YAM x UMA, ETH locked in DeFi, eth1 & eth2 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #21 - 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 cesano and today is the 23rd of december 2020. all right let's get into the news so a bit of more news regarding the kind of uh ripple uh drama from the last i guess 48 hours or so so it came out yesterday that the sec is not only charging ripple and um ripple the company but also the two executives uh two of the top executives at the company being the ceo uh brad garlinghouse uh and christian larson which is one of the company's co-founders uh and and the former ceo so this is pretty a pretty big deal they're

charging them with conducting a 1.3 billion dollar unregistered securities offering and as i said they're not only charging ripple the company but they're charging the executives in an individual and personal capacity as well which is quite a quite of a bigger deal than just charging the company um i'm not going to claim to be a legal expert here i know what the outcome of this is going to be i mean i kind of spoke about it a bit yesterday how ripple and xrp have been you know under scrutiny for a very long time uh a lot a lot more information came out about this as well uh basically the uh larson and garden house uh basically sold uh 600 million dollars worth of xrp for their personal gains which is you

know if this is an unregistered securities offering they've obviously broken a bunch of laws here um by doing this and they've enriched themselves on the back of this um but basically there's a really great thread from stephen paley here that i suggest you go and read it's uh it'll be linked in the show notes of course um and he basically goes through the key points here and basically you know why this is such a big deal and things like that um you know what they're actually charging them with uh you know how much they actually sold of xrp to the public so you can actually see this table here for those watching if i click in here you can probably see it better so there's a table here that basically shows that uh ripple sold xrp to both the open market and to institutional uh kind of

investors as well so they actually ended up selling more on the open market during 2017 2018 and 2019 than they did to institutional investors which i mean it makes sense i guess like 2017 especially right where there was a lot of you know feverish kind of uh people in the market right xrp went up to i think like 3.50 or something like that so yeah it just shows that they've actually been selling this not just institutions but also to to a lot of retail investors as well so they basically netted a total of almost 1.4 billion dollars here they've they've been selling during 2020 as well they they sold 115 million dollars worth to institutional investors there as well i'm not sure how happy

those institutional investors are right now if they've held on to it but yeah just a little table there if we click out of that we can basically see here that they also paid money to exchanges to get listed now this isn't unheard of right everyone knows that certain exchanges will charge a listing fee and if you pay it you'll obviously get listed um but apparently ripple was very aggressive about this and it was one of their mandates to get xlp on to like every exchange that they could which makes sense from a kind of liquidity point of view where they wanted to build up liquidity for the token or for the coin or whatever you want to call it um and a as highlighted here in this picture it says uh larson and his wife uh personally netted approximately 450 million dollars

from these xrp sales so the common narrative from ripple has been they're selling xrp in order to uh fund the developments of ripple but in reality and what everyone knew already was that they're selling it to enrich themselves essentially right um it's not really uh helping the company it's not doing much on that front uh so yeah i don't want to spend too long on this today because it's a bunch of exciting ethereum stuff to get into but i think this is this is big news because as you can actually see in the markets right now xrp is dropping a lot and it's actually dragging the rest of the market down with it and that's simply because you know xrp is one of the biggest coins like it's third there's a lot of bots that trade against uh you know the bigger coins on exchanges

uh and and now the markets are just reacting to that and it's kind of caused the chain reaction here so ripples this lawsuit against ripple is is is a big deal for i guess like the wider market as well just in terms of perception and things like that you know people are now saying well if xrp is an unregistered security then so are all these default tokens so you know without further clarity from these regulators we we can't actually know what um what is actually going to be a security and what what isn't going to be a security so it's very hard to tell but i think with ripple they're just like the biggest riot and they've obviously done a lot of shady things in the past with xrp so it makes sense for this to happen but yeah i'm very curious to see how

this plays out do they pay a fine and get away with it do they they're not going to go to jail or anything like that right but do they go to court try to fight it and then eventually settle um you know from what i've seen apparently they've been trying to fight it and they don't want to settle uh so maybe this year will make it all the way to court and they'll have to sit in there and they'll have to kind of like convince a jury that they didn't do this thing and if they lose that's even worse for them um so yeah we'll see what happens with this i'll keep you guys updated and let's move on to some more exciting things so d5 pulse released their new bitcoin at work section today so there's a thread here that explains it but you can basically see it here

so this is a page on default pulse that's dedicated to bitcoin within ethereum d5 now i mean it it shows bitcoin on ethereum default basically it's just showing the tokenized btc so you can see here that each of the tokenized btc versions are listed obviously wrapped bitcoin is the largest then you have ren btc hbtc and a bunch of others right there's there's a ton now so if we click through here to wbtc we can see that it's growth over time but it doesn't actually show uh where this btc is right or where this wbtc is doesn't show that it's in uni swap or compound or whatever like that it just shows that

it's been growing and you can see the growth has actually been quite amazing here if you go to one year right it was basically non-existent at the start of this year um wrapped bitcoin and then as yield farming heated up in june when compounds kind of yield farming kicked off you know we saw that explosion right and it's kind of like gone down a little bit and stalled out here over the last few weeks so yeah i mean i i'm glad they've got a dedicated section for this i wonder if it's still on the home page let me have a look here um no i don't think it is actually wbtc used to be up here uh it doesn't seem it is uh and yeah if we just do that it seems that they're tracking btc in okay so they are tracking the btc and

these apps on the main page but on the actual dedicated bitcoin page they're tracking like the tokenized version which makes sense um so yeah this is this is quite quite cool i think you know i don't know if there's a cap to how much btc comes onto ethereum i think it only comes for a reason as you can see from this chart there's literally no reason to bring your bitcoin over to ethereum unless you're gonna use it with to do something right there you know if you're just bringing it over and holding it in your wallet i mean they're to me i mean maybe you can make the argument that you're doing it so that it's kind of like all your bitcoins with sorry all your assets are in like one home right so you just have them in like your your ethereum address and you don't have

to worry about multiple addresses but again routes bitcoin is custodial i wouldn't like if i was holding bitcoin i wouldn't want to obviously give it over to a custodian essentially and put it on ethereum like i'd just keep it on bitcoin unless i'm doing something with it unless i'm yield farming with it or something like that so yeah it doesn't it doesn't make much sense unless the you know unless you're using it in d5 i don't expect this to go back down to the levels that we saw over here you know earlier on i expect it to stay up here at a you know maybe it'll come down a bit more maybe it could maybe even go down a lot from here just depends right i doubt it because d5 is going to keep going and btc is a is a pretty i guess like great

collateral because it's liquid right it's it's very um has a very high market cap there's a lot of holders and things like that right so yeah i expect that to just not fall too much yeah and maybe it starts growing again um you know i i've got another thing i'm going to talk about later about ethe locked in d5 and i want to explain a bit there but wbtc or btc locked in dfi in general seems to have slowed down for now you can see here right across the board it's kind of you know petered out here this is taking into consideration wbtc and all the other tokenized btcs as well but the reason i focus on wbtc is because it has much more than even the second like renbc has 14k wbtc has 115k

so it's basically not really too comparable right now it's kind of like a winner takes um almost everything market in the tokenized btc space but we'll see how it plays out so uh yeah i just thought i'd show you guys that because i thought that was quite interesting all right so for those who don't know there is an ethereum developer called virgil griffith he has been around for quite a while the reason why you probably haven't heard of him over the last few months is because he literally can't use technology because he is facing charges over i guess conspiracy like conspiring with north korea or attempting to conspire with north korea um so there's the updates are scarce on this

i think he's getting fair representation i think he has a really good lawyer from memory he has the same lawyer that eos had when they defended themselves against the sec and only had to pay a 24 million dollar fine as i spoke about yesterday for their token offering so and from what i know that lawyer is actually very good in general not just for crypto stuff but in general so he's got a very very good lawyer so there was this news that came out today that he will that virgil was likely going to face a trial uh next september so i mean this is like as a sidebar for a sec this just shows how slow the legal process is i'm pretty sure he was arrested like late last year from memory and now his trial won't be till next september

so it'll be almost two years from like arrest to trial for for virgil and i wonder if he's going to be able to access kind of like the internet or like twitter or anything before that happens i don't know how it works but basically yeah he's being charged by the us government and they want to argue that virgil helped north koreans better understand how crypto could be used to bypass financial sanctions on the nation now i'm not going to opine too much on this but i will say one thing the information that they're saying that virgil kind of gave to north the north koreans is freely available on the internet right even if virgil taught them how to use ethereum taught them how to use metamask taught them how to basically go through tornado

cache even like that sort of stuff it virtual isn't like it's not closed knowledge like he's not the only person in the world that knows how to do this it's all freely available on the internet so i just don't see like why that's such a huge deal but at the same time like obviously you know we don't want to be giving um i mean the u.s doesn't want people giving knowledge and over to like the north korean government and things like that and i totally understand that but at the same time if they're charging virgil with basically teaching them how to do things when that knowledge is already available online and they don't even have to use virtual or whatever then i think it's kind of a weak argument but i'm not a lawyer you know the us government is a lot bigger than i am of course

i mean i don't even have to say that right it's obvious but i just feel bad because i i mean virgil's a friend of mine i met him in a couple conferences uh he you know we we got along really well he's obviously very loved within the film community uh if you've seen the things on twitter about him i just think that this is some overreach and i really hope that what happens here isn't similar to what happened to uh ross albrecht with the silk road case where he got like a ridiculous sentence for the alleged crimes i think he got like three or four lifetime sentences something ridiculous it was definitely like he'd be in there for life sort of thing um which was basically a very harsh sentence to kind of send the message and and you know to to i guess like anyone

else who wanted to run one of these dark net markets i really hope they don't do this with virgil i think that would be incredibly unfair but we won't know i guess until next september now so still another nine nine ten months out unfortunately so yeah virgil i know you're not watching this but you know where we're thinking of you you know we hope that you get through this all right all right an update out of the ethereum cat herders this week uh well i guess yesterday so for those who don't know the ethereum cat herders is basically this little group of a few people that keeps up to date with what's going on in eth one land and kind of blowing into eth2 land now they try to make sure that things are kept on top of that the

community is updated with what's going on because there's a lot going on within eth1 protocol development and eth2 as well so yeah they always post these updates uh i think once a week or something or maybe once every two weeks but they're really great i love them you can see here that they've got like a really nice summary at the top so talking about yolo v3 which is one of the uh test nets for eth1 for the next uh network upgrade code named berlin they talk about eth1 client updates eth2 mainnet updates uh client updates in uh general for eth2 uh the one five five nine implementers meetings uh the eiap ip meetings community updates and and more right so it's a it's quite a

lengthy read here i'm not going to go through it now but if you want to stay on top of ethereum 1.0 development with a bit of ethereum 2.0 stuff like protocol work i would highly suggest uh following this medium page is where they kind of um where they are where they publish this stuff in the ethereum cathode is medium page i will link it in the description of course but yeah this is this is the best resource i think there's a lot of things that get scattered around especially on like the eth research forum and like uh youtube and twitter and everything and it's kind of hard to keep track of and these the you know the the cat holders do an amazing job here of this so definitely suggest going to checking this out for yourself um but yeah there's a lot happening in

eth1 right now i think from what i know we're aiming to have the next network upgrade uh code named berlin to go in q1 next year uh probably early q1 hopefully um and then there's a bunch of other kind of i guess network upgrades that we need to get in as well or at least eips that we want to get in before one five five nine can go in and i actually think when one five five nine goes in that might be the last network upgrade that happens on eth1 before the eth2 merger so the ether under eth2 merger happens so that's going to be a big milestone as well but yeah if you want to learn more go click on this in the description and and check out this link for yourself

also out of the cad herders today was a uh kind of blog post describing the new ethereum improvement process so basically for those who don't know uh eips are i mean it stands for ethereum improvement proposals and these are kind of things that are required to to kind of like be reviewed and go through a process in order to get them into the ethereum main net so every network upgrade on ethereum contains one or more eips that go in so eip1559 for example is an eip and the number is basically just like sequential from kind of like uh when it started number one all the way up to i think it's in the 2000s at this point

or maybe even the three thousands there's a lot there not every eip actually goes into the ethereum mainnet uh some of them never do famously eip 999 kind of died and what that aip was was to rescue the frozen parity multisig funds with the majority belonging to the parody team um so that was a famous one that died and there's many others right that peop you know anyone can propose these things um and submit them on github and then it's up to kind of the core developers the community everyone else kind of in the ecosystem to decide if they want it or not or they want it to go in is it going to benefit the ethereum network no well then it's not going in sort of thing so this is basically an update to that

process because that process has basically been um defined in eip1 but that was published a long time ago so we want to update that process and make it more streamlined so i think what they have done here they've added a bunch of new statuses here so during the eip life cycle there'll be statuses assigned to each eip so it starts off as a draft um it goes to a review now so review is basically the one of the new statuses uh it goes through a last call to kind of review and then final and then it goes from living to stagnant to withdrawn so that doesn't have to i mean it doesn't have to go into every status for example so

if it's a living status i i mean i think they've defined them down here yeah living is a renaming of for the previous studies status active so if any ip is active then it's a lie if it's stagnant it means that i think eips have gone stale obviously uh if it's withdrawn it means that the original author has been has formally removed it uh or i think i don't think it has to be the author i think it does have to be the author has removed it and said no i don't want to do this anymore don't worry about it basically um so yeah there's a bunch of statuses here that get assigned to the eips now this is an incredibly important process and this is how we kind of like do this decentralized governance and come to consensus on things so you want this to be as robust as

possible so i'm really glad to see the cat herders taking a stab here and making sure that they kind of define this properly and getting everyone on the same page the core developers the community you know everyone else in the ecosystem like exchanges infrastructure providers you know app developers all this sort of stuff you want to make sure everyone understands the process and that's what the catheters are doing here so again another shout out to the cat herders they're doing great work here i'll link this in the description you can go check it out for yourself a teaser from parsec finance uh parsec finance was uh was published yesterday yesterday so for those who don't know parsec is the i guess trying to be the bloomberg of d5 or of ethereum where they're going

to have this whole dashboard as you can see on the screen right in front of me the screenshot where you can have different widgets and you can kind of like trade do things in d5 monitor prices all from one dashboard now as you can see in front of me in the middle there they've got like a chart of uni versus usd so you can keep an eye on the price there on the right hand side they have a trending kind of a little box there that you can keep an eye on which assets are actually trending on the certain day and you know how much they've gone up by what their price is that sort of stuff bottom right you have like a market cap table where you can see the differences and the changes in in different assets based on their market cap you can see the trades uh down the

bottom uni against eth i mean on the left-hand side you can see kind of like the d5 fire hose as they call it where they whether it's like monitoring different trades and things like that so these aren't the only kind of elements that uh are going to be on here there's a lot more coming i've actually used this app myself and it's quite fun to use so i think this is going to appeal to people who are frequently trading uh the most because that's what the bloomberg terminal kind of appeals to and um from memory there's also a news section that pulls news and kind of like pulls it up there so it really is exactly like a bloomberg terminal now you've probably i don't know if if you if you you have seen a bloomberg terminal before but it looks similar to this

um but it's mainly i mean i think it costs five thousand dollars a month to to have a bloomberg terminal so um and you don't need it unless you're like actively trading so uh most people would not have seen it but if you just google it you'll be able to see what it looks like but this is really cool uh they're saying that next month they're going to be releasing uh this to the public so i've been using the beta version and it's been quite good uh so yeah go follow them and uh def i'm not even following them whoops go follow them and definitely uh you know keep your eyes peeled for this because i think it's gonna be really cool especially if you're a really active trader or someone really active within d5 you definitely want uh this tool in your kind of like tool belt for sure

all right an announcement out of a yam today so they are launched their official collaboration with uma protocol called degenerative degenerative finance you know it's funny one of my friends uh said the other day they listened to another podcast i did on ethub and i struggled saying the word degenerative and he kind of linked me to the google uh pronunciation of it i was like i was like okay and you guys you call it dj and finance i'm like yeah because that's what everyone says right uh but the degenerative finance that's how you that's how you say it but enough of that basically what this is is that it's kind of a home for this uh cutting edge d5 derivatives they call it so it's built by yam built on your may and built for djinn so

see there you go it says djinn so i can call it dj finance um so this this is really cool i think uh this isn't you know i spoken about the collaboration between yam and uma before but they've launched like an official site here so if we actually click through here you can connect your wallet and you can start minting their ugas token which actually is tracking the ethereum gas prices over time you can deposit you can redeem withdraw and lp liquidity provide and trade so uh this is this is great i i really love this i think that we need more of these collaborations within the ecosystem i mean i know a couple weeks ago i spoke about the wyoming ecosystem and how they're doing a lot of different collaborations with

different protocols they called them mergers but as i said i thought they were partnerships collaborations and that's exactly what yam and yourmae are doing here and there's a bunch of other protocols just like kind of teaming up and and making sure that like they they um they can share resources because there's no point being a closed ecosystem you know having all these expertise and in an open source world and just keeping it close to your chest that's not the spirit of defy it's not the spirit of ethereum and that's not how we can basically make these products better so i'm really glad to see yam and your may do this i hope that uh you know more teams do this i hope that you know yam in particular teams up with other teams because i think yam in particular is really well positioned for this and i've

spoken about this before i know i talk about yam a lot here but i actually think that they've got um an amazing community they've got a really really great treasury to to kind of like pay out this community and this treasury isn't just in yam tokens it's in other things as well they have usd in the form of yusd they have the d5 pulse index they have a bit of eth they have index tokens they have a mixture there so they have like this strong treasury that they can build over time and they can partner up with projects and like you know fund different things and get stuff built so i i think that's that's basically yams kind of like um innovation here and it's strong suit and i'm really curious to see where this goes but yeah go check this out you can meet you guess tokens if you

want if that's something you're interested in as well as i said you can just do it here but this will be linked in the description for you to check out all right last thing a tweet from dc investor today where he basically says that uh he he and i and i quote he says and i quote sorry this is the most important chart for the emerging ethereum based economy and it's ticking back up again after the cool off period from d5 mania of q2 q3 and the subsequent launch of the eth2 beacon chain so this chart that he's talking about for those who are listening in is the eighth locked in d5 chart so he's got a screenshot of it here but i'm gonna go back to d5 pulse and i'm going to click it here and bring it up for all you to see here so

if i go to i guess i should go to all here or if i go to one year it's probably easier to see yeah so you can see on the screen here that basically during d5 summer ethan d5 peaked at about 9.3 million eth and then it dropped off after that i spoken about how the major drop-off that you see here actually was from uni swap so what ended up happening was that uni swaps uni mining rewards kind of ended and then people kind of obviously withdraw their eighth from unisoft that they were using to farm and they didn't put it back into d5 the majority didn't go back into d5 what i actually do think happened is that a lot of it went to eth2 because if you think about it there's a kind of like overlap between the

uni-swap community and the people who wanted uni tokens and people who are farming uh the people who have eth already right and wanted to farm with it and you know putting it into eth2 so it's actually quite quite funny because if you look at the amount locked in d5 right now it's 7.3 million do you know how much eighth is in eth2 right now it's 2 million what was the peak in d5 summer 9.3 million i haven't done the on-chain analysis here but i'm willing to bet that a lot of this eth went into eth2 it's probably not 100 of it i mean it's definitely not 100 of it but it seems a lot went into it so if you actually put eth2 here it would come up right under maker it would be maker eth2 compound uniswap right so technically we haven't actually fallen

from 9.3 locked in d5 it's just that e2 isn't classified as d5 it's just gone elsewhere and you can actually see that after the kind of drop to i guess 6.7 million eighth locked on november 25th which is funny i think it was like a day after the uh the the um kind of deadline for it's getting your eighth in to uh to eth2 um after that we see an uptick here from 6.7 million back up to 7.3 million almost and it's it's ticking back up so people are getting back into uh d5 this could be new people coming in right we had those people going to e2 that's kind of like uh at 2 million i mean i don't expect it to go too much higher and now people are going back into d5 with their eth so

this was really cool uh i thought you know it was great for dc investor to point this out i really want to do some on-chain analysis on this i want to know how much eth went from you know particularly went from farming uni on uni swap to eth2 and i mean i don't have the tools to do that i i don't think it's like an easy job either you have to basically have all the data in front of you and dig through it but you know if i mean if anyone listening or watching knows how to how to do that or knows an easy way to do that or has someone who can do that for me please reach out to me just damn me on twitter because i'm very curious to see how that played out so you know as i said if we include eth2

in this we're at 9.3 million eight we're basically an all-time high i don't usually include eth2 in this because it's technically not d5 but the kind of definition here has been blurred as well you know locked in d5 isn't really kind of like accurate because you know it's most of it isn't locked you know what it's ironic because what because what's actually locked is the ethan eth2 but that's not considered locked eath in d5 right um so it's quite ironic there but i i just call this like ethan d5 right not locked because it's definitely not locked any one of these kind of um people that have deposited their eighth into these different apps can withdraw at any time hardly any of them are locked i think the only ones that i i know of that are locked is like nexus mutual so if you

buy x and m with eth and then you stake the x and xm it gets locked so you can't go back and and get your 8 straight away i think maybe a few of the others here depending on what you do on these apps will lock your eth2 um but it's not very long either it's definitely not uh something that's locked for like it is with eth2 for one two years it's it's very very short i think the longest is definitely nexus mutual i think that's a three month thing but again that's just not locking the e specifically it's locking the nxm that you've bought with each sort of thing but yeah anyway i think this is a really interesting stat to keep an eye on and the fact that it's ticking back up again is really great because obviously that was that brutal drop off

but i guess it kind of makes sense because of the uni stop rewards i definitely make sense i think you know even if i click into uni swap here you'll be able to see it right look at that right if i click eighth look at that 3.2 million eighth down to like 1.2 or something right that's 2 million eight it's just it's matching up too perfectly for me to think this is a coincidence that two million eighth file at a uni swap didn't go back into d5 but eth2 has two million ethernet now i don't know i just i i find that really funny but maybe it's just a coincidence but it's quite funny to to look at but anyway i digress i will i'll end the episode here so yeah thank you everyone for watching listening subscribe to the youtube channel if you haven't

yet uh give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the daily great newsletter and join the discord channel as well and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone