously is speculative in nature because you're buying and selling shares of of these influencers but generally it doesn't command a speculative premium like something uh like defy uh does right so that kind of app works very well on a roll up and

then there's all these other apps that that we're well like decentralized social media like lens for example I know that's on the polygon POS chain right now but that's going to exist on the polygon uh ZK validium when they launched that which is when they transition the POS chain to a validium so it's going to be an L2 so all these apps that just weren't able to be done at layer one are being unlocked at Layer Two and this is what I think a lot of people Miss is that layer 2 does not just offer faster transactions and lower gas fees but by offering faster transactions lower gas fees it enables the creation of all these apps and the adoption of all these apps that just aren't possible on ethereum layer one and that's exactly what we've seen with as I said something like friend Tech

with um other social apps out there other less speculative apps out there and also the long tail of things like nfts you know think about all the nfts that are worth very very little but people don't want to trade them on layer one because the Gatsby is worth more than the actual nft and immutable actually had this issue with God's Unchained cards where a lot of those trading cards for the gods Unchained game were worth very little they'll work you know 10 cents 15 cents or something like that and the gas fee was obviously more than that in order to trade these things or or to even move them around right so they were a pioneer of uh of layer twos with immutable X working with starkware to launch that and that enabled the creation of not just uh not just the adoption of God's Unchained but

also the creation of a lot more games on chain and a lot more games with nfts that are rather low value you know not everything's going to be valued as highly as a crypto Punk for example and that's what you need these things for and that's why Roll-Ups unlock that long tail of apps there so yeah anyway hopefully that explains that little I guess relatively cryptic tweet that I put out on Twitter today all right so Justin thaler here who is a research partner at a16z crypto has shared an article introducing something called lasso and jolt which are two new works that he hopes will change how snarks are designed and built now this is one for the cryptographers out there or the people interested in cryptography and snacks snarks is something that vitayak has been talking about for quite a while now uh and is definitely

something that uh is is super exciting in the zero knowledge space so if that interests you I just wanted to highlight this for you in case you missed that I'll link it in the YouTube description below you can give this a read uh but yeah I saw a lot of people getting really excited about this um these lasso and jolt works and what they mean for snacks generally so yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description below you can go check it out all right so Stephen goldfed are one of the co-founders of off-chan labs put out a tweet today where he said this is the arbitrim tech cheat sheet so Nitro is the only evm roll-up stack with fraud proofs which is correct uh the as oh the op stack does not have fraud proofs right now uh bold which is uh Tech that

they're developed to open validation for all on arbitrim chains stylus which is basically allowing people to code smart contracts in languages other than solidity such as rust C C plus plus and leading to 50 to 100 times gas savings and orbit which is a uh their Tech stack to permissionlessly launch your own L3 I thought just thought this was a really great tweet to basically summarize exactly what the arbitrim ecosystem is right now right it's not just arbitrim1 it's not just arbitrim Nova it's also all this other Tech that's being built around it and I guess like in the arbitrim orbits so to speak and I think orbit is interesting because it's taking a different approach to some of these other teams obviously optimism has op stack pull polygon has their own you

know roll your own Layer Two stack roll your own ZK roll up stack same with ZK sync and some other projects out there whereas arbitrim has gone a different way where they're like yes we you know you can you can launch your own chain but launch it as an L3 on top of the existing L2 you know arbitrine one or maybe arbitrine overall stuff like that and I think by doing it that way it's it's a differentiator from the way everyone else is doing it which I you know you guys know I'm a big fan of and I think that that unlocks even more Innovation that we would have sent than we would have seen from everyone just doing the same thing and it's similar to what stock wear is doing with stock net you know not trying to be non-avm and stuff like that so I'm

