1inch token launch, eth2 deposits and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #23 - 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 25th of december 2020. all right everyone well a merry christmas to those of you who celebrate it uh today is of course christmas for most of you i am recording this basically at 11 p.m my time so my christmas is over but i had a lot of fun ate a lot of food uh and also i got a christmas present that i'm sure a lot of you got as well the one inch token uh it kind of went live today and just like with the uni swap token a few other ones like that it was airdropped to people who use the protocol and it wasn't like an airdrop that was only worth like 10 or something it ended up being worth

a lot right um depending on how much you kind of use the protocol and depending on how many addresses you used it with you could have ended up with a lot of these tokens uh they're currently trading at i think a four billion dollar fully diluted market cap so it is not negligible at all what you can get for these tokens so yeah i mean outside of that the one inch token has been you know a long time coming people knew it was coming they have their decentralized exchange called mooneyswap as well where you could liquidity provide and you could earn even more tokens so a few people did that but even if you just kind of interacted with one inch like did a few trades um i think if you did like one trade you got a bid if you did four trades you got more um and i think

it was maybe based on volume as well of trading so yeah i mean from what i saw there was over 10 000 wallets that basically got uh some one inch tokens or i've claimed it so far i'm sure there's a bunch of others as well over time so yeah another one of these i guess uh universal basic token air drops or whatever what you want to call it where basically like free money right uh for people here so yeah um outside of that i think that uh the one inch token model is actually quite quite thought through um i actually think they did a really great job of breaking it down in this blog post here i'm not going to go through it now you can you can read it it'll be in the show notes um but basically you know they've got an idea of why they

created this token what they're gonna what it's gonna do outside of governance how it's going to kind of have cash flows going to it someone did an analysis at that and and said that basically uh even if there's like a tiny fee on the amount of volume that one inch is doing uh there would be like 50 million dollars going to uh token holders um so yeah it's not not a negligible amount of fees and there's a bunch of other mechanisms that they've got in here that you can go in and read for yourself uh to check out as well i did want to talk about i guess like this broader point and i guess this broader topic of projects you know that don't have tokens that have live apps than giving their tokens out to their users obviously i'm a huge fan of this i think

it's really great it's a really great way to reward your early users and encourage them to stay you know loyal users to you since you gave them free money basically um but i also think there's diminishing returns to this now the first big project that we saw do this was obviously unit swap right and that was huge that was probably the biggest thing that happened in crypto and in a pretty long time even though we had d5 summer i think that uni swap airdrop was just like that thing that you know touched so many different people because so many people had traded on uni swap and you know the valuation was really high a lot of people had multiple addresses that they traded with so they got even more than the 400 uni um and you know uni ended up trading at almost i think 10 at one point so

it's definitely a lot of money for a lot of people um more so than one inch i think unisop has a ton more users or at least ethereum addresses that touched it than one inch and the thing about uni swaps distribution is that it was unique and it was first right in that you know since uni swaps uh kind of done their distribution everyone's thinking to themselves oh well what are the projects that don't have tokens yet and now these projects are basically going to be giving tokens out so how do we kind of like game that or how do we you know make sure that we maximize our profits now with one inch all you had to do was create like a bunch of ethereum addresses and extra and do some trades on uh through one inch and you would have been eligible for these tokens

so i mean i think there's there would have been a i mean i wasn't like smart enough to or like switched on enough or i didn't even think about this at the time to do this i should have done this um but it was also not clear how one inch was going to do this distribution of their token so you were kind of stabbing in the dark but you know creating multiple addresses doing a bunch of trades i think you have to do like a minimum of 20 trades or something like that i think down here it says what it is yeah so if you had done at least one trade before september 15th uh or at least four trades in total or trades for a total of at least 20 dollars you are eligible for tokens now obviously september 15th was a while ago um

i think that might have even been before uh the unisop airdrop happened so maybe that's why i uh that's why they did it that way because then it's like less gameable for people so yeah i i didn't even realize that that was the snapshot date there so maybe what i was saying didn't isn't really relevant i guess but you know i mean at the same time not every protocol is going to have this luxury there's going to be protocols that go out later with um with a token and they're not going to be able to have a snapshot from from basically september or before the uni swap kind of distribution way because it's just it's too far too far back and a lot of people will will have used their project or their app since then and will miss out if they do that so

there's a bunch of projects now uh that that people are kind of eyeing um you know diy dx is one of them if you go on default pulse you can kind of see the list of which projects uh you know people even saying kind of like set protocol the one the the project i work for as well because we don't have a token um and it's just all speculation right you don't know if and when these projects are gonna have tokens um or if you know if they're even gonna have a token uh and and you don't know how they're gonna distribute it you just know that you know the trend seems to be that if you interact with one of these apps you'll get some tokens so i think there's a lot more innovation that can be done on these distribution mechanisms as well

i think you know just giving them out to people who have used your protocol is fine and it's like great for like broad reach but i feel like there should be something else that people should have to do to to obtain these tokens as well um you know obviously uh they're going to be doing a liquidity mining program but i mean we've seen this stuff before i just i just wish there was more innovation here in general and it's not a knock on one inch or anything like that or on unix up or whatever but i think that we have such a you know a versatile network that we can do things with that we should be innovating wherever we can um but obviously the easy kind of solution is just to like kind of scatter out these tokens give them to people let the markets form

naturally you know you get a lot of free press for your for your project so there's not really a negative to doing this but i do hope other projects innovate this innovate on this into the future because i think there's a lot that you that can be done here particularly with projects that uh kind of have been live for a long time and haven't launched a token yet i think they have a lot more wiggle room than they assume that they do um and there's a few of them now i mean people even speculating you know about metamask having a token i know i put a tweet out a couple weeks ago or maybe a week ago at this point where i said that i think that's it's a high chance uh that metamask will issue a token um i mean i do like within the next 12

months i do still think it's a high chance but i wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen i mean i think it's a high chance just because uh it just it makes sense to me now that metamask is generating revenue through their swap kind of a feature on on the extension on the app as well uh it makes sense if they want to decentralize you know the whole kind of thing out decentralize the governance have like fee capture and like staking and all these sorts of things um but at the same time metamask can't easily distribute their token to their users because metamask doesn't actually know which addresses are metamask addresses and which are normal ethereum addresses there's no distinction there so people are speculating on how they're going to do their distribution right they can't really do it based on i guess

uh you know how many transactions that you've done with that address through metamask maybe there's a way to have it like so that people can submit their addresses in some way uh and then it can and then metamask by the extension can verify that that address has done all these transactions through metamask i think that's a way but also you know you'd have to kind of like make sure there's no way to game that and it might be complicated i don't know the technical details here but i do know that if they wanted to do you know a distribution similar to uni swap in one inch they would have to go a lot a lot further to make it sure it's fair and make sure that they actually account for the right things because there's not like as i explained there's no way to basically

tell what a metamask address is and what a normal address is um you know and outside of that there's other big projects i think like you know even people speculating about infuria right is inferior gonna do a token are they gonna basically do what the graph did and have like a tokenized network for infrastructure provider maybe you know you know we've all used infuria but again right do you basically just say okay every ethereum address that is interacted with every app that has used infuria we're going to give them tokens right and that's why i say that i think we need more innovative ways to send tokens to people when when these when these kind of apps create tokens and that's not to say that i that metamask or infurial will necessarily create one but if they do i i feel like they're best positioned

to do an innovative kind of airdrop rather than just you know i guess what we've seen in the past so yeah i'm looking forward to to that to see if that kind of plays out um but back on the topic of one inch in particular there's a few stats here out of nansen they've got a nice dashboard on their pro version here so if you can see the screen here and you can see the the screenshot basically someone uh called token millionaire was able to get almost 10 million one inch tokens at at time of recording i think one inches price is 2.8 2.8 dollars so 2.80 sorry uh which would mean that this airdrop for them is worth like you know what 25 million or something like that uh which is quite insane then there's a few other whales

in here with 1.3 million tokens there's a few underneath that so basically this this kind of shows the top claimed amount could you imagine being that number one there token millionaire i think people have uh speculated that it's a fund but from what i've heard it's it's not a fund it's it's an individual i don't know who it is of course um but you know could you imagine being that person and being like wow i just you know i just got air dropped 28 million dollars and the funny thing is that this person can't actually cash this out yet there's nowhere near enough liquidity uh even for the other ones as well um one inch has like a pool to an incentivized pool going live in three days for their one inch token uh so maybe there's more liquidity there but still cashing out 28 million dollars

worth is going to be hard as well so that's another kind of issue there for these whales um you know i say i guess i say issue like it's a bad thing but um it is an issue when you've got this much kind of um tokens to liquidate you have to either do it over time and probably over a longer period of time or find some otc buyers or something like that sell at a discount which i'm sure you know if you get this kind of money for free you're not averse to doing so yeah cool to see this out of one inch and then uh this person here boxer created a dune analytics dashboard um that's basically tracking a bunch of stats here so if i bring this dashboard up you can see that 16 600 wallets have claimed one inch this was actually 10 000 just a few

hours ago i think so it seems that europe's awake now uh because one inch token launched when europe was was asleep so yeah we're seeing that coming now um there has been 55 million one-inch tokens claimed so far out of the 1.5 billion total supply and there's some nice charts here that show one inch number of holders over time um and as you can as i said like there's 16 000 kind of um holders now uh and there's a bunch of other metrics here token allocation so where it's going all this sort of stuff so this is a great dashboard i'll link this in the youtube description but yeah that was the biggest news from today the the one-inch launch um i did say yesterday that i thought it would be a slow news day given it was christmas

eve slash christmas uh it was besides the one inch stuff i've got a few other things i want to talk about but yeah one inch stole the show and i guess they're forever going to be associated with giving everyone a christmas present basically in in this airdrop so very smart marketing on their behalf i think so etherscan uh published this little chart here today uh basically they're doing a 2020 roundup uh of i guess like different stats on ethereum and this is like a teaser so they've got a live label chart of eth2 depositors so if we go here and we check out here we can actually see um which entities have deposited eighth and you know how much of the into e2 and how much of the network they

kind of account for so you can see here that 47.84 is currently labeled as null so that means either unknown or individuals uh you can see here that kraken accounts for twelve point four percent of the eighth finance eleven percent bitcoin swiss six point six percent steak fish almost four percent staked us again almost four percent hobby three percent and then we get like a bit you know a bit more here basically uh you got vitalik here and then yeah it just spirals down from there um i'm just looking at the names here you know you got a bunch of name things here like kane from synthetics tetranodes famous uh whale on twitter if you've seen him um so yeah this is this is really cool i really like watching this because

i think obviously we want we you know we want to make sure that it's it's as decentralized as possible within eth2 uh currently it's maybe not as decentralized as i would like because kraken owns you know and cracking and binance together are in a pretty large portion of the network i think that's 25 if i'm doing my head yeah exactly 25 of the network so in order to cause disruption on the network you would only need 33 uh i think to cause censorship so if they were able to get 25 percent plus eight percent down here they you know if they were able to get state fish and steak to us to collude with them they could do some censorship attacks now again this sort of stuff is risky right they're risking customer deposits

they're risking their reputations i mean i'm sure they're not going to do this but at the same time i wrote about this actually a few days ago in the delegate newsletter it doesn't matter that the entities themselves won't do it what matters is if some nation state goes and maybe forces them to do certain things on eth2 so in general we want uh much greater decentralization here in terms of deposits but it's still early right still deposits flowing in there's not that many uh offerings just yet you know coinbase's offering is going live in the new year so maybe they'll they'll counterbalance here as well a bunch of other things going live like rockapool for decentralized staking and things like that so i'm glad ethan scan put this together because this is going to be really

interesting to keep an eye on as we go into 2021 especially so uh there's a bit of news today uh from digital currency group so they're planning to launch a new wealth management subsidiary so for those of you who don't know digital currency group is a massive kind of crypto conglomerate that owns a bunch of different kind of things like their own coin desk they've invested in a ton of different companies they are uh own grayscale as i've spoken about before um the the kind of like company the the asset management company that lets you buy each and btc with your retirement account and you know they've been a kind of big story in 2020 so yeah they're basically planning to kind of launch this new wealth management subsidiary

um which i thought was interesting unfortunately this article is paywall tr but i did want to bring this up just because um it's interesting to me because i i couldn't think of a kind of company that's better positioned to do this in terms of like crypto wealth management considering their host of experience with grayscale they have a lot of connections with traditional finance especially um this group itself you know they have coindesk as like a media outlet and things like that so this is very interesting for them to to be doing this i think this is the kind of like as i've explained on the on the show before this is kind of what i expect to see more of in 2021 this this maturation of this asset class you know wealth management for for traditional finance people more

traditional finance companies coming into the space and offering crypto related things so this is all a trend that i'm looking at in 2021 and that i think you should be too um not just with with bitcoin but with ethereum and d5 as well like obviously we've all seen you know these billionaires saying oh we're going to buy bitcoin you know these companies say we're going to put in our balance sheets and they have and that's one part of the story i think the other part of the story also includes ethereum and d5 and uh you know the traditional finance system starting to kind of like i guess merge or like you know collide with with the systems that we've built and either you know adopt them and become part of them or get like usurped by them so that's going to be a big theme i

think in 2021 as well so that's something i'm going to be watching for sure all right last thing to talk about was that 2020 saw over three billion dollars in crypto venture funding and over 690 million dollars in mergers and acquisition activity this doesn't really come as a surprise to me uh 2020 was obviously a year where a lot of people made a lot of money because it was the start of the bull market you know each start of the year at 130 dollars it's at 630 dollars uh btc started the year i think uh oh i don't know from memory i think it was like six thousand seven thousand or something like that dollars and now it's up at you know 24 000 if i'm looking at the chart uh just there so

yeah obviously and then through d5 summer we had a lot of people making money too so there's there's money going around people want to reinvest right they want to compound their gains there's uh and you know in 2019 and 2018 i think we especially in 2019 we saw a lot less funding because of the bear market but now that things have picked up we're seeing all this funding going on here so uh this is i mean pretty obvious to see for me i think uh in general we're going to keep seeing this in 2021 you know as the prices go up people are going to have more money they invest more but it's not just having more money it's the fact that these ideas and these companies people are building have a bigger totally addressable market now right i think d5 went from being dismissed as a toy

in 2019 by most people uh except like the hardcore people in the ecosystem to being like an inevitability in 2020 right people are no longer debating whether decentralized exchanges and amms are going to succeed they're debating about which ones are going to succeed and which model is going to work um you know there's still some skeptics and and that's fine uh you know there always is but you know it's not just that as well it's like on-chain lending uh money markets stable coins all this sort of stuff this was all believe it or not in 2019 still regarded as a toy no one outside of the hardcore ethereum community um actually believed in this stuff so we've come a long way and that's why i think we're seeing a lot of this funding happen because if you actually look at where a lot of

the money has gone um i think it's gone into a lot of depot projects for sure um and i think a lot of uh institutional and traditional finance um kind of uh activity as well so if i was i guess defined 2020 in two narratives i would say that it was the ethereum d5 yeah right the year of d5 the year of d5 and ethereum and also on the other side of the fence in bitcoin land it was the year of institutional adoption for bitcoin and starting to get comfortable with crypto which is now bleeding into ethereum because you know it took institutions a very long time to get comfortable with bitcoin right 10 11 years to get to that point where they're like okay this asset is de-risked enough that we can now invest in it

and feel like it's not a risky investment anymore and that's why they invested at 20k right or some of them a little bit earlier but still very late to the game um and we're actually going to see that take a lot less time for that to flow over into ethereum and d5 i think right um because of the fact that they're already comfortable with bitcoin they'll go looking for something else and ethereum is typically always kind of next to bitcoin these days so i think we're going to see a lot of that happen in 2021 as well so main narratives i'm looking for in 2021 is increased institutional and traditional finance adoption of ethereum and d5 right obviously bitcoin's still going to get that you know that's that's probably a surety at this point but for ethereum and d5 especially and i also expect a lot of d5

kind of apps to go live that compete with the existing apps because it you know some of them have like i guess you could call it a monopoly uh in that they have like the majority market share because they were first but i'm curious to see how many flippings we see with each of these apps um you know some of them are making strategic decisions that a lot of people don't agree with uh the existing apps so they want to either fork it or do it better and they'll probably raise money on that narrative everyone's looking for the you know the next big thing and if you have a really strong narrative saying you know we're going to compete with this product because we can do it better because of this this and this reason i think that's going to be a big theme going into 2021

for sure so yeah we're almost there uh a few days away so it's going to be interesting january i think as well uh you know over the next week it's going to be quiet because everyone's holidaying and stuff but then january people are going to come back refreshed you know everyone feels good because it's a new year they feel like they've left 2020 behind and you know i mean if even if it's accurate or not accurate i don't think it's accurate but like um to say that you know uh the 2020 was the year of covert and now in 2021 we're fine because we have uh you know the vaccines coming and it's going to be a better year i do think it will be but i think sometimes people forget that just because it's a new year doesn't mean that all the world's issues go away like you know the

concept of time is a human thing um you know the world doesn't care about that um but i think from a psychological point of view you know the new year comes in everyone's like okay it's time to start fresh right and i think that's going to flow into crypto people are going to feel more positive um you know especially i think as the vaccines get rolled out as well uh that's one thing that i think has spurred a lot of activity in the markets as well was that you know there's more certainty now there's no uncertainty about like when are we getting the vaccine like when are we going to be able to do things yes cases are still rising everywhere for covert especially in the us and europe but i think you know that's less of a concern for people now when investing because they see a vaccine there right

they see a bunch of different vaccines and they're like okay these things are going to work you know they probably think over's going to be a distant memory this time next year because we'll have rolled out the vaccines and then and then we basically have kind of immunity to it across across all of the population now i'm not a virologist so you know take that with a grain of salt but that's just my reading from speaking to different investors speaking to different people that are kind of like involved with this sort of stuff um and that's the kind of feel that i'm getting i mean that's that's how i personally feel as well i like to in my own personal investments and this is an investment advice but i always like to make sure that you know there's at least some certainty on the horizon you don't want to invest

you know knowing that the world could end in a month right or like have a bit of like there's like a high percent chance of that happening because if you think back to why we had that big crash in march of not just crypto but the stock market as well is because of the fact that there was just extreme uncertainty there was this new global virus you know it was spreading like crazy you had all this stuff coming out of china where everyone was talking about you know thousands of thousands of people dying every day and no one knew what was going on right and then you saw it spreading and and all these cases popping up and and no one knew knew what it was but then after that right we we slowly kind of like over the next couple months after march we kind of came to terms with it and

people accepted that it was a thing they knew what it was they knew how kind of effect uh how how easy it was to spread like what the the death rate was you know the fact that it mostly affected the elderly and things like that and then that flows into the markets that's why we saw such a big uptrend or one of the reasons why we saw such a big uptrend after that dump and of course we had all the stimulus happening right all the money being printed so money's actually worth less than it was um you know the us dollar i monitor the australian dollar to us dollar pair all the time the us dollars is incredibly weak right now uh the australian dollar actually ended up you know crashing during march but then going right back up and and his like upper level's not seen in quite a while now um

so you know there's that happening too there's just so much happening and i mean i was speaking to a friend the other day and i basically said i have no reason to be bearish right now for in crypto in general like i just i don't see a particular reason to think that you know there's going to be a massive crash and like it's going back to like 200 and btc is going back to 10k or whatever i don't see that happening um all i see on the horizon is incredible growth i see you know big money coming into the ecosystem you know not just bitcoin into ethereum and d5 as well i see d5 being finally accepted as an inevitability and something that's going to change the world and something that's going to you know improve a lot of the things that we're doing i see a lot of the ethereum

skeptics come over to ethereum you know only the hardcore i guess like bitcoin maximalists still hate ethereum there's a lot of moderate bitcoins that have accepted that ethereum is is awesome you know it does it does something very different to bitcoin and it's a distinct thing you know just i just i i mean i i and i and i feel like 2020 has showed the world that you know crypto's not dead right bitcoins back over all-time high ethereum's you know obviously not at all-time high yeah but still performing a lot better than a lot of the naysayers thought it would and then we have obviously the d5 tokens as well you know actually proving that they're worth something you know people are willing to buy it i i could go on for a long time i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go on uh too much

here but yeah just in general i don't see a reason to be bearish about the market going forward i think 2021 is going to be a spectacular year i'm hoping we see if at all-time highs sooner rather than later you know maybe january or february it can actually happen that fast you saw bitcoin do it that fast right uh it doesn't take much it just takes a shift in sentiment you know as soon as it starts moving up very fast everyone's going to be like oh my god and fomo engine right and and trying to chase that so i really like i would like to see it in you know january february to set us up for a very nice maybe you know strong bull market in 2021 so hold on to your butts is the saying i guess i think uh the next 12 months is going

to be quite insane so yeah i will digress for now thank you everyone for watching another episode of the daily grey refuel if you haven't subscribed to the youtube channel be sure to do so give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter and join the discord if you haven't yet and i will catch you all tomorrow have a good christmas everyone see ya