2020 Ethereum Yearly Recap - DeFi Summer, ETH outperforms BTC, Eth2 Phase 0 goes live and much more!

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to my 2020 recap of ethereum in this video i'm going to recap the entire year in the ethereum space and the wider crypto space as a whole i'm going to focus on the major events that happened the things that really define 2020 a lot of it i even forgot as i was getting the content together for this video so i think this video is going to be quite interesting uh you're going to be uh reminded of a lot of things that you've probably uh haven't thought about in a few months that were actually quite impactful at the time i'm going to start you know from january i'm going to go all the way through to december focusing on the biggest events that happened in each of those months and there is a lot to go through i put all the content together together

over the last couple days and there's just so much uh you know i i unfortunately am going to miss a lot of things because i can't uh focus on everything there's just too much to go through so i tried to pick out i guess like the the biggest things that i saw kind of happening uh within the space at the time you know and i i kind of tried to remember back to if people were talking about it at the time as well i think that's really important um you know whatever got the community kind of like riled up basically and there were a few major events through 2020 of course uh you know the the biggest obviously being d5 summer and eth2 but there are a bunch of other things as well that i wanted to talk about so i'm going to be going through this i

don't know how long this video is going to be it's probably going to be a couple hours long um you know i'm recording this uh basically live i've got all the content in front of me so i guess without further ado let's get right into it so i guess what the way i wanted to start this video was basically focusing on kind of the returns that he saw for the year so not only did the ethereum network have such an amazing year right eth we did as well so you can see here that ethe finished up about 460 percent on the year um and you can see you know the growth has been incredible right uh i mean i think my camera's blocking off there but you can see basically we started 2020 like quite positively we went up uh into basically

over here and then obviously we had you know the coronavirus uncertainty hit and we dumped down from there then we marched back up basically to july and then we've just continued up since then as you can see here which has just been absolutely incredible and you know eth had a pretty poor 2019 it basically finished uh up maybe two percent on the year i think it was while bitcoin had a pretty incredible 2019 competitive to eighth so yeah it's really great to see eth putting in a lot of effort this year and it's reflecting i think a lot of the work that you know the ethereum ecosystem has done to get you know d fights where it is to get uh you know eth2 to where it is and all that sort of stuff so really really great to see that so yeah i just wanted to call that out

because i think that 2020 finished strong for eighth and i think it's going to have a very strong 2021 as well um but yeah so let's jump into everything that happened within the crypto space so we kicked off 2020 with an sec action against telegram and their ico for those who don't know telegram basically did like a massive ico i think it was like a couple billion dollars worth or something like that not as big as eos of course but a pretty big ico and they managed to raise money from a bunch of like big money players which and people you know they they kind of did this last year i think or maybe the year before but people were like you know this is crazy right uh tell why is telegram doing this and and they were to do it to have a token for their

platform a native token and then they came out with like telegram blockchain and things like that and people were like this just makes no sense we've already been through the kind of like ethereum killer kind of story it doesn't really make sense you know eos raised all this money and didn't get much adoption so why is telegram doing this uh and then after that telegram basically had a lot of issues with not only the sec but other regulatory bodies um you know telegram in general comes under fire from from governments as well i think so yeah they that that's how we basically started off 2020 with an sec action against telegram here you can see here they did a 1.7 billion dollar ico and you know that that's just crazy i think that's the second biggest ico um after eos uh if i'm thinking yeah

yeah it definitely is um so yeah they were basically ordered by a judge to explain why i should not have to turn over their financials concerning their their ico basically so yeah i think there was a few more actions throughout the year maybe i'll bring them up throughout the video but yeah that's that's kind of how we kicked off 2020. oh i'm going to reload here i got so many tabs open that i think my chrome is not liking me right now okay so yeah uh i guess ethereum so this was before the sac action i think and and obviously this is relevant to ethereum so mura glacier was basically this hard fork for ethereum that went in it was unscheduled and the reason why this hard fork happened was because of the difficulty bomb

activated um on i guess activated earlier than people thought it would um which means that the block times got longer and if we didn't defuse the difficulty bomb uh the ethereum block time sort of just kept getting longer and longer and longer and the network would have basically grinded to a halt now for those of you who don't know what i guess the difficulty bomb is within ethereum it's basically a mechanism that was put in place from the early days to you know force uh the protocol to not basically ossify and what i mean by that is basically to force it to not become bitcoin like where upgrades rarely happen you know there's never really hard forks or anything like that to upgrade the network so that's why it was kind of put in i think um you know at this point it's kind of redundant i think

uh you know we this this hard fork i'm pretty sure pushed it back like two years uh yeah almost two years 611 days and i think that's coming up soon in the next few months or something that will be up for for renewal again uh but yeah so this this hard fork basically went through because it needed to like there was no like if we didn't do this hard fork the ethereum network would have kind of grown grinded to a halt which is which is unfortunate there um but yeah basically really uh i guess like that was january 2nd right it's like the start of the year um and this was kind of like i guess the um there's a lot of fun around this because people are like oh you know the theorem developers forgot about the hot you know the the

um the ice age they call it or the difficulty bomb now they're trying to rush through a hard fork whatever and you know i guess like i say it's five but there is some kind of like uh uh credence to that or or kind of like credibility to that because i think people did forget about it i mean eric connor was the one who pointed this out because he noticed that the block times were ticking up uh and that was a failure on i guess like that not just not the developers but like the whole ecosystem for not noticing this thing but in general it's something that's not talked about right when's the last time you heard someone talk about the difficulty bomb on ethereum it's hardly a thing that people think about because it's just such a redundant thing now that i think we should just remove it at

this point and i think you know it's not going to be an ether or anything like that so sooner or later it's going to become this kind of irrelevant thing so i guess we'll see how how it kind of pans out from there but yeah we started off the year in ethereum with that which unfortunately wasn't like the most bullish thing to happen especially after the 2019 that ethereum had uh it was quite uh yeah it was quite an interesting start to the year all right next up we had these uh nba player spencer dinwiddie uh rolling out his tokenizing investment platform at the beginning of the year uh being of 2020 so some of you might remember this basically uh this was quite quite big news at the time that he was kind of like tokenizing his i guess like salary on ethereum

basically uh and you can see here it's basically a bond so it was the first bond being managed by a digital transfer agent operating on the ethereum blockchain so this kind of like there was a lot of drama around this throughout the year i think the nba ended up blocking him from doing this or limiting limiting him to what he could do there was obviously a lot of um concerns around securities regulations and things like that around this but at the time people getting really excited right because they're like you know here's this mainstream kind of platform like the nba and a player within the nba embracing ethereum you know it's going to bring so many new people in blah blah blah uh i mean it kind of it was exciting but it kind of didn't really go anywhere i mean i think the last update i saw

was that some nba player was accepting bitcoin of a lightning network or something i mean at this point it's just like very gimmicky i think there's not really much to these things like yeah it's cool it's exciting it's like pioneering but i think that in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really do much i think that you know the narrative is fine the story is cool but it's basically a thing where you think about it for a few days or maybe even just a couple days and you kind of get over it so yeah but that was pretty big news at the time at the beginning of this year and i think even maybe it even happened last year because there's just been so much drama around this i've just heard about it on and off um but yeah i guess that was that was

pretty big news at the start of the year uh next up i mean i think this is probably one of the biggest pieces of news from the year was that uh virgil griffith the uh i guess ethereum researcher that works at the ethereum foundation uh was formally indicted in the north korean case so basically for those who don't know virgil went to north korea and he basically um is kind of charged with educating north korean officials on how to use ethereum and cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions that's basically the gist of it um now i mean i've spoken about this before i think that the us is kind of overreaching here i think that all that information that virgil kind of

even if he did teach them or whatever about this all that information is freely available anyway so it's not like he was giving them privileged information and on top of that i mean i personally i know like i know virgil i know people who who are really good friends with him as well i don't think he was going there with the intention of educating north korean officials to evade sanctions or anything like that but you know this kind of caused a stir in the community for sure you know virgil is a long-time ethereum community member uh and you know outside of that people were like you know this was really stupid of him to do you know really done for him to go to north korea in the first place and yeah totally i agree with that it was really dumb for him to do this

um and obviously he's paying the consequences now but at the same time i think that you know we i mean we've recently got an update that he's got like a court date this year i think september or something like that so we'll kind of see what happens there the person who's representing him as his lawyer is the person who represented eos against the sec and got them a slap on the wrist basically so he's got a pretty good lawyer representing him but i guess we won't know the results of this uh for quite a while still so you know it's sad he'll probably end up spending like two million dollars under arrest where he kind of at two million dollars he'll probably end up spending two years uh under like kind of this house arrest i think or not being able to access technology not being able to do anything

and it's really sad um so i i hope we see some better news out of this this year because yeah 2020 was not good for for virgil griffith unfortunately next up we had a major release of eth2 at the start of the year so basically i mean eth2 had a really really big yacht in general uh but this was released on the 11th of january 2020 uh and this basically i guess was like cleaning up the eth2 kind of specs uh making sure that everyone kind of was on the on the same page uh getting phase zero beacon chain to a stable state uh and this was i guess basically for developers mainly but what it ended up doing was i think it signaled that you know we're going to coordinate eth2

properly we're going to get our together we're going to bring all bring in all this stuff so that people are on the same page and so that it's not really confusing anymore because throughout 2018 and 2019 it was a lot of kind of con there was a lot of confusion around east 2 still there's a lot of disparate efforts going on and we kind of needed to bring that all together and that's what danny ryan basically did this year he brought it all together he coordinated the effort and he got it to mainnet uh and danny ryan was the guy was the one who released this dj r2 uh basically um so yeah that was really big news because that was kind of like the signal that we're making eth2 happen this year um in 2020 sorry it's 20 21 now um so yeah that was that was quite big

news at the time uh so i just wanted to call that one out aztec so i haven't heard from aztec in a few months now but they did have a big kind of like year as well so for those who don't know aztec is a privacy protocol and what they ended up doing in january was finishing their uh trusted setup and it was the largest one in history at the time i participated in this it was really cool this is basically i'm setting up the network to be able to kind of like i guess function essentially i'm not going to go into the technical details but this was pretty big news at the time uh you basically got to be part of this ceremony if you participated and you got a t-shirt as well uh which i still have somewhere um i felt participating which was really

really cool but yeah this was this was huge news at the time i think i was one of the only people from australia to do this as well because there was like a global map you could see and you could see where everyone was in the world and stuff like that so yeah there were over 202 participants um of which 176 were valid so that was like the biggest at the time uh you had uh 30 participants staying incognito which is really cool participants from 105 cities across 41 countries so yeah there was like there was a lot of participation here and at the time it was pretty pretty big news so yeah really really cool to see that but i haven't as i said i haven't seen much out of aztec lately i think maybe they're working on some some protocol improvements and things

like that so hoping to hear more from them in 2021 so this might come as a shock to some of you but aver um didn't go live until 2020. so ave had been around since 2017 and it used to be called ethlend uh but their protocol i don't think was live in any kind of like mainnet capacity uh it didn't really do any anything they had done on ico they raised money they were building it out but yeah ave protocol went live january 2020 and you can see in if you look at their total value lock chart there was like hardly anything in there at the time and now it's over 2 billion so if i had to say besides uni swap the other project that had an amazing 2020 was

was ave they just grew so much right not only their platform but their token as well their token price had just been butchered after the you know 2017 bull market and bear market right it was like trading at only a five million dollar cap like i think early in 2019 and then it's like over a billion dollar market cap now so ave had yeah just an incredible yeah and you know at the time i think that compound was the only money market live so arvo came in and they were challenging like compound essentially and they basically managed to overtake them a few times in 2020.

so that was really cool but yeah i guess a lot of people aren't aware that ava went live in 2020 they probably assume that it's been around for quite a while nope they they they did all their growth in 2020 which is just the more impressive right they've only been on mainnet for a year and they're already a top defy protocol um you know by far not just in terms of total value lock not in terms of token price but feature set right trust brand reputation just insane so you know big congratulations to stani and his team on this uh it's just yeah just incredible that what they've managed to kind of um i guess accomplish within just one year on mainnet optimism so you've probably heard a lot about optimism lately i spoke about them on the dailywear refuel

yesterday or i guess like the latest one i did um so basically optimism came out of plasma group so before they were called optimism they were called plasma group this was basically an announcement that they had evolved into i guess this new group that was focusing on optimistic roll-up technology which is a scaling technology for ethereum uh so they go on i guess this was posted january 16th 2020 so they go on to say you know why they're excited about optimistic roll up why it's going to be amazing right what they're going to be doing with it and stuff like that it was a short update here but this was kind of like big news at the time because plasma group had been known for a lot of their scalability work that

they had been doing with plasma uh and then i think towards the end of 2019 optimistic roll-ups were heating up and people were like what what's this roll-up technology right you know zk roll-ups as well like what is this this looks really awesome this is really promising and of course you know 2020 was was another year where all that technology kind of came to mainnet um and we've got like main implementations using roll-ups now and it kind of seems like that's going to be the technology that takes ethereum to the next level right and scales it out essentially so uh yeah really cool to see i mean optimism had a big 2020 as well i think 2021 is going to be an even bigger year for them as they bring their technology to main net people can actually use it right for real value transfer and things like that

so yeah really cool to see that uh in terms of set news so the company i work for we launched set social trading in january of 2020 which was the first d5 social trading platform uh you know ever um you know for those who who don't know etoro has a social trading platform it's basically a way to copy uh traders so you basically say okay whenever this trader makes a trade i want to make a trade the same trade that follows them and that's kind of what we did with set social trading so we had a bunch of um people on board pioneering the the social trading platform which was really cool we had some really great uh growth there it was it was a monumental effort at the time to get these traders to vet them

to make sure that they were experienced and and you know uh and legit traders and things like that so yeah it was really cool to to kind of um launch that at the beginning of the year and that kind of like uh carried through the rest of the year it was really really cool um so yeah we had that uh launched in january um and then since then sets evolved a lot which i'll talk about a little bit later i think um but yeah that was that was really cool to see go live in in january of 2020. uh so this is funny because this was posted on january uh 31st 2020 and it was the cftc chairman reiterating his beliefs that eath futures will be launched now obviously it was announced a couple weeks ago that eth futures will be

launched in february of 2021 so this was really great foresight here from from uh heath tarbert here uh and when he said these people were expecting it to come a lot sooner than it did but you know we all know that the traditional system moves a lot slower than we would like but it's just funny to look back and see that he actually said this in january of 2020 and it took almost a year for it to be announced so that was really cool and actually he goes on to say here that he believes the futures tied to ether could trade in the next six to 12 months so i guess he was off by one month or not even one month like a week because technically they're going live in february i think february 8th or something like that so he was off only by about a week which

is really really cool so obviously he has privileged information here i think where he's across and privy to you know different things happening in this space but really cool to see that that came to life ah here we go yeah aztec as i was just talking about so january they had their setup uh their i guess like they trusted set up ceremony which was to get them to mainnet and then they launched on february 1st uh basically and you know what you could do with aztec at the time was you could rap die in a zero knowledge proof and make it private die so you could send kind of die to people and the amount that was being sent was hidden so if i send you a thousand die it would actually come up as like i think 10 die or something and that was just like a

static unit um so no one would know that i was sending you a thousand die and you wouldn't know that i they wouldn't know that you're sending me a thousand die or whatever something like that so yeah aztec ended up going live february 1st um but as i said haven't heard much of them from them lately hoping to hear more as we go forward uh maple uh was announced in february of 2020 so some most of you probably haven't heard of this project and i disclaim you here i am an investor in maple they are born out of melbourne uh the city i live in in australia so uh know the guys really well uh but they recently also announced that they had raised the seed round too but they actually announced their platform what they were building in february of 2020 and they've kind of been building

towards it all year so basically what maple loans is or what the maple platform kind of is is that it's like basically a way for people to form communities to borrow and lend under collateralized loans so i think that under collateralized loans is going to be a big thing going into 2021 you know no one wants to have to put up like 150 collateral to borrow you know uh a hundred percent to borrow less assets than they put up right uh you want to have more value for your money you want to be able to have a reputation where you're like okay i want to borrow this money on my assets but i want to make the most out of it i don't want to have to borrow like such a little amount and risk getting liquidated because the you know i have to keep such

a high uh collateralization ratio all this sort of stuff so i think maple is going to be a big player in that space in 2021 but yeah they announced all the way back in february 2020 which actually when i was going through this i was like oh wow i had that that is quite a while ago because i actually met with them um i think in 2019 i met with i still i was yeah i was still at my old job um before set so i met with them in 2019 i think in early 2019 um and i kind of like uh just kind of gave him advice about where i saw d5 going and and what was happening i remember at the time talking about like there was not much going on there was like compound i think in dharma in unisop basically uh 2019 feels like a different world now

uh in d5 but yeah i remember that conversation um but yeah cool to see that i guess this was announced uh uh almost a year ago now and hopefully they'll be going live really soon so a bit of sad news i guess during 2020 as well that people may have forgotten about consensus started laying off people so in february of 2020 they cut 14 of their stuff as they geared up to raise more money now this wasn't the only cut that happened and i think i'm going to talk about the other ones later but basically this was a pretty big hit at the time and this came out of the fact that eth was i think so for those who don't know i'll give some backstory here before i go

into it uh joe lubin obviously a very early investor was uh considered a co-founder of ethereum or he's considered a co-founder of ethereum um he funds a lot of consensus through his own pockets through his own eth holdings now obviously when the eighth price is lower he can't fund it as much as he would like so he he began cutting stuff in 2020 because ethereum's price had been brutalized in 2019 it was you know still hovering around 150 at the time or something like that so it was definitely not where he could uh uh you know have more staff on so he started cutting stuff and i think that's actually i mean i feel sorry for the people who lost their jobs but at the time i thought it was actually pretty good because

consensus needed to get leaner i think they had over a thousand employees they definitely needed to get leaner as an organization focus on their winners like metamask infurera truffle sweet things like that um rather than a lot of the moonshots bets that were making and things like that so yeah i think it was healthy at the time but over the last few months i haven't heard anything about further layoffs and i think that's in part due to the fact that each price is going up uh which helps a lot with funding consensus and things like that so yeah but at the time this was sobering news as uh obviously whenever people are losing jobs in the ethereum ecosystem the whole ecosystem feels it because it's very very tight-knit kind of place um but i think that you know there's so much opportunity now for people to work

within ethereum and within crypto that these people would have found other jobs i'm sure of it oop let this refresh so pull together raised their first uh i guess around uh one 1.05 million dollars in february of 2020 it was led by ideo vc so audio collab ventures um those of you who probably know of them with participation from consensus labs and doggy tale capital or dtc capital here so at the time pulled together was i mean people were talking about it at the time and they're like this is going to be huge right this is like a no-loss lottery where people can go into this and basically uh you know put in there put in some money and then the interest

earned on that money is the prize and they can withdraw their money at the end of it it's not going to be like it's a lottery where you put in your money and then if you don't win you lose it all um so that was kind of a big kind of narrative at the start pulled together had like a pretty good year i think they launched like v2 they raised more money um i think i might go into that later but basically i think this is one of the apps that brings in the mainstream uh if it if we can scale it if we can get it kind of like into the mainstream consciousness uh pull together wants to be a savings vehicle as well where you can encourage people to put their you know money into this uh and and and basically it's saving their money

technically right um and then also they they go in the running into the running of uh basically only um sorry uh winning a prize you can think of this like a bank account right if you put imagine if you put your money into a bank account and then there was like a a price that got given given out to people every you know a few weeks or something uh from the bank and basically from and that would come out of the money that they made on your money because you know for those who don't know when you put your money in a bank account it doesn't just sit there the bank uses that money to make investments you know to loan out you know especially to mortgages and things like that all this sort of stuff um to make more money for themselves and that's how they can

pay you an interest rate even though the interest rates are very low right now it'd be really cool you know if a bank did that but they don't do that they probably will never do that but pull together does so yeah i i thought that was really cool um but yeah they raised that money and they actually raised more money recently which i might go into a bit later so m stable was announced in february of 2020 as well uh again um uh and i'm an investor in m stable and an advisor to them as well so disclaimer there that basically what m stable is it's a stable coin platform similar i guess to curve where you can swap in and out of stable coins uh m stable produces a meta stable coin called musd which is backed up by um a bunch of

other underlying stable coins so the theory is that the musd stronger than the than than the um then it's parts so it's it's as strong as the sum of its parts basically uh so yeah that was announced in february it didn't hit mainnet till later but yeah announced a long time ago um and then i i think it started like i invested first in january of 2019 so it's been out for quite a while now and they've seen some good traction so far the stable coin space is obviously heating up a lot as well so really great to see see them going live and making moves there so open v what is this open v1 i think it was yeah went live on main net in february of 2020 as well uh they started off with protecting your

compound finance deposits against technical and financial risks a lot of people actually think of uh these options platforms uh not you know just as pure like i guess financial tools to bet on certain things but they can also be used for hedging uh your financial and technical risks as kind of like an insurance uh platform i guess you could call it or a coverage platform sort of similar to nexus mutual and i think that's what a lot of people aren't using this as just yet but as more of these kind of like options come online to basically hedge your risk hedge your technical and financial exposure to different things because we're going to see more use of this and i've said on the daily great refuels that i think that

the options platforms are going to be extremely hot in 2021 i know of like 15 plus like projects at this point it's it's insane um and i think that there's gonna be only a couple of big winners like in terms of like really big winners and it's gonna be very hard to pick which ones win uh it might end up being the case where the ones that win don't even kind of like look like an options platform they just give people the best products to use to do what they need to do basically so yeah i think that uh this was really cool open had a pretty good year as well but now they're facing a lot of competition so we're going to see what happens there so authorium was uh was quite i mean they went live in february of 2020 it was quite a big deal

within 2020 but i don't think they have managed to kind of grab too much adoption away from metamask at this point so for for those who don't know ethereum is kind of a wallet that basically allows you to have like a smart wallet where it's you know secured with like sort of similar to arjuna where you can have like account limits and it's like a smart contract wallet and you can do kind of a bunch of different things with it i mean if i was to click through to here i'm sure they've got like a bunch of examples of what you can do with it basically uh there's integrations uh with with different apps here um they i guess they rate yeah they also announced that they raised the seed round of 1.1 million dollars um and yeah i'm pretty sure they added all these features throughout 2020 so

like batching transactions fiat on an off-ramps um an ethereum native app things like that so yeah that went live at the beginning of 2020. i haven't heard much from them as i said uh recently i guess because there's been so much noise within d5 a lot of these projects are finding it hard to get uh you know public exposure at this point in time but i still think that like from what i know ethereum is is is kind of chipping away working away trying to get more adoption on their wallets i think the wallet space is also pretty crowded right now as much as i think that metamask could be improved a thousand times it's just so sticky and so many people still use metamask um so i guess like we'll see what wallets win in 2021 so synthetics added ether collateral at

the beginning of this year to the synthetics platform so before that it was just snx as collateral so their native token but then you know obviously people were uh you know asking hey when are you gonna have other collateral and obviously the next best collateral was ether or i guess like you could argue ether's better collateral than snx to a point um so they basically launched this in the kind of like limited uh kind of that yeah they limited the um the collateral that could be used i think 1500 eighth was what they started with and they had to lower that um and then they kind of like raised it from there i'm not sure what it is at this point i think it's a lot more than that um but yeah so this was really great to see i think that before this you know there was a lot of

people going on about risk associated with synthetics because of the fact that it was kind of like a a self-referential system where that you you know you'd use snx's collateral to back up the synthetic the synth assets and then that collateral would basically um if it was to go like full very quickly then the entire system would become undeclaralized you know very quickly and that would lead to losses and liquidations blah blah blah um but you know the collateralization ratio i think at the start was like 750 percent so you have to put up 750 worth of snx to borrow at minimum to borrow uh a very small amount against that so yeah really great to see them put 8th

collateral in i'm not sure if they're going to add other collateral to the system maybe they will like tokenize bitcoin things like that we'll have to see as the as 2021 goes on so loopring launched their first zk roll up exchange in february 2020. i think this was the first layer 2 implementation in d5 i think on main net at least um so and blueprint had a really big year as well because of this right uh this is basically using as i mentioned before roll up technology but not optimistic roll ups zk robs which is which is different um you know there's a lot of debate about what's good uh what's better basically you know zk roll-ups or optimistic roll-ups but yeah this went live in february of 2020.

uh it's gotten a lot of usage since then i think their their usage has skyrocketed lately 40 million locked or something like that which is more than a lot of you know layer one protocols uh which is really cool to see so i think you know they released a bunch of other products as well what i think they're going to have a good year in 2021 too compound governance so this was announced by uh compound ceo robert leschner on february of 2020 so they announced that they're basic they were basically going to have like a decentralized governance process they were going to have a token they hadn't released it yet they just announced it and they kind of put in a uh i guess like a beta version of their governance process where people could delegate uh comp iou tokens or like fake comp tokens to different protocol

politicians um and then they would be able to test the governance process so yeah that was announced as early as february 2020 and as we all know you know comp uh went live i think june of 2020 but i'll talk about that uh when we get to that one so another big kind of thing that happened within 2021 and bled into 2022 was prog power you haven't probably haven't heard about this for quite a while but prog power was something that dominated the ethereum community's consciousness all throughout 2019 i think and some of 2018 even so for those who don't know prog power stands for programmatic proof of work it was basically this uh eip that um people proposed that would upgrade or change ethereum's uh proof-of-work

algorithm in order to be asic-resistant right and this obviously caused a lot of drama within the community for those who were around there was a lot of disagreements the arguments and debates went on for for ages um but i think this post from hudson jameson here basically put this to bed now this wasn't hudson you know being the dictator here and saying you know prog power's dead whatever we're not going to do it this just was basically summarizing the history of it everything that kind of happened uh all the debates all the fours and against and things like that and giving you know basically i think hudson gave his own opinion that he thought that it wouldn't that proc wasn't going to happen based on the fact that there was so much community kind of like um support around this not

happening um and and then yeah he gave his personal perspective here and he was talking in a uh speaking in a personal perspective he wasn't speaking on behalf of the ethereum foundation or anything like that um so yeah i think this is the post that kind of put prague power to bed basically killed it because it summarized everything really nicely and it showed everyone that there was not community consensus here but yeah there was a time where people were like you know prog power is going to go through we're confident it's going to go through so it didn't and i haven't heard anything about it for quite a while i think the people who wanted to go through have kind of given up at this point and i think we're all just focused on getting to eth2 getting rid of proof of work entirely moving fully to proof of stake getting

that merger done between eth1 and eth2 and forgetting about you know prog power and everything got to do with mining i guess on on aetherium another big piece of news that wasn't within the hume community but i guess like had some ramifications for ethereum was that tron and justin stein specifically took over the steam network so steam i think as a platform was sold to tron and then what ended up happening was there was a hostile takeover where the blockchain of steam was overtaken by tron they kind of were able to get most of the uh delegated proof-of-stake nodes uh to them so they essentially controlled the network uh and that was kind of like quite a big deal at the time uh

there you know there was a lot of talk about what this means for d5 protocols right and if they can be hostile governance governance takeovers for d5 protocols and i think there actually can be i think for sure 100 they can be because if you have enough power with if there's on chain voting with tokens and you can basically you know you have something that you want to do or something you want to implement on that platform you can do it if you have enough tokens and you can make your you know exert your will essentially so that's why this was kind of like a very hot topic at the time and the steam community was actually quite large you know outside of ethereum i think the steam community is one of the biggest ones in crypto and they fought back they forked it off

um they created a new community i can't remember what it's called now but they created a new token a new community called hive that's right it's called hive um to basically fight back against justin sun uh and i think binance got caught up in this as well they were like supporting justin sun's um you know take over here but then cz said oh you know we don't get involved in these politics we're just supporting what the community wants and it was just it was a pretty big like you know uh dr like a lot of drama i would say that for the steam community this was their version of prog power in terms of how much drama was kind of going on here so yeah that was that was a big piece of news in march uh also in march zora was introduced so you've probably seen

zora on uh on twitter a lot where people are tweeting uh a moon face uh kinda like happy happy moon face sorry a crescent moon a happy moon face another crescent moon together um basically that's like signaling to zora that they want to be a part of like the beta testing so what zora is it's basically a marketplace to buy sell and trade limited edition goods aka nfts um and obviously we all know that nfts had a pretty breakout year within 2020 as well um but zora is one one of these platforms that are kind of i think targeting hype culture so for those who don't know hype culture is kind of this thing that i guess like it's more for millennials and generation z or gen z or zoomers as they're known uh where

basically there's limited edition goods that people want to want to kind of like get or quote-unquote cop uh and they pay a lot of money for this so this includes like sneakers you know limited edition clothing uh like uh uh you know uh jumpers and tops and things like that all these sorts of things so that's what zara is doing they're kind of like bringing their physical world into the digital world and being able to trade these things they weren't the first ones to do this for those who who know about uni socks from uni swap they did this as well but zora kind of took it to the next level and are trying to bring on all these kind of artists and all these kind of people to sell their their physical goods as digital goods and kind of capture the secondary market value of that

and i don't know if i'm going to go over it later but zoro was also hosting rac's tape for those who don't know so that was basically a tape token that gave you a claim on a limited edition physical tape of ra like actual cassette tape of rac's music which was really cool as well so that was that was a big kind of thing uh during 2020 as well so arjun announced in march that they raised the 12 million series a which was huge at the time like i remember reading about this and was like wow 12 million dollar series a round that's that's massive um for argent right because you'll see a lot of uh i guess like crypto projects raising money but not a lot of them raised 12 million dollars they can tend to raise like one

to maybe four million dollars i guess there's a seed round so it's a bit different um but still this was a massive raise at the time and it was led by paradigm who are famous for their unisop investment fans for a lot of the work they do around uh with optimism on optimistic roll-ups and things like that they also had backing for robert lesnar of compound of course and a bunch of existing investors joined as well i think argent also had a really great year in 2020 they're trying to bring crypto ethereum d5 to the mainstream i guess um to uh people who don't want to use metamask don't want to use like these other complex wallets they just want a seamless experience they basically want like a fintech venmo experience within ethereum and that's what arjun's trying to give them so yeah they announced that

in march of 2020. uni swap unisop had a massive yeah uh and i think my camera is blocking uh blocking it here so uh because the the website's basically on the on aligned on the left here but basically you can you can see here and i'll talk to it unisop v2 uh there was an overview given by uh hayden adams in march of 2020 i spoke a lot about uni swaps kind of growth in the daily grade newsletter yesterday so if you want to check that out you can links in the in the description but basically uh they kind of went over what unix v2 is going to be how it's going to work what improvements it brings uh kind of things like that i don't think it went live in march of 2020 i think this was just like kind of an

announcement post about it um yeah so the launch details were here so they were going to do a test net and if they they're optimistic that v2 was going to go live uh q2 of 2020 which which it did um but yeah so this was really exciting at the time uh because unicorn v1 was still quite small but it was growing you can see the chart here my camera's not blocking it now so you can see the chart here that it basically was kind of like slowly slowly in 2019 growing and then it just like kind of had a breakout uh up in into early 2020 and then obviously we've all seen the growth that unisop has had throughout 2020 it's just like dwarfed this growth but that was in part due to v2 as well because it brought more flexibility to the protocol

brought more features and stuff like that so yeah so uma went live uh march in 2020 with their priceless synthetic tokens so this was basically a way for to to basically create synthetic tokens without oracles uh on the ethereum network and uh basically tracking anything essentially so the synthetic protocols i think synthetics is obviously the biggest one right now but uma is coming to give them a run for their money there's other ones coming as well out like a bunch of other platforms i won't go through them all now but uma kind of went live uh they wanted to give people uh exposure to kind of things like the s p 500

that didn't require an oracle feed which i think synthetics does require because they use chain link oracles so this was kind of like their moat here or i guess their competitive advantage um but yeah this was released to test net they said you know they basically have an idea of what you could do and everything like that uh and you know i'm actually thinking about it now i'm noticing a trend that a lot of this stuff that we're that we now use on main net right went went on the test net in q1 and q2 of 2020. uh so it's really cool to see that the whole ecosystem is kind of like you know going on testing at the same time and then going to mainnet right and we're kind of like moving forward as one collective kind of like whole rather than kind of disparate parties so

yeah that's really cool to see so coinbase wallet uh integrating d5 apps in march of 2020 was big news at the time so they basically allowed you to enter into d5 apps like compound and dydx directly from the coinbase wallet now i think this was the first instance of centralized finance or c5 building on top of d5 and getting involved with that and i've spoken about this before but i think that that's going to be a big narrative going into 2021 centralized players tapping into dfi's vast liquidity right vast user base you know the the all the advantages that come with it for their customer base so that's going to be big but yeah coinbase definitely kicked it off in

march of 2020 with with these integrations here just a few clicks and you could you could get involved um you know very similar to how argent while it works but obviously coinbase has a much bigger user base than arjun at this time so that was that was quite big news in march of 2020 big news outside of ethereum in april was binance confirming a coin market cap acquisition this was huge at the time they they spent i think uh i don't know if the actual dollar amounts were disclosed oh yeah i know uh it wasn't disclosed like publicly but the sources that the block went to basically uh said that at the time the acquisition was worth 400 million dollars paid out in bnb and cash that was a lot for coin market cap but you know at the same time

coin market was still very dominant at the time that's where everyone went to view kind of like uh the the rankings of the different coins and stuff like that um the information about different coins coin gecko was still very small i think coin gecko had a really amazing 2020 where they actually ended up flipping coin market cap after this acquisition um but yeah so this was this was huge news at the time uh and binance i mean i feel like they kind of squandered this acquisition they didn't do as much with it as i thought they would uh they obviously kind of like improved the website a bit and kind of plus a binance stuff everywhere but at the same time they allowed coingecko to gain on them and i you know i might be a little bit biased here but i think coin gecko is a much

better platform than coin market cap eve you know uh just from like a data point of view like coin gecko pioneered the fact that uh you could see like fully diluted market cap versus circulating market cap you could see where the tokens were basically i'm going to be released right which wallet i was sitting in from team and investors and stuff you could actually see a lot more markets as well like decentralized exchange markets too on there so yeah i feel like binance squandered this and you know i actually was more bullish on this acquisition at the time i figured that this was going to be huge for finance because coin market cap was like a a retail funnel where a lot of retail investors went to but it doesn't seem to have happened that way so balancer went live in april of 2020

uh so for you know i guess like at the time the only amms that were live were uni swap and then i think kerb as well but in terms of like non-stable coin amms it was uni swap uh and then balancer went live and they basically brought a few different things to the table they allowed you to do eight different tokens within a pool rather than just two that uni swap had um they offered i think i don't did their bell token go live here i don't think so i think it went live later but they basically offered an alternative to uni swap in that you could use eight different tokens instead of two you could do uh i think smart order routing which is basically optimizing across pools that's what unisop did in v2 i think i'm not sure about v1 but they

definitely have it in v2 obviously and then you could set custom fees as well whereas unisop's fee is flat at 0.3 percent um you could set anywhere from like i think you know no fee or maybe like a very small fee to five percent or something like that something crazy maybe even higher than that i don't even think there's a limit on the fee i'm not sure but yeah they brought some new things to the table so yeah balancer april man it doesn't feel like it's been that long i feel like balance is newer than that but maybe that's because they launched the bell token later but yeah that went live in april of 2020. so reddit actually uh ended up getting involved with ethereum so this news came out in april as well so it's basically uh the title here the headline here is

reddit may use ethereum for a new token based point system and this was uh this hadn't gone live yet and it actually did end up going live later but this was basically reddit um saying that they're experimenting with a points and perk system on ethereum's blockchain uh it all went live later as part of like um moon crypto and like uh bricks as well for those who remember this but basically yeah at the time this was just like an announcement this was coming um which i thought was really cool at the time there was speculation as well i was like how is reddit going to do this ethereum can't handle the scale whatever blah blah and there's actually news that came out that reddit hosted a scaling competition for ethereum which i'll go over a bit later but yeah so this was really cool at the

time people got really excited about this you know whenever a new not a new whenever an existing big platform like reddit gets involved with ethereum people like wow there's gonna be so many new users coming in and that is exciting but at the same time it's over it's it's often overestimated how fast this adoption will happen people are like oh you know one million reddit users are going to come onto ethereum instantly it's just not how it works right it takes time you know it starts off slow it might go exponential at one point but it doesn't go exponential for quite a while i think so yeah really cool to see reddit launching uh announcing that in april 2020 i'll go over kind of what they what they launched a bit later so the d5 alliance was announced in april of 2020

uh i think so it was is it the d5 alliance yeah so they it was basically volt capital jump capital cmt trading and dr w trading which are all these i guess centralized kind of institutions or traditional finance institutions launched the chicago d5 alliance which basically uh brings chicago-based trading firms and d5 projects together uh since then the defilance alliance has been growing quite rapidly i think they basically want to bring in traditional finance systems in uh players into the d5 space whether that be traders or like you know brokers or i guess like different firms and things like that and basically being able to bring in more liquidity to the space as well and i

and i don't know the numbers on it but i think they have played a big role in d5 this year in terms of providing liquidity getting involved with yield farming all that sort of stuff so yeah that was really cool to see as well well let's refresh this so uh prior pry labs did a lot of test nets this year for eth2 or sorry in 2020 for eth2 uh and one of them was basically the topaz network uh this was the first one that represented the full ethereum 2.0 phase zero mainnet configuration and this went live in april of 2020 as well uh this was a bit premature because as some of you know the phase zero kind of main net configuration changed a few like over the next few months but this

was really really awesome because this was the first time that uh it went live with a full maintenance configuration um this was getting a lot of people hyped up i think there were more test nets that went live uh after this uh there definitely was more madasha was obviously the one that most people knew about but topaz was an early one and it kind of like represented the first i think once topez went live people were like okay we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now we can see the beacon chain we can see phase zero uh you know we can see that it's going to happen this year so that's why everyone got really excited about this test net so black thursday happened in march uh i think you know that was a really big deal for the wider crypto space

obviously uh all the prices dumped of all the crypto right but none other than maker dow was actually the most affected by it within d5 so what ended up happening on black thursday was that gas prices spiked so high that make a dale's oracles didn't update in time so what ended up happening was that uh someone was able to bid on the collateral with zero dollar bids basically to liquidate people and they got i think like four million dollars worth of eth or something for zero dollars or or worth of collateral for zero dollars which meant that the system became under collateralized which meant that mkr needed to be printed to re-collateralize the system and that ended up happening and that ended up going quite well actually but then of course there were class

action lawsuit uh lobbied against maker for 28 million dollars for losses spurred by people affected by this i don't know the current status of this i don't know if it was thrown out or if it's still ongoing or whatever but yeah 28 million dollars was quite a hit there maker still went on to have a really amazing year in 2020 but the mkr token has not it has basically stayed around the same price versus us dollars it has fallen a lot versus if so this is a big hit for maker but at the same time they see they seem to be growing still right people still seem to trust the system i think they've made a lot of a lot of improvements since this kind of uh thing happened in april uh sorry may um so yeah they definitely uh bounced back from this but at the same time

there's a lot of damage there people still remember it people still know what happened um so i'm hoping that maker has a better 2021 in terms of like i guess the price of the mkr token because that represents a lot of um confidence in these systems i guess whether whether we like it to or not all right next we have gnosis protocol so gnosis announced uh i guess like the the gnosis protocol in april of 2020 it was the result of two years of research and development uh and basically what this what noises protocol is it's a fully permissionless decentralized exchange protocol that enables a new mechanism called ring trades to maximize liquidity now i think i want to call out here that

this is fully permissionless fully decentralized exchange like completely decentralized it even the front end it's just available via mesa which is on i think ipfs and any updates to even the front end needs to be done through the on-chain voting process so that was really really cool to see completely permissionless completely decentralized uh ring trades where uh basically enable people to put in their bids and it all settles at like a fair price so that there's not like fomo and things like that it does uh kind of batch auctions it allows you to trade in between you know potentially any pair without having to worry about liquidity so that was launched i think mesa had a

pretty good pretty good year in terms of like adoption uh there was a few icos or kind of coin offerings run on it as well but yeah that went live in april of 2020. so here we go compound governance finally went live in april of 2020 as well um so basically the the governance process uh i guess like at this point wasn't like the comp token had it launched but the governance process had launched there was a bunch of comp allocated to or at least delegated to protocol politicians so like people within the ecosystem that were was being used to do like a v1 of the compound governance process here um but the token wasn't live just yet i think uh

i think that you know people speculated on how the token was going to be released but we didn't actually know that it would be released through a yield farming program just yet but yeah this was like the first i guess iteration of compound governance which went live in april of 2020 and 0x launched their matchup platform in uh april of 2020 as well so what matcha is it's basically like you know one inch or decks.ag basically a decentralized exchange aggregator uh that looks really awesome i actually love matches design i think it reminds me of like robin hood in terms of like uh the traditional finance system uh so this went live and they've actually done like a lot of uh trading xerox uh volume started picking up

because uh it went through kind of like 0x for a lot of trades and for liquidity and things like that um but yeah this was this was quite big at the time i've used matcha before it's really great sometimes they'll cover your gas fees i don't know if they do it lately but they did it um back then like when they first launched it over the first few months within 2020 so yeah it was great to see matcha go live then uh so and as i mentioned at the start of the video uh consensus did end up laying off more stuff uh um and they did this because i guess they cited the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as well i think that i mean as i said it was it's got a lot to do with its price so it's price actually started trending

up in q1 of 2020 but then the chronovirus uncertainty hit and eat dumped to like 90 again in march and then had a slow recovery through april but at that point i'm sure you know joe living was like okay i need to cut more stuff i can't afford this you know i don't know if the price is gonna go back up there's a lot of uncertainty right now you know no one thought that 8th was going to go and have like such an amazing year amid all this kind of like uncertainty in the world so yeah we saw another layoff of consensus there another 14 of staff unfortunately laid off in april so here we have uh future swap so future swap was only live for a short amount of time on ethereum before they actually went

uh back into i guess building out so they like they went live as like a beta platform um i think they did like a couple of different tests where uh they did uh this in april and then later on they did uh uh another one where they said that you'd be able to get their token if you had provided liquidity um so what basically future swap is a perpetual futures market uh that lets you basically trade with like up to 20 times leverage um i think that they're gonna have even more leverage when they go live i think they're going live this year uh but they were basically testing it and they did like a very um i think a very safe launch where they limited what people could do uh they didn't just put it out there and say you know put a billion dollars in

our protocol they actually put caps on how much could go in um so that was really cool to see as well but yeah they're not live right now none of their kind of like things alive right now but they will be i think earlier earlier this year in 2021 uh but we'll have to see how that plans it plays out so this was actually pretty big news at the time so coinbase uh basically said that they were introducing a price oracle for defy so they were signing their price feed from uh coinbase uh for i think it was eighth or something like that or um or like a bunch of other tokens so yeah they're doing it for sorry they're doing it for bitcoin and eighth usd markets and i was signing this so that it could be used within d5 um and what ended up happening was that

compound ended up using it they ended up using the diet oracle which for those who who probably are aware that ended up actually biting them biting them uh because it ended up happening where coinbase uh the diet price spiked and then uh it spiked on compound then all this stuff happened uh so but yeah at the time it was quite cool because it was just coinbase getting more involved with d5 right they were they had already gotten involved with their coinbase mobile wallet app where they basically allowed people to get integrations with compound and dydx and things like that and now they were signing a price oracle which is kind of like the next step so i thought that was really cool more telegram news so basically um as i said at the start the sec went

after telegram for their ico and then eventually telegram ended up caving to u.s regulators they delayed the launch of their blockchain chain which still hasn't gone live as far as i know and they offered to return 1.2 billion dollars to investors of the 1.7 billion dollars that had um been raised now as i mentioned before telegram has uh been just you know drama upon drama regulators you know delays everything on their blockchain platform so yeah i wasn't uh i wasn't i'm not surprised to see that they haven't gone live yet i mean they mention here that okay they mention here they're pushing their go live date to april 2021 maybe maybe they do do it maybe they get it live you know they've got like four more months to get it live in 2021

or maybe the regulators come after them again and say no you can't go live i don't know it's gonna be messy we'll see how it goes throughout 2021 so also in april uh gnosis uh introduced uh apps into gnosis safe so for those who don't know nurses safe is a basically a multi-sig wallet um that launched quite quite a while ago and now that you and and in april of 2020 they integrated apps so what apps is basically default apps that you can use through gnosis safe through the multisig wallet to do a bunch of different things i've used it a lot because eric and i manage the ether address through gnosis safe and that they've been adding apps all the time it's really really cool i think that you know the the future for a lot of i mean treasuries are going to be

through nurses safe they're going to man manage their multi-seeds through this i mean everyone that because ethereum doesn't have like a native multisig everyone uses uh nurse's safe as far as i know and obviously we saw that you know parody multiseed the other one got hacked and then got frozen and no one wanted to use parodies multisig anymore so gnosis kind of stepped up and built out nurses safe which is the most secure multi-sig on ethereum it it holds like hundreds of millions of dollars if not maybe a billion dollars at this stage i don't think it's there yet but yeah very very secure multi-seek wallet so zappify was introduced in may of 2020 so you might you guys might have thought that zapify has been around for a while and and has as another kind of incantation called defy zap and defy snap

um but zappify itself went live in may of 2020. and disclosure here i'm an investor in zappify just i want to get that out there but basically defy zap and d5 snap they existed as standalone products for a while so d5 zap was basically the um the the concept of zapping into different opportunities on ethereum so being able to enter into like a liquidity provider position very quickly um on ethereum uh on like uni swap and things like that and d5 snap was like a portfolio manager so they kind of merged to become zapify which is a portfolio manager and viewer and and everything like that and and to allow you to zap into different opportunities as well so they had a few stats here that you know they launched their beta in

december of defense app and it had processed 13 million dollars uh of of kind of like deployment into d5 since then actually since may um it's gone up to a billion dollars now for 2020 so they ended up processing a billion dollars after this merger they had only 1500 unique users at the time i think they put out their yearly review and they ended up having like 300 000 unique users or something like that so their growth has just been incredible through 2020. um you know i i mean it's one of the reasons i invested in them right and i use them all the time they had a great d5 summer but yeah they only went live in may of 2020. so they basically launched at the right time because in june we saw comp go live which i'll talk about but but yeah that was really really cool

to see so immutable x was introduced by immutable the company behind god's unchained which was basically is go and it is live now but it's it's basically basically a non-custodial exchange in partnership with starkwear so basically a dex running on uh starkwear's zk uh roll up technology um to basically be a decks for nfts like god's unchained cards and i think they're going to be integrating with other projects as well um but this was a big deal a big deal at the time as i said in as i've said a lot in newsletter on the on the refuels 2020 was the year of uh layer two getting to mainnet getting um you know i guess like on test nets and on mainnet

going past the research phase and going into the development stage and i think 20 21 is going to be the adoption stage and i think immutable x is going to be one of the apps at the forefront of that and as i said synthetics uh you know as i said about layer 2 it was getting layer 2 to mainnet so synthetics exchange announced their layer 2 demo is now live with the optimistic virtual machine which is made by optimism on their optimistic roll-up technology so this was basically a way to demo this scaling technology um and i think that it lasted for a short amount of time or maybe it still got ongoing i think it is still ongoing on the test net um it allows you to basically use you

know the synthetic exchange on a layer two feel the power of it feel how fast it is um and this was like a trade there was a trading competition as well where people could basically trade on there and win like a a lot of snx i think ten thousand snx at eight dollars is worth like eighty thousand dollars like first place got more than that so there was some really great prizes um basically offered for this but i remember this i played around with it i'm not a good trader so i obviously didn't win any prizes but uh i played around with it and it was just instant right like you just confirmed trade and just instant uh that was really cool this was the first demo actually this is the first demo there's there's a second one that i'll talk about a bit later

with the synthetic staking but this was for the synthetic exchange which i think the mainnet is going live on january 15th that's the target date this year 2021 so we're going to get so much adoption happening in 2021 for layer twos it's going to be insane so uh here we go uh so i yield so for those who don't know yield is a company that's going to be bringing fixed term fixed rate lending and interest rate markets to d5 uh so they uh i guess they went live recently but they were announced in may of 2020. uh i think they raised money from paradigm as well and they brought on um uh dan robinson who originally published the paper to help them with these sorts of things uh so that

they basically announced this yeah in may of 2020 and they've i think they went live recently um i think i'll cover that soon but yeah this was not just another d5 app that went live that a lot of people got excited about because finally you know we're bringing a yield curve to d5 which is which is missing right now um to to defy stable coins as well to make sure that we have like a yield curve that we can reference and that different d5 platforms can reference and things like that all right so as i was talking about before reddit announced that they were looking into an ethereum based uh kind of token platform and they launched it in may of 2020 so they launched two tokens one named moons and the other bricks and it was issued to members of the subreddit cryptocurrency and r fortnight which is

very interesting at the time uh and then reddit was calling them community points basically um so this was like an experiment that reddit did people were very very excited about this at the time they basically um were excited because you could actually wrap these and trade them as well like on uni swap and things like that um uh just like you could like donuts if people remember from 2019 ethereum donuts became tradable because someone tokenized it uh but i think reddit took this to the next level and and basically did native integrations with cryptocurrency subreddit and the fortnite subreddit and it was cool to see that they did it with fortnite because that was like a whole new user base right that was a whole new set of people that had never gotten exposed to cryptocurrency before getting exposed

through ethereum so this was huge news at the time and was really cool to see at the time so and then later on reddit announced something even cooler which i'll get to soon uh the kind of scaling competition that they did which i'll talk to soon as well so eris x uh announced the launch of the first u.s ether futures contracts now i i said at the beginning that um that the cftc chairman said that we'd say aether futures coming uh coming live within six to twelve months from january i think that what he meant by that was i mean yes rsx is is is a kind of like traditional finance platform but they're not very big the bigger platform is cme and that's the one that announced the future's going live in february in 2021 um but still i had forgotten

about this rsx that they had actually launched the first u.s ether futures contracts but i don't think there's been much volume here um as a as as compared to cme i think it's been quite small but yeah that went live in may of 2020 so yeah i guess like the cftc chairman was right about his prediction of six to 12 months he was actually uh off by a month in terms of like he was too pessimistic he should have been more optimistic but as i said rsx is not as anywhere near as big as cme so uh i guess like that's what everyone's looking forward to right now is like the cme kind of launch so arjun v1 was introduced in may of 2020 and basically introduced one tap defy

so it allowed you to basically you know tap into these protocols and entered into them very easily no need to go through like complicated i guess metamask transactions and complicated transactions with the different protocols you could literally just um hit like rv or compound or or the die savings rate and just enter into them with a couple of clicks i think i mean it it says that's one tap but it's more than one tap but basically it's it's nowhere near as complicated as as doing it with metamask or like a ledger or whatever you just do it from your phone it feels very similar to like a venmo or a robin hood or something like that so i thought that was really really cool at the time um i think since then argent i don't know if they've released v2 yet i don't think so

um but i think they're working on it so yeah really cool to see that go live in 2020 so the first eth2 deposit launch pad the i guess like all of you who have used e3 and got into 82 staking will have used the launch pad so i'm in may of 2020 the first uh mock-up of the launch pad was was kind of posted by uh deep work studio and this looks very different to the one that we have now but basically very similar concepts i think that we'll replace these graphics over on left here with like the rhino that everyone knows about um i think the colors were replaced but yeah this was the first version of it um and that would got a lot of people excited because just another thing that made eth2

feel very real right it felt like it was coming it was it was close the light was there um so yeah this was announced in may of 2020 and then obviously it was iterated on and we have the final product that looks a lot more like this uh this screenshot here than it does the the above ones but that's what design you know that's what design is you know we go through the different iterations over many months and we get to a place where we think that you know users are going to really appreciate it and i think a lot of people did appreciate the launch pad was very easy to use it was like people's gateway into eth2 basically so tornado cash uh in may of 2020 did their trusted setup uh which was bigger than

uh aztecs one so we had aztecs being the biggest earliest early uh 2020 and then tornado cash came along and was even bigger and i participated in this one as well and i had over a thousand contributors that participated um to to basically make this the most decentralized uh trusted setup ceremony in the world um 664 remained anonymous which was really really cool uh there were uh the ceremony ran for 10 days which was shorter than aztecs i think aztecs ran for 30 days but i think this also showed the growth of like kind of ethereum in general right we had aztec having i think it was like a few hundred contributors then we have over a thousand with tornado now but i think tornadoes set up was actually easier than aztecs as well that

the barrier to entry was lower for one reason or another but yeah um the tornado cash hasn't been around for very long you know may of 2020 was when they did this i don't think they had gone live at this point i think they went live later but yeah really cool to see that so in may of 2020 uh tbtc so tokenized btc actually ended up being deployed to the main net for those who uh like this is the first deployment so for those who who know uh what ended up happening like two or three days later there was a critical bug found and they took the system offline i think um uh i think you know uh maybe he mentions it here uh no no this is just like the main net launch

um basically yeah and then two to three days later it kind of had to go offline because it was a critical bug and then it got relaunched but this was the first decentralized i think tokenized btc that went live maybe ren protocol went live sooner with their rent btc but basically up until this point dropped bitcoin had dominated the space and it still dominates the space but people were excited about this because they're like we want a decentralized btc on ethereum um and that's what tbcc uh hopes to offer but yeah they went live wet off like two to three days later i went live again later which i may cover a little bit later so uh mariano from i mean he used to work at maker dao for a long time actually he kind of left

recently but basically uh psy was ended up being successfully shut down so single collateral die um in may 13th of 2020 so that's it like that single collateral diet system was shut down uh because makeup moved to multicollateral dye which i think i've forgotten to to go over so yeah they moved to multi-clatter will die no though they did it in 2019 that's why i haven't got it on 2020 recap i remember this um multi-cloud will die i went live end of 2019 um and was like obviously growing within 2020 and then they shut down single collateral die in may of 2020.

here we go unisop v2 protocol got deployed to mainnet so as i said they announced it earlier and then they deployed it to mainnet in may of 2019 which brought with it a host of new upgrades you could easily migrate your liquidity across there was a new uh sorry an updated interface for unit swap uh you could do uh erc20 to erc20 pairs so you no longer had to use eth for the pair you could use unisof as a price oracle there were flash swaps now updated documentation basically this was like uni swap launched this and then after this they just went crazy with growth um we all know about unisop's growth i won't go over it again i've talked about it a lot lately but yeah v2 went live may of 2020. maybe v3 goes live may of 2021 i don't know if

we have to wait that long i think v3 is a lot closer than people think so uh starkware basically put together this blog post um saying that they could scale reddit's community points with starkx and basically what they did was they took um their zk roll up technology and trustlessly onboarded to the ethereum mainnet the 1.3 million user accounts that had balances of the brics and moons tokens from fortnite br the subreddit there and they did this basically the price per transfer was only 600 gas which is extremely cheap on ethereum they did it over 12 hour period while using only 2.5 of the ethereum network uh and they paid

gas prices that were on average 30 below the average block gas price during that time so this was a demo basically for them to on board the entire fortnight battle royale subreddit onto ethereum and to show reddit that we can already scale their community point system using the existing technology that we had i think thought that was really really awesome that they did this i mean at the time people were really excited about this they're like okay wow scaling is already here and it was as i've said i mean i've said it so many times 2020 is the year of getting scaling to mainnet 2021's adoption i'm curious to see if ethereum gets adopted by reddit uh through their scaling technologies in 2021 as well i mentioned emstable before how they announced that early that uh in in february of 2020 they went live on

main that in may of 2020 basically allowing people to uh mint musd swap in and out of stable coins earn a yield on their stable coins through the save feature uh and that's been chugging along quite nicely since they went live in may of 2020. uh defcon 2021 was announced in may of 2020. now obviously uh the 2020 devcon was cancelled unfortunately because of coronavirus um i think i don't remember where if there was a location kind of announced for 2020 i don't remember now but basically 2021 is going to be in colombia basically uh in uh where is it in in bogata in colombia um i don't know if this is going to go ahead to be honest the the

world is still kind of you know um tackling coronavirus i know it's january i know we have vaccines coming and things like that but i don't know if i'm gonna even be able to go to this like the borders are still closed in australia i can't even leave my state at the moment let alone the country um so i don't know if i'm gonna i probably won't like i'll be honest i probably won't be there maybe it'll still go ahead and maybe people will be able to go but i think it's going to be a devcon that if if the coronavirus pandemic continues as it has been and with the disruptions that it's causing i don't think it's going to be a very big devcon which is sad because i know that colombia is a very beautiful country um but it's also people were also like

you know this is weird right uh colombia i mean obviously has a reputation for drug cartels and everything right high crime i think that's kind of like over over exaggerated but at the same time people are like you know going to colombia all these crypto people together you know are we going to get kidnapped right is our kind of ledger's going to get stolen is our crypto going to get stolen i don't i think that's over exaggerated but i wish i could go i don't think i'm going to be able to go uh to be honest right the um australian government isn't isn't expecting to open the borders until at least mid-year um and i think it's going to be even later than that even with vaccines and things like that uh we're not going to have vaccines till i mean my age group probably till the

end of the year or something like that i don't think i don't know i don't know what's gonna happen with this i just i feel like it's not gonna be as big as the other devcons if it goes ahead maybe it'll end up getting cancelled i'm not sure but we'll have to keep an eye on that one but still cool that they announced this and people were very optimistic about it but yeah as we approach kind of like the the date which is in like what date is it i don't remember i don't think they announced the date at this time um yeah but basically yeah they announced that and people were like bit iffy and aaring about it because it was may right the pandemic was still raging it's still raging now but it was like raging more in may of 2020 so yeah we'll

have to keep an eye on that one so the omg network went live um uh basically uh in uh june of 2020 this year after three years of development so omg used to be called a mise go for those who don't know um they basically brought this network to mainnet claiming to reduce costs by 66 percent uh this was quite a big deal at the time because obviously the project had been around for quite a while and people were like you know where is it you know are they going to ship it and they did they shipped it and they actually ended up partnering with usdt as well which i think i'll go into um to basically put usdt on the omg network uh so yeah that was just another scaling solution that went live within 2020.

so also in june of 2020 i launched the daily way so i launched the daily grain newsletter uh the very first edition went live on june 6th i think it was uh and this started off as just like a personal project for me to educate people um you know you can see the logo there is different as actually i changed the logo a couple days later but that was like the original logo at the time um but basically there was no youtube channel it was just the newsletter there's no discord or anything like that or twitter account i just launched it as a side project at the time and i'm happy to say that since then i've written a daily gray newsletter piece every single weekday i haven't missed one weekday since then so i'm pretty proud of that but yeah for those who want to know i

didn't know the history that's basically when i launched it in june so it's been six months so far um and it's been really great so far and you all of your support has been great so yeah another layer two scaling solution that went live was uh diversifies decentralized exchange using starks or using stark x uh is now on mainnet um basically that's been i guess like an order book exchange kind of like the loop rings exchange is but yeah this went live a bit later um for those who don't know diversify is basically a i think it was a a bit for next project um and then it kind of like spun out and became like a its own kind of thing where it's been doing a lot of layer two scaling solution

a lot of layer two things so yeah they went live in june of 2020 as well and of course another layer to loop ring pay went live uh so basically enabling uh very cheap and instant uh transfers uh uh on the loop ring pay kind of network using the same technology that they used for their uh loopering exchange but basically this was a payments use case uh basically um uh payments uh uh instantaneous payments you know for free um with the same security guarantees as ethereum so that was another big deal there uh which is really really cool to see um you know loopering has been very big within the layer two space in 2020 they've been leading the charge they've been the pioneers here and i think in 2021 they're going to

basically i mean the fruits of their labor is going to come to a become apparent because they've just they're just so far ahead of the game at this point um in terms of building you know dexes and payment kind of um apps on layer 2 that they're going to be a big winner through 2021 i believe so yeah really cool to see that going live within uh 2020 and i'm curious to see what else they do in 2021 i'm very excited all right next up we have the onix test net from prylab so this was another i guess eth2 phase zero test net that came out after the topaz one that i just spoke about before uh it was i guess there's a few months between the two test nets and this one onyx was i guess the second last one that they did

um single client i think as well still which is really really cool um so yeah this was just another test net uh i guess as 2020 was the year of eth2 you know there was a lot of test nets actually um not just uh within prior labs but also the other teams had their own test nets there was like you know test nets that live for a few days some for a few months uh there was a lot of testing that went went into eth2 and for those who obviously i guess um you know we're around we're running these things you knew kind of like what the process was each time it was like restart the network get these new clients running and yeah it says yeah i mean topaz wasn't multi-client ready whereas onix was so i think onix ended up being compatible between sigma prime's

lighthouse and uh prism prismatic labs prism and things like that so yeah that was just another network uh another test network for the phase zero beacon chain in june of 2020. so i alluded to this before uh i spoke about how reddit did their community point system and they announced that they'd be doing that on ethereum and things like that they had the moons tokens and the brics tokens um and then you know uh just a couple months later in in june they basically announced that they're going to be hosting a great reddit scaling bake off and what this is is basically a competition for different scaling teams to come in and show their kind of like scaling solution and how they can scale reddit's community point system i showed

you just before that starkware already kind of you know jumped the gun here and did a demo already a bunch of other teams submitted results here um i think the result where are the results here we go so yeah the the submissions came in there was basically everyone you know every kind of scaling solution and some other networks chimed in and kind of submitted their solutions here uh you had starkware obviously came in first there's matic omg network you know basically all the scaling teams or at least most of them kind of had had a go at this which i thought was really cool um so yeah i mean this is just this was big news right the fact that reddit was not only supporting ethereum through this community point system

but also supporting it through the uh this you know scaling bake off uh unfortunately i haven't heard anything about this lately actually since the you know the submissions rolled in and everything so hopefully they're gonna put out an update soon um because it was a quite a very big deal at the time so uh yeah that that happened in june of 2020 as well next up we have uh zk sink from the mata labs now uh for those of you who have used git coin over the past two rounds and use their uh scaling solution they're using zk sync so you've already used it and it's basically based on you know zero knowledge roll-up technology it lets you do really really fast and instant payment payments uh very cheap um fees as well uh and it works really well for get coin i

mean i'm sure a lot of you uh got uh use that because of the cost savings you know donating to get coin grants during high gas price times uh actually you know depending on how many grants you you donate to can end up costing 50 to 100 or something like that whereas if you use zk sync kind of once you're set up with that it's it's it's much much cheaper i think 80 or 90 percent uh cheaper so uh yeah they released this in june of 2020 as well and then obviously became one of the most used layer 2 solutions given their git coin integration which i thought was really cool so compound protocol announced comp in june of 2020 i think this was pretty much like one of the biggest

pieces of news of the year because of the fact that it kicked off the yield farming craze right they announced comp and then they said that all users when whether they're lending or borrowing are going to accrue comp tokens uh to their account and this kicked off the yield farming craze people would you know doing things in spreadsheets calculating how much they could yield how they could hack it and everything and then we had all the kind of like uh i guess like it took it took a little bit but then we ended up having other uh kind of projects come along which i'll talk about later of course that kind of you know kind of brought us through to i guess like september october when it went really crazy um but yeah so i i would say june 16th 2020 was like the the time that yield farming and

liquidity mining became kind of popularized uh whereas synthetics actually pioneered it i would say that you know they started doing their synthetic staking kind of program where they paid snx tokens out to stake is in april of 2019 i would say that that they were the pioneers here and there are other networks that have done it too um but i would argue that synthetics pioneered this model and actually made it succeed whereas compound kind of popularized that to the point where uh basically everyone knew about it right yield climbing just became this massive meme i remember being on twitter you know everyone was talking about it everyone was was talking about um and making memes about yield farming and everything so that's what kicked it off and we had like a crazy few months after that

that's for sure which i'm i'm sure i'll get to in one of these many updates up here so uh this report came out in june of 2020 as well uh about paypal and venmo are planning to let users buy and sell crypto and as we all know you know towards the end of the year paypal uh you know enabled crypto purchases for us citizens of buying and selling which was a huge deal but the rumors started swirling you know in june of 2020 and people just kind of i guess forgot about it when they announced again that they were going to be supporting it and actually kind of like adding it to their platform um so people got really excited but yeah it was it was reported earlier in the year in june of 2020 axi infinity had a had a great year actually last year besides

this update so they obviously launched their token as well later in the year but what they introduced in june was a scaling solution so uh called ronin now ronin is a bit different to zk roll ups and optimistic roll-ups in that it is a side chain to ethereum so it is not secured by ethereum but i think um what they want to do is they want to basically get it to a point where it can be a layer 2 solution on a theorem not just a side chain but yeah so they introduced this because i think nfts got priced out of the network uh for defy use cases you know it became really expensive to do anything with nfts so we obviously have ronin we have immutable x which i just spoke about before from uh immutable the people making gods unchained um and yeah i just this was just another

scaling solution that kind of came out and this this actually recently went live on a test net or mainnet i think as well so there is there is progress being made here for sure so also in oh this is in july actually of 2020 uh center the uh i guess like one of the parties made one of the one of the main parties behind usdc ended up blacklisting an address holding usdc for the first time this was very big news at the time because there's always this kind of discussion around you know centralized versus decentralized stable coins many people aren't aware that any of these centralized coins whether it be usdc or raft bitcoin or things like that usually have a back door in there that where the admin

or at least the issuer can basically blacklist your address right or basically you know stop you from being able to spend your funds now they obviously don't want to do this unless they're forced to and they were forced to by law enforcement to do this i think it was due to either money laundering or terrorist kind of related activity that they got kind of a law enforcement action from um but yeah this was big news because i don't think many people realized at the time that circle uh sorry center you know circle coinbase kind of had this power to blacklist people's addresses when holding usdc and it's not something that most people need to worry about i think but at the same time it speaks to why we do still need a decentralized stable coin

right you know it dies great it unfortunately suffers from losing its peg more often than not but it's a very very great uh kind of alternative at the same time it's also consisting of 40 usdc at the moment so you know that could be blacklisted for whatever reason and then dye would obviously lose its peg majorly because most of its collateral not most of 40 of its collateral would be blacklisted so there's all this stuff kind of happening in in that kind of world and there's a bunch of other stable coins now trying to you know be the one truly scalable and decentralized stable coin and i think we need to get there because we can't rely on these centralized solutions forever you can't rely on centralized tokenized you know bitcoin or or you know stable coins or

things like that because inevitably those are the choke points where regulators are going to go after it's all well and good that we create this like super cool defy system where the apps are fully decentralized like uni-swap but if we're still just handling the assets that are centralized and they dominate like you know tether still dominates for example in the stable coin space then we're really not you know d5 right like fight works because of the assets and the liquidity one if you if you can choke those by going after the centralized players then it kind of kills the the golden goose essentially so we definitely want to make sure that we kind of get off these centralized solutions and onto the more decentralized ones but yeah i think since then since july since cena kind of did this it's

the community is more aware of it now which is great but at the same time you know i mean usdc growth is still is still going like really high and i'm actually really glad about that but at the same time i would like to see you know less reliance on these centralized stable coins wi-fi so you know we had comp launch in june then we had wi-fi launch in july so if comp started the fire in uh you know the yield farming kind of crazed such fire in june wi-fi threw like a ton of gasoline on it and just caused a massive explosion because we all know what happened right i mean anyone who was around back then knows how explosive this release was uh andrei basically went from basically unknown

in most of the community to being like the person in d5 right the default god um because he released this token it was capped right it was 30 000 tokens ever you could farm it with a bunch of other tokens uh there was no vc allocation there was no team allocation no insiders nothing it was quote unquote fair launch uh and the community just like lashed onto this right uh people bought like a lot of wi-fi you know while it was sitting at around the 1 000 mark and things like that you know people a lot of people ended up you know quitting their jobs because they got they got rich off the off the pump of this and everything um and you know it kind of started uh i mean it kind of like continued the yield farming craze and kind of took it to the next level

basically with with wyon so yeah that launched in july um and that kind of i think you know june i remember when comp launched i messaged one of my friends i'm like like dude like this really feels like super bullish right now like up until that point the market was kind of hot like ethan btc were recovering but it wasn't like you know things were exploding or anything like that i remember messaging my friend when compound launched and said this is crazy uh this is gonna go nuts we're gonna have like another a bull market here because of this um and you know sure enough we did and then when wifi came out i said to my friend like we have to buy this right we have to buy as much as we can of this this is crazy this is insane like um and

it was right and i but one thing i didn't foresee was how quickly it would expire or how quickly we would play it out because we basically went from you know non-existent kind of like yield farming in june to yield farming being absolutely everything by july august to all these tokens kind of going up rapidly in price into september and then we have like the massive come down through october and november still december to an extent right uh and then you know we started seeing ethan btc trend up again um but yeah wi-fi is definitely uh one of the biggest stories of the year i think right next to comp uh simply because of the fact that it launched something new right it launched this kind of like fair launch movement

where people were like forking things and and saying we're fair launch or doing that there's a lot of scams as well right but at the same time i think you know the biggest news of the year is always something that comes out of nowhere and no one kind of foresees and no one saw yule farming coming absolutely no one saw it coming that i know of anyway maybe there were people that i haven't spoken to but everyone that i spoke to and everyone that i am kind of like you know speak to day to day no one saw that coming at all they knew they all knew d5 would grow but they didn't know kind of like that this thing would come out yield farming and basically supercharge d5's growth in 2020.

um so yeah and this wasn't just the token right you know wifi wyong came out with a bunch of products right you could do basically you could do like um uh yield farming with them you know deposit your funds yield farm uh through other things you know the vaults and everything like that which became really popular and there's a bunch of other features here uh and then you know every kind of like every week after this or every few days after this andrei kept shipping right and people were like how is this guy shipping so fast uh you know we all know how that ended in the end it was uh he was shipping fast because he wasn't exactly testing these things right testing prod became a meme and all this sort of stuff but yeah so that was definitely one of the highlights of 2020.

so i spoke about the launchpad before at least the first version that was showcased the official one went live july 27 of 2020 so this was basically the final product and you i mean i'm not going to spend too much time on this you've all seen it you've all played around with it i'm sure uh but this was basically a guide on how it was going to work you know um and getting people ready to basically run for mainnet i think mainnet was expected earlier than december 2020 but there was a few delays due to various things but the fact is that we got this ready uh you know way earlier than we needed to which is really really cool so yeah that came out in july so also in july at the end of july uh arvanomics there was an argonomics update so

avere basically announced that they were going to do a token swap and supercharge their tokens so go from the ethelen token to the new ave token and they would basically add all these new features to it that would make it a lot more valuable a lot more give it a lot more utility um such as being able to stake it uh being able to participate in governance things like that uh there's just like so many features that they added that basically made arvia one of the best default tokens i think um so yeah and as i said like ave has been around as ethan since 2017 they originally did this ico you know a lot of people kind of wrote them off and then they kind of had a renaissance in 2020 where they just you know shot to the number one spot i guess or close to the

top of the d5 leaderboard um so yeah really cool and this went through recently i think last two or three months or something like that um which is great because average just continued to grow which is which is really awesome orga v2 went live uh four months ago so i guess that's august um so all girl v1 was i guess like out for a while there was a lot of people criticizing it because it was um you could only kind of bet on things or or make markets with eth you couldn't use like stable coins so it kind of limited the platform a lot in terms of like what people would want to do you know that you don't want to basically make a prediction market with eth and then you know the eighth price changes so much that

the uh that you end up uh it was better off you're just holding the eighth then kind of betting in these markets with it so that's uh one of the the big features that came with v2 they also did a token swap from rep to rap v2 as well um and there was a bunch of obviously uh token addresses here and everything contract addresses here and everything but yeah that went live in august of 2020. so more paypal kind of news here from from cointelegraph in july so this was kind of like widely reported and then it kind of was reported that there was a paxos partnership going on as well um so that ended up coming true so paxos is the kind of exchange or provider um that or the broker i guess you could

call you could say um that is helping paypal uh to offer these services to their customers so yeah i guess these rooms swelled for a while and people as i said people seem to have forgotten at the time um but yeah we got that out there now so set v2 was introduced in august of 2020 this was a pretty big evolution of um set and set protocol uh it was basically going to be rolled out in phases where it's adding multi-asset support yield farming support you know gas cost savings uh all these things like this set portfolios like what you see with the d5 pulse index and things like that and a bunch of other things some of this stuff's still not out yet i like flexible trade execution and enhanced protocol integrations but they're being

worked on right now i mean obviously i work at set so i'm across all this sort of stuff um but yeah that was announced in august and uh that's been the biggest upgrade for set protocol uh ever basically the the work that the team has put in has been really really great uh to get to this stage um and it's been great to see it evolve over over the last few months so dark forest was announced on october october august 2nd 2020 so you've probably seen dark forest lately the uh i guess zero knowledge space warfare game as i like to call it uh where you get can basically uh create like an army of planets capture power planets capture other people's planets you know destroy planets all these sort of things um and it was officially announced in august of last year

since then they've kind of been making constant improvements to it and um doing different beta editions where they were letting people in you know with keys with beta keys and things like that um so it's become very popular lately i think i i had a few of you dm me the other day when i said that i had some keys and they went very quickly i haven't been able to get any more keys unfortunately um but yeah this this is really cool because i think that i mean this is running on the xdire network and using zero knowledge proofs uh for as part of the game mechanics but i think this is really cool because we need more of these kind of like uh i guess really i wouldn't call them like technical games or anything but like just take crypto gaming to the next

level like we've had games like god's unchained axiom infinity and stuff that are that are great but i think they're very similar to what we already have where obviously god's on chain is like hearthstone axe infinity is kind of like pokemon or something like that right whereas at dark forest was like a real-time strategy game and it actually was like um you know very unique and got people really hooked there's a few people on my timeline on twitter that i see tweeting about all the time and they're they're very hooked on this right now so yeah this first came out in august i think hopefully this year they do like a full release i think uh that'll be really cool um it's still a little bit clunky i think uh using xdi maybe they'll they'll use a different network or a different layer two solution to scale it some more

but that's how they've been able to do it on ethereum basically doing it on the xdy sidechain there's no way you can do this on the ethereum maintenance it would be too expensive all right so as i said comp in june right wi-fi in july you know comp starts the fire wi-fi chucks a ton of gasoline on it i think yam was like the uh i mean yam did put you know put gas on it put explosives on it basically made yield farming enter i guess not just the ethereum consciousness but like the wider crypto space consciousness um for a few days yam was literally all that anyone talked about literally um it was basically this protocol that was going to

kind of rebase uh the yam token was going to rebase uh and and part of that rebate would go to a treasury and the treasury so the yam token holders would vote on what that treasury did or where that those funds went or how it was managed and the way you could earn these yam tokens where you could use like all the defy tokens like snx and i think link and things like that um yeah yeah mkr wi-fi you know can't blend uh land which is now are there and you know the apys at the time were very high i think the protocol ended up reaching a billion in total value locked or something people were you know printing a lot of money off this sort of stuff but this is what really kind of i think wifi you know kicked it off and this

continued the the party um you know after after like you know and it's funny that it happened basically a month after each other you know comp wi-fi yam and then from there after yam we had all the food ponzis right and all the forks that were just like literally copycats and copycats upon copycats upon copycats and that's why we had the crash so fast i mentioned before how i was surprised at how fast this crashed and now you know when you really think about it the fact that there was just so many clones so quickly um you know in hindsight it was obvious that it was going to come crashing down and some people called the top to their credit uh but a lot of people didn't a lot of people got wrecked by you know wi-fi ended up going from you know it started at zero dollars but

but it hung around most of its life at like a thousand two thousand dollars but it went from that to like forty five thousand and then it dropped to like seven thousand in like two months and after the main yard now it's back up to i think twenty two thousand or something like that uh and yam i mean yams market cap went crazy and then it came back down and it's like a 10 million dollar market cap right now or something so uh yeah it was a i mean it was a crazy time anyone who experienced this i mean during these months as well like i was in a stage four lockdown in melbourne due to coronavirus which means i couldn't leave my house for anything but essential services so i literally just threw myself into this and it was crazy i mean i kind of like neglected my health a bit

neglected my sleep a bit and i think a lot of people did but out of this came uh you know a lot of people that made a lot of money and they started giving back git coins started seeing a lot of um you know much more money thrown at it for the matching rounds for the grants and things like that so as much as i think that these things went very crazy i think they were a net positive for the ecosystem because now we have d5 that grew so much and defy's growth didn't go away um you know it grew in part by a major part to the fact that yield farming came along and you'd find me still around you know the apy is a way less lucrative but your farming's still there and we're still you know finding new ways to kind of harness it to do

you know fair launches to distribute tokens and things like that so yeah i definitely think that comp wi-fi and yam are to credit for basically causing the explosive d5 mania that we had and basically growing defy to where it is you know kind of today oh yeah and then i guess like i've got this up here because i wanted to talk about the fact that i mean yam launched but then there's a lot more to it right yam launched and then there was a bug found where the re in the rebasing mechanism so it needed saving uh then it turns out that yam couldn't be saved because uh the code couldn't be changed or whatever because the governance didn't work then there was like a post-rescue attempt then there was a migration

plan announced where you would go to v2 and then v3 um and then yam set up a git coin grant and raised over 100 000 die for audits and things like that and that all happened in about three days so that was quite crazy uh and for those of you who are wondering where i'm getting all these updates from i actually curate a a newsletter for ether each week called the ether weekly and you can find that at ethub.substance.com and that basically has all these updates that's where i've got this all from i went through every newsletter like 52 newsletters from last year picked out all the best bits and that's what i'm showcasing to you right now but that goes out every week every every monday so rvv2 was announced in august of 2020.

you know i've had as i said i've said it too many times right now i've had a spectacular year in in 2020 you know they had their v1 go live the tokenomics update now v2 they announced in august where they were adding like a bunch of different features here so um i'll go through them soon because they went live and i'll talk about more about the features there but they added a bunch of new features here and they you know they went i think there was only three or four months where they announced and then they launched um which is really really cool but i'll talk about that a little bit later so another thing that happened during d5 mania uh shortly after yam i think was uh curves token launch so and curves token launch was very funny because what ended up happening was

the tokens were avail sorry the tokens the contracts the smart contracts for their kind of token and their governance system were available on github which means anyone could launch it and or deploy it to the ethereum mainnet and what ended up ended up happening was some anonymous person called xerox c4ad uh on on twitter they um basically launched it for curve and it was out there um and you know their last tweet what a ride uh so they basically put it out there um and then it was available right uh and curves market cap uh fully diluted market cap ended up being like i don't know 200 billion or something briefly and then it a curve went like 50 dollars and then it came crashing down because um that was only because there was a

little bit of supply so it's under a dollar now you know um but that was like huge uh i think at the time there was a bunch of token kind of releases people were really anticipating and curves was one of them and i think curve delivered they launched at the exact right time as well august 14th i mean that was like the heat of the d5 market uh that was coming off yeah i remember you know we had yam and then uh people were like after the yam fiasco finished in like three days like okay can we take a break now and then a few hours later curve happened and then people are like oh my god like stop um which was which was quite funny at the time so yeah that went live went crazy you could farm it you know same shebang that happened all the

exchanges kind of listed it very really really quickly you can see here that evan was looking at the fully diluted valuation at the time and stuff like that and then people speculating that the curve finance launches a legal maneuver so that if they can say that a community member launch it they can claim that they were sufficiently decentralized from inception all this sort of stuff maybe they can i haven't seen anything more about that since then but yeah that was another major launch in august of 2020. oh i'm going gonna have to refresh this here i think this is the tether integration with omg network uh captures uh i'm not gonna bother with this uh basically um what this was is basically omg network

uh adopted tether usdt on there to do more scaling and things like that um on the omg network uh and i don't think there's been much adoption of that lately but it was pretty big news because ust t or tether went on there and was able to be sent across the network and it was i think the first major asset that was on there basically um but yeah i'm going to keep an eye on that i think that's going to grow more this year i just need more integrations to to uh you know continue another big news out of avere uh again i know i've been talking about others so much uh and it's just because there's just so much stuff that happened with them but they basically were granted an electronic money institution license by the uk financial conduct authority which is

a very big deal it means that their business entity so not the protocol the business entity are they limited was issued this license which means that they could do a bunch of different things within the traditional finance system kind of using ave and the team could basically allow uh dave ecosystem to access payment accounts and onboard kind of new users into d5 um so this was this was huge right this is just more i guess the traditional finance system bleeding into d5 and for those i mean i use these terms a lot and for those who don't know the difference when i'm saying kind of like traditional finance i'm talking about like the traditional traditional system like the existing banks the existing financial

solutions that deal with fiat mainly right when i say centralized um exchanges and solutions i'm more referencing the crypto centralized things like coinbase um you know bitstamp bitfinex all those kind of solutions and then when i say d5 obviously i'm referencing um all the apps on ethereum so that's kind of like the spectrum there so you know ava's already got integrations with centralized exchanges so this is just like bridging it out again into the into the traditional finance system which is where we need to tap into if we want to keep growing these things so it was really great to see other uh get granted this license all right next up we had another big piece of news during the d5 craze which was sushi swap now

this was this was is quite big right quite a big tale to be told here so this launched in september of 2020 as i said each month here i just had like a one major announcement that was just absolutely insane uh but basically sushi swap was they claimed to be an evolution of uni uni swap with sushi tokenomics aka they claimed to be a fair launch version of uh uni swap where there was like no vcs and the community could get the tokens and things like that so uh that was i mean uh for those of you around um none of what i'm gonna say is gonna be new to you but i'll just give the tl dr for those who weren't so what ended up happening was that sushi swap launched they allowed you to farm sushi swap

tokens with uni swap liquidity provider tokens and then after a period of time they were going to use those liquidity provider tokens to migrate the liquidity to sushi swap which is a fork of uni swap that ended up happening there was a few hundred million dollars worth of liquidity taken i think it was 800 million taken from uni swap into sushi swap um through the migration and during all this time there was a lot of drama right between unison versus sushi swap chef nomi the original creator ended up like kind of exit scamming by selling the dev sushi amounts but then he paid it back uh and then he kind of disappeared and the community kind of took over and it's been growing ever since um and things like that but this was you know this lasted about a week

and a lot of these things happened really fast but yeah lasted about a week uh ended up you know i guess vampire attacking unisox liquidity uh and then as you all know after that like shortly after that union swap launched their token which i'll go into in a bit um but this was this was huge at the time and and i think this marked kind of like i'm i know i think the uni launch marked like the end of the the mania there but sushi swap was like the last good yield farm i would say in terms of like the amount of yields you could get from providing liquidity uh it wasn't like an outright like copycat they were actually building things i mean i know it was like a straight-up fork of unisop initially but they ended up building things and now they're like

flourishing they've got a whole unique ecosystem within the sushi swap project but um yeah so that was that was quite big at the time and it divided the community it was a lot of drama surrounding this right you had like i don't know like it was just insane at the time and i think that uh since then uniform and sushi swap are co-existing and they're doing their own thing which i think is very healthy in the end sushi swap there as well so uh yeah so this was actually launched before sushi swap from uni swap protocol in august i think the order got messed up a little bit there but basically what this was is that um unitop released token lists which when you go to uni swap now you can pick a

token list to choose from to choose tokens from and this was done because there are a lot of scams around where you would input like a token uh name or like a token address and uh it would say that it's called this right like it's say you you wanted to trade like link and it would say okay you know this is a link but it wasn't really link it was uh it was a scam token and people getting scammed a lot so unisop ended up coming out with this token list feature which um you know i guess seems to alleviate the problem a little bit but also made it worse i guess in the fact that when you want to add custom tokens it keeps resetting it every time but that was a pretty i guess like big addition at the time because this was in

the heart of like the ponzi's right and the food ponzis and the d5 yield funding mania so obviously there were a lot of new tokens and they were all using uniswap for their liquidity uh so yeah it was great to see uni swap release this metamask mobile came out in september 2020 as well on android and ios obviously everyone has probably used metamask at this point on desktop their mobile client i don't know if it's as popular as their desktop client but it syncs with it i mean i'm not a mobile wallet user so i don't actually have much of a view here but i have used it before and it works well um but yeah so that released in september of 2020 and to complement their desktop offering barn bridge was another kind of hyped up

i guess like product yield farm that launched in september where you could uh import like your stablecoin liquidity and farm bond tokens i think the hype for this only lasted a week or so because of the fact that the price dropped so fast after the first rewards were paid out you know yields farming was kind of like old news at this point people were basically like um over it i guess you could say uh because there was diminishing returns to it um but bomb bridge what it is it's basically a tokenized wrist protocol and they're actually i don't think their actual product is out yet they're just doing their yield farming in order to distribute their token uh but their products coming out soon uh some of you may have seen saffron finance as well which is another product like this um but this was kind of like a big kind

of news at the time when they when they launched this and they launched a liquidity mining program and people were pretty excited about that so the d5 pulse index was launched on token sets back in september as well for those of you who don't know the d5 pulse index is a index that consists of uh the most popular default tokens such as wi-fi snx rv all those sorts of things uh that was launched september it's got like a 25 million dollar market cap right now um it's it's you know it's growing pretty well um we we we really believe like i've said that indexes are going to be a big product going forward people just want diversified and passive exposure to a lot of these things so i think that um that's going to be a

big big kind of narrative going forward uh but yeah this was launched in partnership with d5 pulse with set uh d5 pulse basically did the methodology for it they created the whole thing like how it would be weighted and stuff like that what tokens would be included and there was actually uh you can see here the original allocation here there was uh wi-fi was first now wi-fi isn't first anymore i think snx or rvs first right now but you can see that the circulating market caps at the time and the token price this was back when you know at the height i think this launched just as like the d5 market was about to cool off and crash and since then rep has been removed from the uh the basket as well uh in there but yeah that's been growing quite steadily which is which has been

really cool to see as i said before zk sync went live and they were integrated in with git coin during round eight uh and around seven uh and i mean i explained before how all of you have experienced this and experienced the benefits of zk sync so i'm not gonna go into it again but really cool to see that git coin pioneered a layer two solution here all right this i think marked the beginning of the end of yield farming slash d phi mania was the introduction of uni i i mean i know i've said that i thought other things were the biggest things that happened in the year but it's kind of it's kind of hard to say i think in terms of like broad i mean i guess you could say in terms of like broad

uh exposure awareness how much you know noise was created about this how much you know of the community outside of ethereum heard about this i think uni was the thing so the uni token was the thing of 2020 that got everyone talking about kind of like i guess like everything ethereum everything uni swap everything defy simply because they did the best air drop that anyone has ever done they gave 400 uni tokens to everyone who had uh interacted with uni swap at least once even if they had failed a transaction on uni swap they got 400 unit tokens now obviously a lot of people use multiple addresses so they got like multiple 400 allotments of um

of uni tokens which uh meant that i think over 100 thousand addresses ended up claiming uni or something like that it was crazy and then on top of that they also paid out uni tokens to liquidity providers and the earlier that you provided liquidity the more tokens that you got now uh some of the top liquidity providers from like the start got like millions of dollars worth of uni which is insane right imagine getting that right imagine sitting there and being like oh i was an early liquidity provider going on the uni swap website and seeing that you can claim millions of dollars worth of uni just for being an early user of the product that was insane uh and that was like a a really great story at the time and still is i think it it it really shows that you know there's been other

air drops like this but it shows what you can do for for users for your early users of your protocol and what i actually thought was hilarious was that they took the snapshot for the uni airdrop i think only a couple days after um sushi swap uh kind of launched so that everyone who was providing liquidity on uni swap to use to farm sushi actually didn't get any tokens for that i've got like a very minimal amount of tokens for that which i thought was sneaky but good and actually on that note i actually think that the uni token wasn't going to launch in september i think it was going to launch later but sushi swap kind of forced their hand here um you know and uni also came with a liquidity mining program that lasted for i think a couple of months or something

like that where you could farm a bunch of different pools here you can see eth usdt ether like each stable coin basically in eth wbtc and that basically shot up uni swaps liquidity um and it was kind of funny because then after the the liquidity mining ended sushi swap did another vampire attack where they redid their liquidity mining and took liquidity from uniform once uni farming ended as well so there's been a bit of that going on back and forth but yeah i think the uni token launch was the thing that defined uh d5 in 2020 for sure i know i said that about the other things but that i think about it in terms of the reach that it had it has to be uni has to be the uni launch so optimism put out another update in

the september of 2020 basically saying the light at the end of the tunnel now i use this uh as well i use this term earlier on in the in the video where i said that all the layer 2 team saw the light at the end of the the tunnel here in terms of like we're going to get this to main net uh you know we're going to get this to test that the main it really quickly uh and we see like how we're going to scale ethereum and that's what this post is all about you can see the trdi here you know this was their test net rollout plans their early adopters and their path towards mainnet so basically what they did was they did uh synthetics integration with their staking interface where you could basically use um optimism to stake for the for people

i mean because the gas space was so expensive smaller stakers were kind of priced out and this was for them basically um and you can see that here under pseudomainnet and then open to public i think these things are going live the studio main and open to public like very soon next couple weeks and yeah i mean they also put uni here as well and chain link so they've only announced their synthetic integration so far and they've just been teasing their uni-swap integration chain link as well they're teasing so i'm curious to see how that goes here but yeah really great price from them this gave people a lot of optimism pun intended about layer 2 i think because uh people i think are still sleeping on this i said it on twitter the other day people are going to be blown away by

what we deliver this year and how much adoption 20 layer 2 gives in 2021. the first state of eip1559 update went live um i think what was it two months so september october in 2020 eip1559 had a big year towards the end of the year uh for those who don't know there was a bitcoin grant that for aip1559 that ended up raising over 150 000 tim biker uh one of the eighth one um core developers or core kind of coordinators joined the effort and he's kind of leading the charge here and he puts out these updates i think there's been like six updates at this point which is which is amazing right for those who've been around for quite a while

um there wasn't much updates around this there wasn't anyone leading the charge here we know that we knew that we wanted it and we know that we still want it but we needed someone to step up and tim bico did this which was really cool to see so yeah one five five nine had a really great year in 2020 as well so uh tbc tbtc went live again in september of 2020. so i mentioned how it went live i think in june or something like that uh before uh but yeah it ended up going live again in september of 2020 where they fixed it uh it was like fully audited and everything and it's been running ever since um it hasn't i think sadly it actually lost its first mover advantage to to i mean it didn't have a first mirror advantage but like there were no

tokenized bitcoin kind of um implementations that were huge but then you know tbtc you know kind of failed to launch um the first time which gave the uh the opportunity to like wrapped bitcoin to become the kind of bitcoin that was used within d5 during d5 summer and then tbtc launched at the end of d5 summer and has not seen the adoption that i'm sure they would have hoped for but it's still live they're still growing there's still a lot you can do with it you can still use it and everything like that so yeah it's good to see that they went live again and didn't have another another kind of bug there october of 2020 vitalik posts this uh ethereum i guess magician's post called a roll up centric ethereum roadmap now this kind of changed the game with eth1 and eth2 and how we're

going to be scaling uh when we go to eth2 so what he means by this is it basically he means that we should be using zk rollups and optimistic rollups to scale ethereum we shouldn't have to worry about shards doing like cross-shard transactions and and sharding breaking kind of composability and the money legos we have within ethereum we should just use roll-up technology layer 2 technology to uh to to scale ethereum and i spoke about this earlier about how we're going to use the shards as data availability layers and that's what vitalik kind of outlines here and he also says that we can basically get to the point where we're basically phase one and done which means that we ship phase one of the f2 road map and then we can start using it you know

uh uh you know to do things to do all the things we want to do and then obviously the merger will go through the eighth one to e2 merger and then phase two might come along you know later on but it's not a critical road map item anymore so this kind of like was like a very big paradigm shift in how we're going to be doing things with eth2 people seem on board um you know i'm definitely on board with this you know i didn't expect to see as much layer 2 kind of stuff that we saw in 2020 but it's good that we did because i think that this is the right path forward so another big piece of news in october that was i guess not ethereum related but crypto related was that the cftc and the department of justice filed charges against the

owners of the of bit mix so bit mix is a giant or was a giant derivatives exchange it had been around for quite a while um and it had a pretty eccentric ceo in an arthur hayes you've probably heard of him before probably follow him on twitter um so they charged him with uh along with his co-founders bendela and samuel reed now i think ben and samuel have been arrested but arthur's still on the run but basically what they charged them with is that they were i guess servicing uh kind of u.s customers without doing proper kyc uh procedures and things like that i think there might have been some like uh anti-money laundering yeah and bank secrecy act so they were failing to report these things uh to the

relevant authorities and stuff because they were servicing us customers this is a pretty big deal um and the fact that arthur hayes still hasn't been arrested is quite insane um this is these are some serious charges so the fact that he's running away from them and still on the run as far as i know is is quite insane to me but yeah that was a huge piece of news in october and i remember seeing at the time bitcoin was sitting at around ten thousand dollars i can't remember what eth was i remember eighth was around sorry bitcoin was around ten thousand because that's like the meme number right and i was watching the chart i'm like okay is btc gonna dump now because bmx is was a huge player like very very big player and it really didn't it had like a little bit of a dump but it didn't

really do much and that's when i kind of thought to myself like okay the bull market's on you know the the the bull market's definitely on like this is a confirmation for me because if a major exchange kind of it didn't go down but if like the drama happens and you know they are basically people were scared that they couldn't withdraw their coins out or whatever uh if that happens i expected a kind of bigger dump but that's just not what we saw uh so yeah that's just like a bit of an aside there what i and what i remember feeling at the time uh john mcafee in october was also sued by the sec for his ico promotions and he was arrested on u.s tax evasion charges what's funny is it took so long for this to happen for anyone who was around in

2017 and 2018 mcafee was a prolific ico schiller or seo promoter he promoted basically everything he got paid a lot of money to do this as well ended up coming out that he made more than 23.1 million dollars to uh to basically shill or promote these icos um and he was paid in both tokens and uh and ether and btc it just i mean everyone knew this was going on because he'd just chill like it was like mcafee's coin of the day or coin of the week at one point and they would actually pump and this was the super shady and it took like what three years for the regulators to catch up here which is quite insane it's also quite scary for projects who think they've gotten away with things because um i don't know what the statute

of limitations is on a lot of this stuff i doubt it's very short i think it's it's quite long and sometimes it's unlimited but yeah so that happened in october it was quite i mean it i say funny because like i thought it was gonna happen like much earlier and the fact that it finally happened was you know quite quite a funny thing to see finally so metamask launched their swaps feature in october of 2020 as well so for those who don't know you can click into your metamask extension and you can see a swap feature there this is basically a uh decentralized exchange aggregator and a way for metamask to make money now i actually traced what wallet metamask kind of takes the fees into and they've made millions of dollars from

this so far which because they charge like a 0.8 fee i think on these swaps so they've actually become a revenue generating business now which is awesome you know metamask has been you know free for forever and it's been funded out of consensus but now they're actually generating revenue and have a proper business model and this has led people to think about you know are they going to launch a metamask token or a mask token and is it actually needed i mean i said the other day on twitter that i think there's a near certainty that they that they launch from within the next 12 months maybe i'm wrong there i just say that because i think that at this point the fact that they're generating revenue the fact that they want to descent that i think they want to decentralize out um you know development make it more

of a community owned thing a token makes sense there so we'll see how that plays out but yeah this was this was a pretty big feature when it was released in october of 2020. another layer two kind of implementation here from mata labs so curve curve teamed up with mata labs to use zk sync uh so you can do a basically you know swap stable coins on curve on the on the l2 test net with zk sync and you can do this right now like it's a live demo uh that you can go check out uh it's at uh zksync dot curve dot phi dot f5 sorry um and you can go play around with that i've played around with it before it's super fast like it feels just amazing you know it's not clunky like i guess

the ethereum uh one main net kind of is when you're doing a lot of things uh it's very cheap it's very quickly it's very quick sorry it's it's just great so just another layer to implementation that went live in 2020 again aztec uh i said you know i spoke about as tech earlier in the in the video basically they rolled out their own layer 2 implementation on zk roll ups uh where they where it's uh they're calling it privacy on layer 2 here a bunch of different features you can see here like 2 200 times gas reduction compared to aztec 1.0 oh yeah they dubbed this aztec 2.0 which is their layer 2 network um and you can basically see a block explorer here

you can go to the demo and everything so if i click through to the block explorer i can see it here you know what's going on here i think that uh yeah it's still on kind of like the gorilla test net um and i don't think there's much happening yet uh or maybe they've changed test net since this was released but basically uh that was just yet again another layer to implementation that went live i feel like i'm going to click through all these tabs now and they're just going to be layer 2 implementations at this point but as i said like so much later going live now it's just time to adopt it and i think that's what we're going to see in 2021 uh something not laid too related so the index cop went live in uh in october of 2020 as well so this was launched by

set and default pulse uh basically summoned by them it's basically supposed to be a decentralized organization to manage index products so the index co-op actually manages the default pulse index now so under under their management allows them to basically do trustless rebalances you know figure out basically whether to remove a token or not and things like that um or like give opinions on that and the index cop is also responsible for onboarding more indexed products to under its umbrella so not just the default pulse index but anything new that can be onboarded uh you know we'll be on board to the index cop there so i thought that was really really cool announcement uh from that and again like i work for set who summoned this so

a bit of a disclosure there for you for all of you uh news again i think this is like what the sixth time i've mentioned are there but i i just i just have to because it's just they've done so many good things here in october they raised 25 million dollars from uh from a bunch of new investors uh i think i guess they sold other tokens to them uh they they uh raised it from blockchain capital standard crypto and blockchain.com ventures among others here uh which was just you know at the time i was like okay 25 million dollars is a huge raise but it's ave like they're growing so quickly you know i'm sure these investors were clamoring at the door like i want tokens right i want to invest so just another thing out of affair there

so i was i was alluding to it before so synthetic launched their second ovm l2 test net with uh with uh optimism i guess uh so uh you could basically stake your snx uh and then you could uh i guess as i said this was for the snx stakers who were priced out of the ethereum one main net so you can stake it on their layer 2 implementation and it's like fast and free and everything like that it's not i don't think it's like a main thing i think it's still test net um but yeah this was basically a i think what was it uh a testnet snx distribution going on here in october uh and since then i mean i've been a part of it on one of my addresses it's been

quite cool it's quite cool to use it feels very smooth um i think it's very centralized at the moment though but you know as i said still test net phases and things like that another update out of optimism here so they basically uh teamed up with coinbase wallet so coinbase wallet now supports optimism as i said coinbase has been super active in the d5 space in 2020 they have contributed so many things they're adopting all the bleeding edge tech i thought this was just like a huge a bit of news here um you know obviously adoption is going to be slow on a lot of these things i think but the fact that you can still use optimistic ethereum through coinbase wallet was was huge and i'm hoping to see coinbase be even more active in 2021 finally the paypal uh adopting crypto

news was made official in october of 2020 where they announced that they will allow users to buy hold and sell crypto on their platform using paxos in the back end this was i think the biggest one of the biggest kind of crypto news like outside of ethereum just crypto related news for the for the year um this is going to be bringing in and has already been bringing in a lot of new people into the ecosystem unfortunately they only support a handful of tokens right now like btc eth bitcoin cash litecoin like it's just weird i i can't wait for them to support actual kind of like tokens that do something that are cash producing like defy tokens and things like that i think that's when it's gonna really change the game but yeah this finally got announced in october of 2020.

uh tokensoft announced also in october that they were partnering with anchorage to bring uh wrapped layer assets to ethereum so basically going beyond wrapped bitcoin and launching things like the wrapped zcash uh as their first product tr um i think they've been there's been talk of wrapped filecoin basically any asset that is not on ethereum you know natively because it's part of another blockchain wrapping that asset and putting it on ethereum i i mean i i think this is this is cool i think this basically reinforces uh ethereum's kind of uses this economic nexus that sits the middle of all these other things but at the same time i don't know how much demand there is for anything outside of wrapped bitcoin right you know wrapped z cash i mean i don't know you know z cash is

obviously probably you know probably got like a a varied holder base but i don't know how many people are going to be clamoring to get their z cash onto ethereum in order to do like use it as collateral and define things like that i think you know even if you think about the privacy features that it might bring you can wrap any token with aztecs technology on ethereum and and make it a private privacy coin essentially um to an extent so yeah i i thought this was was big news because it just reinforces ethereum as like the asset settlement network but i don't know how much demand there's going to be for anything except bitcoin i'll probably be proven wrong maybe i'm not thinking about like all the demand that there is but maybe there are people who still actually want to hold these things long

term um we'll see i guess we'll see what happens there so november 4th 2020 was the eth2 announcement date so the eighth two date was announced uh on november 4th when it was going live phase zero was going live on december 1st 2020 the uh deposit contract was deployed everyone had a few weeks to get their eighth in by november 24th so that uh everyone um basically could become part of like the genesis set so we wanted we needed to get to the minimum of 524 000 uh 8th deposited and then we could kick off genesis on december 1st which ended up happening which i'll talk about a bit uh in a bit uh later in the video um so yeah that was huge news obviously

everyone was like you know when's 8th 2 when's 8th 2 wednesday 2 and then finally we had this update from danny ryan on november 4th which is you know less than a month um later we had 8th 2 live which i'll talk about in a sec another v2 implementation so rb swap from off chain labs was a fork of uni swap v2 onto an arbitrary roll-up this is another kind of optimistic roll-up implementation uh off chain labs is building this they basically you know you could use it uh basically if you click trswap.arbitrom.io it was really fast and just another layer to implementation going on here within uh ethereum in november uh we had unfortunately the

uh i guess consensus bug with geth and infuria so what ended up happening was there was an update to geth the geth ethereum client that fixed a critical bug a critical consensus bug that was not exploited or anything until november 11 2020 when funny enough the optimism team actually ended up exploiting this uh not on purp i mean i guess on purpose but they weren't doing it as like a malicious thing uh but what ended up happening was that infuria ended up going out of sync with the ethereum mainnet because they were running an old uh go ethereum or geth version of ethereum from december 2019 uh which means that uh

they fell out of sync with the ethereum main net because of this now uh i mean this is a post that i wrote at the time called infuriating um explaining basically exactly what happened from a technical standpoint but this was not a great moment in ethereum unfortunately um it didn't mean that ethereum was centralized or or that it was dead or anything like that but it did mean that we needed better disclosures from our core developers about these sorts of things they did a good thing by fixing this consensus bug but what they ended up doing was that they didn't tell anyone about it they didn't even tell him furor about it which they should have and i think there was lessons learned there for sure they put out a postmortem here as well about it too and there was a lot of discussion that

kind of followed from here which is quite cool to see i think yeah as i said i think they learned from that experience uh november 2020 so october is when paypal announced that they were doing the crypto services in november they basically opened it up to us users so yeah u.s users can now basically buy sell and trade crypto on paypal's platform again at the end of november uh as i mentioned earlier in the video die is price on compound uh fluctuated i think it went uh higher than a dollar like a dollar 10.20 which led to liquidations that shouldn't have happened it was 88 million dollars worth of liquidations on compound that shouldn't have happened but did happen because the the die

the die price was misreported because they weren't using uh multiple oracle providers they were just using i think coinbase and uniswap and obviously coinbase um was was the market the die market on coinbase spiked up to a dollar 30 which means that um people were able to liquidate on compound so that was uh i think you know that brought up the topic of like oracles and oracles being a choke point and a centralization point uh on um on d5 right i mean obviously chain link is a big oracle provider but rolling your own oracle seems to to kind of lead to these kind of bugs or these exploits that happened i i mean it's not even an exploit i guess it's like an economic kind of bug here i guess you call it like no you know

what i'm going to call it unexpected economic behavior because it wasn't a bug you know the system worked as as it intended it wasn't an exploit it was just economic behavior that is not expected right no one expects dye to spike to 1.30 and you know affect the rest of the defy market through an oracle kind of ex oracle um kind of um i guess mismatch there uh so yeah that was kind of like a lot of people talking uh and uh and you know compound was actually took a little bit of a hit for that but they seem to have bounced back and they're doing fine right now so it doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage there yearn uh so wyon started doing a lot of these mergers which i spoke about in some of the daily great refuels uh they started merging with a bunch of

different d5 protocols uh like cream uh sushi swap cover um pickle i think there's a bunch of them uh and you know they were calling the mergers and stuff like that but they weren't really mergers because their the protocols still retain their tokens they are more like partnerships um and i think that you know i think that they did this so they could bring a bring kind of like uh i guess like un sorry bring like uh people into the ecosystem of of wire and bring like developers into the ecosystem and kind of like synergize between all these projects so yeah that was kind of like people were like you know what's going on this is weird um but you know it it seems to have worked like the whole ecosystem seems to be growing

uh you know sushi swap's doing very well right now i think wyoming's getting ready to launch more v2 products so yeah it seems to have uh have been a been a great decision there so we hit uh the minimum that we needed on december uh sorry november 24th to launch eth2 preston van loom put out a tweet on november 25th saying eth2's birthday will be the first of december at 12 p.m utc which is when it was scheduled to be because we reached that minimum i remember this time if you were on twitter this was like uh this was history that was made on on on november 24th when we hit that target everyone was watching it it was a few hours before we saw the eighth rolling in uh you know into the deposit contract and people were like are we going to

make it and we did we overshot it right and it was just such an amazing celebration the community came together in such an amazing way that that for me was the highlight of the entire year like my personal highlight was that um you know 8th 2's launch was cool and everything but this was the highlight the fact that we actually came together as a community to get this stuff done uh that was that was just awesome at the time so for all those who experienced that you know what i mean uh for those who didn't you know that's what it kind of felt like i felt like you know years worth of work and research and development culminating in this thing that uh basically um you know was going live and and and everyone was celebrating and we we just did it we as a community we did it

which was really cool to see and then genesis happened on december 1st 2020 i wrote about it in the daily gray here the launch of eth2 phase zero went off without a hitch it was so perfect that even like every researcher and developer were like wow that was too perfect right um it just it i mean it has been going perfect ever since there's been no bugs or anything like that i mean um i didn't mention it but the madasha test net that was the longest running e2 test net that went live for a few months in 2020 ended up having like some critical issues but the network rebounded from that there are a lot of lessons learned and that culminated in such an amazing ef2 launch so yeah eth2 um has been chugging along it's still going fine right now there's

been no critical issues with it uh and hopefully we launch phase one this year and we we can kind of like get the merger done as well maybe next year in 2022 and then we can finally get rid of proof of work which people have been kind of like waiting for for a very long time get coin grants round eight started in december as well it was the biggest round i think up to a million dollars was uh was uh kind of like given in matching funds uh and then there was people uh kind of like donating as well across the round it was the biggest by far and this was basically the result of all the money that was made within defy i think um all the money that people made from d5 tokens from yield farming and everything like that people kind of um uh i guess

donated to the the teams that they wanted to gave back you know the matching as well like it was just awesome to see um sorry you know i can't wait to see what round nine's like now that you know the prices are still going up and you know i'm sure people are making money still so really interesting interested to see what happens in uh round nine rv v2 went live in december i swear i think this is the last other update for for this video uh but yeah rv v2 went live in december of 2020 they brought with them a bunch of features which i said i'd talk about like uh flash loans were upgraded uh yield and collateral swap which allowed you to basically swap out your collateral through using flash loans i think um flash liquidations uh

liquidating using flash loans uh batch flash loans uh debt tokenization so you can you know uh get your debt positions and tokenize them and you i guess like potentially use them in other d5 protocols native credit delegation basically allowing for under collateralized loans a bunch of gas optimizations because rv v1 was actually quite intensive on gas costs so that was really cool to see and stable and variable rate borrowing as well and a bunch of audits as well we're done there were five audits done so i'm taking security very seriously here uh but yeah ave yeah as i mean i said it before had the biggest year in 2020 i think in terms of like the amount of stuff that happened for them so really great to see that visa partnered with circle the issuers of

usdc in december of 2020 they're going to be doing a bunch of stuff around there they want to add usdc payments to visa credit cards as well which i thought was really cool um and this is huge news right visa is huge everyone's always kind of reference crypto transactions per second to visa and things like that and the fact that we're getting usdc which lives on ethereum in into visa and basically um partner you know partnering with them and bringing them into the ecosystem is just another stepping stone on our way to bring traditional finance in to ethereum cme group announced ethereum ether futures on december 16th 2020 a really great early christmas present here as i mentioned earlier rsx did they eat the futures earlier in the year i think in june

cme group is much bigger than them you know cme group for well cme the exchange uh the chicago mercantile exchange does a lot of volume for bitcoin futures which they launched in the end of 2017 so now they're launching these in february of 201 um their second crypto futures product which is which is ether here so people are obviously very excited about this and as you can see here this is the aggregate open interest of bitcoin futures and cme is in red one of the biggest providers here i think the biggest single provider of um of bitcoin uh futures trading here so the institutions are coming for ether also in december we had nexus mutual's founder hugh carp's wallet uh address

getting hacked from a man in a middle attack and eight million dollars was drained from him uh this was very unfortunate uh nexus mutual was actually going through uh some pretty tough times before this as well with the token price coming down pretty rapidly um and you know the project kind of like suffering from that and then this kind of happened i went over this in a daily grade refill i won't go into it now i'm sure many of you have read about this but yeah this also happened in december which was unfortunately uh not uh not very good for for hugh here coinbase also announced in december that they have filed for ipo so they're going to be ipo in 2021 i think this is going to be the first big crypto ipo this is going to bring in so many new people into

crypto it's insane uh coinbase is obviously the front door in the us for a lot of people into you know eighth btc and a bunch of other kind of um tokens and things like that so this is going to be huge i think it's going to trade at over 100 billion market cap right out of the gates you know crypto's heating up so people are going to be like you know how do i get access to you know crypto or the broader space in my retirement account i can do do it with coinbase shares now or coinbase equity whereas you can only do it through grayscale's products right now for bitcoin and ether since there's not a bitcoin etf um so i think a lot of people are going to be lining up to to kind of get their hands on coinbase's equity here the graph network also went

live in december of 2020 this was this was massive right i mean they launched their network they launched their token their token ended up trading at a ridiculous kind of price or valuation and things like that um everyone kind of like i mean it's funny because a lot of people didn't know what graph network was beforehand but they had actually been powering all of d5 for a very long time all the fancy like numbers and front ends you see all that stuff's kind of running through the graph and they launched their token which went nuts and people kind of like started comparing it to chain link as like middleware and things like that so yeah that was that was quite a big launch and for those of you who are around for a couple days that token went absolutely crazy because it was listed on coinbase

you know uh it just it ended up going like insane so yeah that was that was a really cool launch to see and the graph not just i mean the token but like the product that they've built they've been building for a couple of years now i think or maybe even longer than that is an amazing product everyone that i've spoken to on the developer community loves working with it so yeah that was another big launch tornado cache also announced their governance system token in december of 2020 as well so they are going to be doing a torn token which is going to be given to people who use tornado cash in the form of an airdrop it's also going to be given to the governance system as well team investors of course and the tokens going to be used

for liquidity mining and things like that which within tornado cache so that was just another i guess token launch another big token launch in in 2020 it wasn't the one that finished off the the year though which i'll go into in a sec so uh compound protocol uh i mean they announced that they were going to be migrating to their own chain called compound chain which was a kind of out of left field announcement for a lot of people they're like you know why are they building this why aren't they just working within the ethereum layer 2 ecosystem and you can see here that they blocked or people from replying uh to to them because they knew this was an unpopular decision so i mean i wrote about this in the daily way i'm not a fan of this at all i thought

i think it's a very short-sighted strategic decision i think they're gonna regret doing this i think that um they should have just stuck to ethereum and and worked within the layer 2 ecosystem there and worked with other projects to do that but maybe i'm wrong we'll see we'll see what happens with the compound chain but yeah that was another announcement that kind of got a lot of people talking in december also about a week ago the haiku book was announced i i i think i wrote about this uh or talked about it on the daily bay refill the other day so the haiku book is basically a collection of haikus that were posted to the r eighth trader and our eat finance daily threads over the years um and this was basically for anyone who was on reddit and in those threads you would have seen these

but yeah so basically you can buy this book now at the haikubook.org i think it is and it's it's a really cool i think like book that you can buy um because it's like it's got like a really pretty art on the front of like ethereum art and things like that and then inside it's got like haikus of course and it's like something you just put on your coffee table and i think it's a conversation starter as well so yeah this was also kind of announced uh like yeah just towards the end of the year basically sorry we ended the year the last two announcements here the first one being with the sec filing a lawsuit against ripple and its two executives alleging that the firm brought in over 1.3 billion dollars in ongoing unregistered security sales this was one of the biggest

pieces of news of the year obviously this ended up um killing i guess like a lot of the xrp uh price movement that we saw within the november i guess movement that was i guess people were attributing it to tick tock and people on there promoting it and things like that but uh yeah so that kind of happened and then a lot of exchanges announced that they would be listing it like coinbase i even announced that they're going to be listing it in january of 2021 so yeah this was just huge news at the time and a long time coming a lot of people were like you know this took way too long to happen you know it was obvious that xrp was a security or an unregistered security and was trading as an unregistered security and that the co-founder and ceo are profiting

amazingly from this from selling this into the market from selling xrp into the market so yeah that's still ongoing i think there's like going to be a lot of stuff happening with that this year but i'll um i'll keep you guys updated in the daily great refill episode all right the last bit of news to end out the year here was one inch token launched on a christmas eve gifted to everyone who had interacted with the one inch protocol similar to unisop of course and you know i guess the market doesn't really like these tokens anymore because the one-inch token launched and within the first three hours it was trading at like a pretty good valuation i think it was the same valuation as uni uh and then it kind of like dumped it went from like three dollars maybe it

went up to and now like it went to under a dollar now it's back up over a dollar um but this was like you know kind of everyone knew this token was coming but they didn't think that it would be launched on christmas and it was kind of good to get a christmas present here for those who i guess got some one-inch tokens and ended up selling it or you know even if you're holding it it's still worth a pretty penny now but that's how we kind of like finished out the year with the one inch uh protocol launching the one-inch token launching the governance process launching all this sort of stuff so yeah that was that was really cool to end out the year i think the last few days there might have been some some recaps put out from each of the projects

but no major announcements that i can remember coming out but yeah so i guess that basically ends 2020s recap that is a very very long video i know it's going to be about probably like two three hours long if you've made it to the end here kudos to you you have basically gotten the most comprehensive i think recap of 2020 on ethereum that you will get from anywhere uh a lot happened and there was a lot that i was missing from that i ended up actually not including so many things that happened uh and it was just too big of a year and i think 2021 is going to be even crazier so if you do want to keep up to date with basically uh every week go to ethub.substance.com it's where i basically put out you know um any fab weekly newsletter

and we base i basically you know break down everything that's happened in the last week in ethereum and eric connor and i also record a weekly podcast um at podcast.ether.io that goes over the weekly newsletter and of course i have the daily grade refill episodes going out every day now but i know that you know that might be too frequent for some people so definitely you can check out the weekly recaps instead uh and yeah if you're new here subscribe to the youtube channel give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the delegate newsletter join the discord and that's it for this year for the 2020 recap everyone thank you for tuning in and i'll see you all on the next daily refuel thanks everyone