always uh I'm always down for encouraging that sort of stuff in the ecosystem and always excited to see that kind of play out here so yeah anyway I just wanted to highlight that tweet then all right so uh Lyra V2 is something that has been talked about a little bit recently on Twitter and I've I've kind of talked about it on on uh on the refill before but uh the Lyra Twitter account published a new blog post today called Lara V2 the decks for pro Traders so there's a tweet thread as well that accompanies this and explains exactly what Lyra V2 is and all the improvements coming to it you'll remember that Lyra Lyra V2 is actually going to be launched uh as a um as its own op stack chain as well here so it's basically taking on Dy DX I guess from that from that kind of

point of view here and trying to essentially uh basically be that Dex for pro Traders as they describe here they've been live for quite a while as Lara V1 they started on optimism then they moved to arbushroom now they're going uh with V2 and they're basically creating their own chain so if you want to read more details about that I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to do so and apologies if it seems like I'm powering through these updates here just because I I realize I'm coming up on time uh so next update Zappa has introduced something called Trends so now now you can discover the top things people are doing on chain across D5 swaps nfts and much more so essentially any address that you're watching it'll give you a nice interface within Zappa to see what those addresses are doing so have they swapped you know

like what nft have they minted what contracts are they into interacted with all that sorts of stuff which is available to you in the Zappa interface for yourself I just saw I just saw myself there actually in the in the video I just uh here where is it yeah here we go it says Cecil used this rockapool used 102 times in the last hour I don't know if that's accurate or what that's tracking there but yeah I just spotted myself but yeah this just keeps track of everything people are doing on I guess their public addresses here or any address that you want to monetize so you can go check that out in the Zappa interface for yourself you just have to go to the zapper fire website to do that all right last thing to discuss here was another tweet that I put out today about

Ico so I said I really think we threw the baby out with the bath water when we abandoned icos the concept of a crown a crowdfund is sound it's just that unfortunately the execution of almost all icos was horrible there were scams or pump and dumps I'm still hopeful that one day we get well executed icos so when you really think about it some of the biggest projects in this ecosystem were icos and obviously the granddaddy of this is ethereum right ethereum was really one of the first if not the first icos I don't think it was technically the first but it was definitely um the biggest one at the time in 2014 and obviously it's blossomed into what it is today uh and then we had uh a bunch of other icos happen in 2016 and 2017 as I said most of them were scams

and pump and dumps and didn't really go anywhere uh but there were other successful ones like rockapool was actually an Ico Riot and a few others out there synthetics uh are there which is Eastland at the time so there has been some successful ones but the vast majority weren't successful but as a reaction to the Ico bubble of 2017 what ended up happening was that there was a brief kind of like period of 2018 even 2019 where people were doing idos or initial kind of like uh exchange or IE or I should say initial exchange offerings essentially and there was idos which which is initial Dex offering as I said those were those were kind of done in 2018 2019 2020 but not to nowhere near the same extent of icos but then it's just a general reaction to icos we

abandoned them right we stopped doing them and then everyone just started raising from VCS and and angels and insiders for their their kind of projects and obviously I'm one of those angel investors who who invest in these things but the thing is is that I would much rather be able to invest in these things on the public market where everyone could invest in them alongside me because I think that a lot of The Insider allocation stuff is going to potentially lead to to perverse outcomes down the line it already has to some extent of some projects but I generally just don't like that model in saying that the Ico model itself that was used in 2017 where it was basically just a free-for-all most of the time I think that doesn't work fundamentally because

why that doesn't work fundamentally like it's core reason there's many reasons but the core reason is that you optimize for speculators in that environment where if you open it up for everyone the people who are buying it most of the time are just people who are going to flip it and that's exactly what happened with the icos in in 2017. so if you want to do a crowdfund where you're you literally want to do it because you want to issue a token you also want to raise money to build the project out then what you actually need is a better way to filter out who can actually invest and this is why it went to VCS and Android investors it doesn't necessarily mean that these people are better investors than the public but you can vet them a lot easier right you know who they are

they've got a name attached to them uh and all that all and all the stuff that comes with that right and you can do kyc on them and everything like that but icos generally didn't do that there are some that did kyc but people didn't really like that so what other way could we filter people uh into these icos what other way could icos optimize for people who are actually aligned well there's many many different ways of doing that there is a world of on-chain data that these projects could use if they really wanted to but that's not the only issue here the other issue is the regulatory side of things as Ari Paul notes here he says that you know he agreed with me but there's big gaps in the tech and legal tooling uh to close before that icos can become a net positive again and I agree

with that definitely if you did a token sale right now in the US it would probably be deemed illegal right I mean it would definitely be deemed in illegal Securities offering by the SEC so obviously that's another reason why icos also died is because from a regulatory standpoint it is not is not very palatable for these teams to do this especially in the US but I think that if we can come up with a framework for filtering the right people to get get into your into your Ico and to be able to contribute to your Ico I think we can have much more successful icos than we have had in the past because all that happens right now is that the Project's default to VCS and Angel Investors because they're easy to filter they're easy to vet there's not really any regulatory uh kind of risk there because

you can kyc AML them you just accept the credit investors so it's all well and good and then you do like your soft which is uh your simple agreement for future tokens and you convert Equity into tokens and then you're mostly shielded from kind of like the the regulatory stuff here because you're not doing anything with regular retail non-accredited investors so it is definitely a failure of policy and a failure of the regulatory regime specifically in the US but also other places around the world but I think it's also a failure of lack of imagination lack of being a lack of looking at things on chain and filtering addresses because you wouldn't really filter people you would filter addresses and being able to get the people into your fundraise that you actually think are going to be long-term aligned with you that aren't going to just dump the token

as soon as they get it and actually with icos a lot of the time there wasn't investing either which was very bad obviously it lent itself to speculators so there obviously needs to be vesting but I generally have a problem with vesting even how it's done in uh in the kind of like VC funding world where it's time-based vesting and not Milestone based because with time-based vesting people still get their tokens even if the project ends up being a failure and they still make money from it whereas milestone-based vesting uh is much better because essentially you don't get the tokens until the Milestones are hit right and this is traditionally how it works in the I guess like uh non-crypto world where a lot of the bonuses that are paid out to Executives uh specifically not so much investor kind of like um investing but but executive

bonuses stuff like that are done based on Milestones so we could do that with with vesting through and if we did an Ico that was able to filter through the people that they um the project wanted to include then they could do vesting as well on top of that it'll be Milestone based so that everyone's kind of aligned and everyone can kind of get positive outcomes from this instead of it just becoming a pump and dump uh test which is what we saw in 2017. so I think we can get there but as Arya alluded to need much more regulatory Clarity we also need much better ways to filter people on chain things like ethereum attestation service is a good step there are ID projects being worked on all that sort of stuff that allow you to basically uh um at least have relative certainty that the Cyber is the people

trying to cyber your Ico aren't accepted in and that you kind of like know the the the participants that you're getting into your into your round and also I know it's kind of difficult to do this but let's just say you vet someone and they look amazing you know on paper so to speak or based on their ethereum address you add them into your your Ico and then they just straight dump the token as soon as they get it well now you can Blacklist that address right the community can basically say well you know they just dumped it straight away they're not going to be allowed into any other rounds and then people will say okay well someone can just spin up a new address they can but that new address no longer has the profile of that old address so they probably won't get into

any more rounds so it just acts as a really great filtering mechanism in my mind as long as there's a standard criteria that the community could agree upon in order to get this done and to and to to see who you accept into your into your Ico people will call this gatekeeping but I don't think so I just call it filtering out for high quality participants I don't think that's gatekeeping I think really what you're doing is ensuring that you have a good crowdfund you have aligned members of your community because if you don't do that we saw what happens in 2017 it's just an Ico pump and dump fest with scams everywhere and uh we don't want that to get obviously so yeah anyway that's my comments on that and uh well I went way over 35 minutes uh just last up here I'm attending another meet up in

Melbourne so I've got one this week or next week I guess coming up um the um oz d51 in Melbourne and then the week after that I'll be attending another one so on the 24th of August at upside down so you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I'll be speaking at both of them and I hope to see any Melbourne based or even Aussie based people uh there at these meetups they're going to be a really great time but on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone