Aave v3 on StarkNet, Polygon's big 2021 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #284 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel worry capped the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the third of january 2022 all right everyone new year 2022 i hope you all had a great new years i actually stayed home for mine i didn't do anything too flashy just stayed home with the fiance and kind of had a quiet night quiet night in there but i saw a few pictures on twitter people kind of like at various parties around the world but i think with the covert situation you know different parts of the world it still seems a bit uh a bit all over the place right some people going out simple staying home not exactly sure kind of like what's going on there but you know we we soldier on we keep going and we go

into a new year a new year new exciting things happening i went over kind of a recap on last week last week's refuel about 2021 and gave some 2022 kind of like not so much predictions but kind of outlooks and there's a related thing that i wanted to talk about today which is related to a tweet that i put out yesterday and i'll just read out the tweet it was a three-part tweet basically i said in late 2020 there was a strong narrative being pushed that you didn't need to buy or hold eth all you needed was btc plus the d5 blue chips aka the crypto barbell strategy that turned out to be horribly wrong with eth strongly outperforming btc and most of d5 in 2021 now there's a new narrative being pushed that layer two is a bearish for eighth so you only need to buy layer

two tokens and alt l1 tokens it really amazes me how people can still be bearish on eight after all this time and how many times these same people move the goal post now there's two other tweets after that but i want to focus on the first half of this little tweet right here so for those of you who are around in late 2020 like it's actually amazing how bearish people were on 8th and how bullish they were on d5 tokens and how wrong they were i don't have to rehash that for those that were around back then and if you weren't around back then i'm sure you've heard heard about it before um but what i find even funnier was that there was a lot of predictions about what 2021 was going to be and how many people got it wrong which i also went over a lot on last week's refuel

who i talked about uh people didn't see kind of like the dog tokens coming the altar one stuff coming the nft stuff coming and i think that there's a lot of predictions being given right now for 2022 and i feel like so many of them are going to be wrong again it's just it's so very hard to get things right about this industry it doesn't matter what time frame you're looking at because it's such a new industry there's so many unknowns there's so many kind of like things that just catch a run off guard especially if you've been in the crypto industry for a while you kind of miss things because you get used to a certain way of things being and then all the new entrants that come in i mean they've got no prior context they've got no history they are literally coming in

for the first time so your their mindset is very different to yours if you've been in it for a while and that's exactly why a lot of people actually missed the um alt l1 stuff like they obviously went went pretty crazy and there was yeah there were some people that caught that train that saw it coming but for on the most part most people missed it and most people missed eighth because they were kind of like had priors about btc and i'm talking i'm going back to like 2017 and and even further back than that so i think when it comes to not just investing in crypto but spotting trends you really need to try and reset your your thinking about it you can't just like be stuck in a mindset that you're in before because what ends up happening is you miss things and i i'll be the first to admit that

i've missed a lot of things because of that where i get stuck on a certain narrative or i get stuck uh kind of looking at certain things and i miss things kind of playing out and i think 2021 was a was a humbling year for me especially the second half where i kind of i mean i i i feel like i had an edge in 2020 and the first half of 2021 where i'm well i was making a lot of good investments and i i kind of like saw whether where things were going and then the second half of 2021 i kind of like lost that edge and i didn't see a lot of the stuff playing out i mean i think i knew nfas were going to be big but i didn't realize how big they were going to be i didn't really know how to play

it correctly i didn't really place any big bets there i mean i bought some nfts but nothing nothing crazy there whereas a lot of people kind of saw that trend coming oh sorry not a lot but like some people saw that trend coming and played it really really nicely there but obviously uh i i think like in 2022 there is a way to kind of not just reset your thinking but also kind of like look at what's playing out look at what the most popular narrative is and try to find something that is different to that like right now i think in the ethereum ecosystem the most popular narrative is that uh 2022 is going to be the year of l2 we're finally going to have all this l2 adoption it's going to be great it's going to be awesome look as bullish as i am on layer

2's guys i'm not convinced that you know we can just kind of like bucket layer 2 adoption into one year or one specific year like people go on about how last year was the year of alt-l-1 and a lot of them kind of like got traction and a lot of them uh kind of like proved themselves and and east you know tvl dominance went down and all that sort of stuff yes and no like i i feel like people just as i said before people not just with the hotel ones with anything the narratives are usually stronger than the fundamentals and the actual traction and i feel like people get stuck in this hole where they think that there's much more traction for something than there actually is and this goes for everything i'm not just talking about the all-tail one talking about anything ethereum ethereum based

projects anything and there are a lot of real projects that get neglected especially their token prices there's plenty of the d5 quantum quote blue chips that have been neglected for a very long time or their prices have been doing uh very very poorly even though they've been growing they've been innovating they've been releasing products and then the ones that have like a stronger narrative seem to be doing better than them so i wrote about this in the newsletter today uh but basically this is the concept of shifting narratives where you you've basically got these narratives that play out on short term long term time frames and people get stuck in them and people kind of like get stuck in that that that frame of mind they don't they fail to evolve and that doesn't make a good investor in my mind like obviously none of this is investment advice but

just generally i think that if you get stuck in like an old way of thinking or if you think things have to play out like they have in the past or if you think that you can see what's going to happen even though you're you know you've been around for a while you're not kind of like thinking from a new person's perspective it can be difficult and i i find it actually really good exercise to talk to newer people in the ecosystem and to see what they're focusing on and to see what what what kind of like their friends are focusing on and what they find interesting because a lot of the time it's very different to what you find interesting there's plenty of people out there who don't find ethereum interesting because the fees are too high for them right and we have the layer twos and stuff like

that but there's no easy way for them to onboard to most of those things yet so they went and played on the other things right obviously the polygon pos train was a big uh a a a a big thing as well but a lot of them kind of like played with solana or avalanche or some of the others out there and that's why a lot of those tokens did very well in 2021 so i think always keeping on your toes and realizing that it's very easy to get stuck in kind of like a boomer mentality even though you think you're on the forefront of things um especially when it comes to investing i think that's always a good thing to keep in mind there so that was kind of my point about this because i feel like a lot of people got stuck in in a mindset

in late 2020 and they just kind of like missed eth completely and they tried to make up for it with the other l1s in 2021 i mean it was successful to an extent but it's always funny to see kind of the narrative shift there and then you know in the second half of my tweet thread here i said you know of course ether isn't going to give you a 100 x within a few months because market cap is already high and yes you can outperform it by investing in certain other things but i believe ether is the most bullish asset in crypto from a risk reward perspective it's simply a comfort comfy hold um so i think like people people usually have kind of like a um not not just around eight but just like any asset they usually have like a a mentality that they go in with where

they're like okay well if i put money into this am i going to get like a 10x or 100x or 1000x what am i going to get out of this i i look as bullish as i am on 8th guys you're not going to get 100x from ethan any time soon it's market cap is already half a trillion dollars the 100x from 8th could happen in a decade or something like that uh or or longer than that but it's not going to happen within a few months whereas there's a lot of other assets out there not just the alt l1 or anything like that i mean many of those hotel ones are actually pretty high market cap now so i don't think you're going to get 100x out of a lot of them anytime soon but um there's a lot of other things like a lot of

emerging projects new projects in different kind of categories whether that be d fire nft stuff like that that are incredibly risky but they also have the potential to go 100 x plus and we've seen these play out like pretty quickly i mean there were a few uh late last year that were kind of like d5 2.0 that went you know 100x or more there was a bunch of nft projects those are not just the nfts themselves but like infrastructure projects around that and those sorts of things a bunch of other tokens um uh yeah i mean these and i mean there's a lot of scams and ponzi's as well that would go up really high but then come crashing down but the thing is is that these things are always much more risky than than something like eighth like there's a reason ether is already worth what it is

i mean ethan was obviously much much riskier a few months a few years ago that's why you had a better return but now ethan and bitcoin as well i'm much more mature as assets uh you know obviously i still believe eighth is incredibly bullish but if you're looking for 100x then you have to play in the riskier assets that's just that's just the way it is and you can structure your portfolio however you want to structure it you can have like 10 of your portfolio just like doing complete degen stuff where you basically say to yourself okay well there's a high chance i'll lose this 10 percent but i'm going to do it anyway because i want to make that 100x whereas you keep most of your portfolio in quote-unquote safer assets like ether and and and you do that because say you put 10 percent into something

that goes 100x uh that is a still a massive win right like but say you put uh say you did another way say you put 90 of your portfolio into something and you you kind of sent yourself okay i'm gonna get 100 x from this and then in reality it just crashes and you and say it crashes like 50 and you lose 50 of your almost all your portfolio the risk reward is kind of like out of whack when you do it like that so that's how i usually play it and obviously this is an investment advice but this is how a lot of people play it they don't put their whole stack into something uh at least most people don't put their whole stack into something and hope that they're gonna get like a massive gain out of it uh and it's gonna be it's gonna be all

well and good many of the best investors will play it like safer like that yes they'll do like risky stuff but only with a small part of the their portfolio so there's that aspect to it and the last tweet i just said moral the story don't take investment advice from crypto twitter most people get it very wrong i believe the best course of action is to learn from smart people with a proven track record and apply their thinking strategies to your own so cheers to a profitable 2022 for all so i mean i think that if you're following people who are just shilling a new coin every week that's not gonna be a good time for you i i feel like the people who shield a new coin every week are the ones just unloading it every time they're shilling it because no one really shields a coin before they've

bought it and even if they say they have there's no way for you to verify that right because for example someone could say to you some random ain't on twitter account that has like a decent following can say you know i love this coin i believe in it i think it's going to go like 100 100x it's going to be awesome you know come join me uh this is you know for such and such reason reason and then they're just offloading their tokens on you with their wallets and you've got zero way to prove any of that because they can keep their wallets completely anonymous you've got no way to tie it back to them if they slip up you do but even then there's hardly any consequences for this sort of stuff like that ain't on account if it becomes really bad they can just start another

account and do it all over again and this sort of stuff plays out all the time i'm sure you've all seen it right like on crypto twitter plays that all the time it's the concept of exit liquidity especially on the lower market cap things where there's not much liquidity and not much volume these people need to kind of like shield these things in order to to exit them once they've entered but that's always uh you know it's always a kind of like dangerous game you play when you when you're playing in these sorts of things incredible amounts of risk but also incredible amounts of rewards if you play it right and i think the the actually this this is an advice but like number one thing i always have to keep in mind is that don't look at the wins that had played out last year and say to yourself

oh if only i'd put money into this i you know it would have been this much and it would have been awesome that is the worst way to think about it because what ends up happening is that you think that the next thing that you're really bullish on is worth you putting the money that you would have put in that other thing that did really well and then it doesn't play out the same way it never plays out the same way it's not it's not going to play out exactly the same way as it has for for the other thing i know a lot of people have been doing this lately where they're like oh apparently i had invested in the alt l1s last year i knew they were going to pop off because ethereum fees were higher the narrative was there blah blah and

now they're all chasing it now again and to be fair they can still play out i can still go up but still make money there but the thing is is that i feel like that trade is pretty much like done at this point in terms of like giving you massive amounts of returns unless you find something that uh that is uh kind of like a much lower market cap but a lot of them got just re-rated up already and the same thing happened with day five mind you right when during d5 summer so i think that when you're looking for the next kind of like 100x or more than that you really have to not only be very careful about what you pick but you have to kind of like write off the money that you put into it you have to say okay well this 10 of my portfolio

whatever percentage it is is in um is in this and i'm comfortable losing everything but if if it plays out really well and if i'm right about my thesis i could make a lot of money from it that's all you have to do and you have you really have to come to peace but you can't just tell yourself oh yeah i'm at peace with this if this goes to zero no no you actually have to write that money off i don't even think about it it's either 100x or zero and i know that sounds like gambling because i it really is to be honest like if you're if you're kind of like djing into things it is very close to gambling it's pretty much gambling like if i'm being honest i mean and we've all been there we've all done it and i guess like uh you kind of like switch modes

depending on what where you're at like if you have a lot of money already you're in wealth preservation mode if you're just starting out you've only got a few thousand dollars to your name well you're probably going to be like well i don't care like a few thousand dollars i can afford to lose it i'm gonna go and like do all the degen stuff because the reward is like lucrative if i play it right but you know it's all up to you it's up to your decisions and of course uh i'm not here to give investment advice i'm just here to kind of like give my experience and how i kind of like view these things uh playing out so i just wanted to hide this thread from vitalik over the weekend he put out a thread which i'm sure a lot of you already saw where he said happy new year

today a mini tweet storm of some of the things i've said and written over the past decade and what i think about those subjects today so a lot of these things go back to 2013 2014 2015. a lot of them don't have to do with ethereum specifically it's a it's you know it's about bitcoin bitcoin cash a bunch of other things i suggest giving this thread a read if you somehow missed it it's obviously a very popular thread here i really liked it because i mean it's obvious that vitalik is one of my favorite people in the ecosystem for a number of different reasons i just think that the fact that i mean one of the major reasons is the fact that vitalik has created such an incredible movement in ethereum such an incredible ecosystem and he's still as humble as he is he's still as dedicated

to to ethereum as he is he's still able to have such self-awareness to actually call himself out on a lot of this stuff that he made predictions about that were wrong and kind of like why they were wrong and what he got wrong what he got right all those sorts of things i yeah i just find that incredible and the fact that he's so young as well like you expect this from old maybe older people who have more wisdom in under under their belt but no vitalik's young like i'm pretty sure he's 27 so he's three years younger than me and like he's just yeah he's a very very unique and special uh person in the world and i'm very glad ethereum uh has him in the ecosystem still you know obviously he could have created ethereum and i mean he could have like just stopped a few years ago

he would i mean he is set for life in terms of money he doesn't have to do what he does but obviously he does it for more than money um and uh you know he doesn't really care about money from from what i've seen anyway so yeah definitely go give this thread a read it is a really great one i love getting his perspective on all these different things here so another great thread from polynya over the weekend uh going over some shower thoughts on what they'd like to see from a roll up tokens now i spoke about rollup tokens last week on a few of last week's refuels i mean i've been talking about them for quite a while but i wanted to kind of like go through some of the points that paulina brought up here and add my had my kind of like color to it so the

first point which i believe is the most important that i hadn't actually considered or thought too deeply about uh was paulina says a vampire attack l ones to oblivion and yes this includes ethereum smartly is target active users across different l1 fewer tokens drop to the yield farming chasing chain hoppers and high value ethereum users so we all know vampire attacks right they've been used to i wouldn't say incredible success i would say that there's been kind of like mild success with the vampire attacks they have to be done right they have to be done in such a way that it not only uh you know uh uh vampire attacks liquidity but it's used as a marketing tool as well where everyone's talking about it so if the l2s do it right they can

vampire attack these other l1 including ethereum l1 and move a lot of that liquidity to the l2 where it would possibly stay even without token incentives because the l2s offer a much better experience than pretty much all the l1 even i mean yes they're more expensive today but even in their kind of like more expensive state they just offer a much better user experience in in my opinion and maybe uh you know it depends on the l2 you use and things like that but in my opinion they're much further along so i think that they have a pretty good opportunity to vampire attack these l1s get their liquidity across and and basically uh start growing their ecosystems out because once you have the tvl there a lot of the other things kind of like fall into place and a lot of the network activity falls into place and

it's it's a really great marketing vehicle so i thought that was a that was a good shower thought there um i think there's a couple others here i'm not going to go through them all but uh yeah this one distribute at least 70 of the tokens to the community slash treasury and at least 70 of tokens to active circulation have a clear long-term plan for incentives this is very important as you've learned from d5 liquidity mining uh if you kind of like have five percent of the token circulating and ninety five percent kind of uh uh still not circulating and the fully diluted money caps really high your token ends up just stagnating or going down continuously and you don't build a community like that because no one wants to buy the token no one wants to hold it no one feels like they're getting rich making

your early community rich is the um is the is the play is definitely the best way forward so air dropping a lot of the tokens because a lot of these alters are going to have high market caps from the get go no matter what they do so i think that the only kind of choice they have to distribute tokens in a fair way is air dropping the majority of them because then the users get uh the users get like a large stake like depending on the on the um the airdrop amount in the network already from the get-go and a lot of people will sell it of course but that's just distributing it out to the people who want to buy it from there and then you kind of have a much better distribution so i think that is definitely uh uh definitely something to keep in mind for the l2 teams here

and then the last point was uh paulina saying liquidity farming is old news keep someone major assets and the roll-up token but keep a tight lid with very low inflation this is another mistake that a lot of defrag projects have made they've done too much liquidity mining too fast you have liquidity locates that come dump the token uh no community gets built and they just leave from there so i think that the l2s have to be very careful with this do light incentive programs don't just do it as kind of like liquidity mining um giving away tokens to liquidity providers or anything or just don't just do that do kind of like liquidity incentives or token incentives in terms of like paying people to develop on there being like okay well we'll give you a certain number of tokens if you come and develop or port

your app to our l2 that's probably a better way forward there but there's a few other kind of points here that polly now made i'll link this uh thread in the youtube description and below um but i'm going to move on here because i'm running out of time so mariusz from uh the gold ethereum team uh gave a kind of like update thread on the kinzuki test net which on the 31st of december which was like four days ago now so it has already hit block 100 000 and it already had 97 000 accounts on it and it seems there's a new transaction every block as well so it's a couple other stats here outdated now of course because this was from about four days ago but cool to see the uh kimsugi test net uh just you know plotting along here seems to be going

really well i'm sure we'll get an update in the next couple weeks around how that's gone and everything like that so really really cool to see that um santi here from the proof of humanity and ubi project basically put out a great tweet where he said el salvador is top-down crypto adoption argentina is grassroots bottom-up crypto adoption el salvador enforces bitcoin and argentina embraces uh ethereum at the developer using entrepreneurial levels the rates of crypto adoption in argentina are way ahead than any other country out there they're pandemic led to a quantum leap in the sector so this is something that i've brought up before i thought that el salvador's way of adopting crypto obviously bitcoin was very coercive i don't think that it was a great way to do it i don't think that the people of

el salvador really had a say in it um i think that the government just wanted to do it or the president just wanted to do it and he did it and he keeps buying the div apparently and doesn't feel very organic at all it feels very very forced aka top down crypto adoption whereas in within argentina they've actually been building out an ecosystem for the last few years uh primarily around the ethereum ecosystem there's a lot of really really cool ethereum people that are out of argentina argent argentina and have lived there you know their whole lives or come from there or born there um and they're basically uh part of the grassroots roots bottom-up effort they're not you know the government isn't trying to force crypto on them no one's trying to force crypto on anyone they've been using things like dive for years each for years advocating

for crypto getting it kind of um involved with with their day-to-day activities and obviously argentina has a high inflation as well of their native currency so it's been kind of like a lifeboat for them but yeah as as santi puts it here it is a bottoms-up approach which is what crypto should be this is what i think a lot of projects get wrong not just ethereum and bitcoin or whatever but like projects in general in crypto they try to do a top-down approach that doesn't work in crypto because crypto is all about ownership web 3 is all about ownership if your users and your kind of like i guess token holders in your community doesn't feel like they have any kind of like ownership or say in the protocol they'll just leave they'll just go somewhere else um because the switching costs are

so low everything within crypto whereas if you feel like that within your own within your own country the switching costs are much higher right not not just because like leaving your country depending where you are can be quite difficult but because you have your roots there right you have your family there you have your friends there you have you have a house there you have you know you're used to the area and it's just very very different but within crypto switching costs of um particularly applications is very very low maybe not for ecosystems like for example the switching cost from going from ethereum to another l1 if you've been a hardcore ethereum is obviously really really difficult um but the switching cost from going from application to application is super super easy so i think that all projects within crypto should always be a grassroots bottom-up approach because of

the that kind of like ease of switching costs there but yeah great tweet from sunti here moving on brantley set out another kind of tweet going over december 2021 starts for ens this has been a new record for mo dot e most dot eighth names registered in a month 109 000 all ethe l1 despite the high gas fees over 250 000 owners now 600 000 names 91 new integrations now 423 total 5.8 million dollars in revenue all goes to the dow and 99 of open c volume for domains e s is dominating it we all know it is uh it's awesome we all have our dot eights uh it's really really cool to see the progress there uh mahalo from the polygon team put out a recap of 2021 and polygon had a massive 20 21. like

i just i was thinking about the other day thinking back to the start of 2021 and like basically i mean that's when polygon did their rebrand in about february i mean so many did they rebrand the polygon in february they were basically not even on the map now there's over 100 million watts on the pos chain over 3 000 apps one billion plus transactions six new solutions which were all weren't out at the beginning of 2021 by the way the sdk polygon avail homemade knight for midan and zero top web 3 names such as unisop arvin opencr on polygon and big brands such as dolce gabbana nfl macy's and everything like that so polygon had an absolutely massive 2021 i'm looking forward to an even bigger 22 from 2022 from them there so there's an account that i've come across recently that i just wanted to

highlight called sudo theos who is doing a lot of great threads around ethereum and zk lately so i really like this thread where they basically put together a thread on what do all the zk terms mean so what all the zero knowledge terms mean go check out this thread but i also highly recommend going and following this person because this may be another polynomial in the making like there's not often that i come across people who really know their and know how to kind of like i wouldn't say dumb it down but like explain it in such a way that uh everyone can understand and i think pseudo theos is definitely one of those because isn't just this thread they've been doing a bunch of different threads lately uh not just you know not just one off thread you can see here everything like that look all these

threads i mean scroll through their profile to kind of uh i guess like have a look here but yeah i just wanted to highlight this account for a highly recommended follow uh and sudo if you're if you watch or listen to the daily way please reach out to me um and dm me i do have a backlog right now but i'd i'd love to talk to you i have a few questions i want to ask you but uh but yeah okay definitely go give this person a follow um ave so stanley announced their first announcement of the year from rv which is that they are building a mobile wallet i think the wallet game is going to heat up pretty high pretty um pretty uh uh quickly in 2022 and throughout because i mean when you think about it the kind of like uh wallet game is such a huge

kind of um uh business kind of opportunity because it's like a front door right like centralized exchanges are our front door um right now in terms of like um getting people on with fiat on and off rams but once we have all these mobile wallets that have like uh all these on-ramps integrated and everything like that they're gonna be the front door for most people i mean look at argent for example they already have native l2 integrations happening they've got fiat on-ramps happening they've got they're bringing the web to experience of one or two clicks two web three so i think that's a huge opportunity and yeah alveo seems to be building a mobile wallet here which i am looking forward to learning about uh learning more about another related rv announcement is that other v3 um is going to be ported to stark net so

there's currently a community effort to get rvv3 on starkwear's starknet network here that's really really cool obviously we want to get all the top kind of like quote unquote blue chip default projects from ethereum l1 to all the l2s so it's great to see this already happening here i hope to see ava v300 live on arbitram really soon and optimism as well because uh obviously they both don't have white lists and they're both evm compatible or equivalent so it should be very easy to get rbv3 on there i'm sure it's coming once rbv3 goes to ethereum mainnet as well i would actually love to see kind of like a um a multi-deployment there where they do kind of like v3 on ethereum mainnet l1 uh rpm and optimism and even the polygon pos chain as well i'd love to see kind of like a multi-uh multi-pronged

approach there but anyway last update here because i've gone over time i believe i i think i've gone over time maybe not just yet uh but uh yeah this uh this kind of like teaser from jasper here who have highlighted um uh kind of like before i think but basically teasing a new kind of integration with jpeg notifications here so jasper works at zappa by the way so this might be part of the kind of like mobile wallet effort here so you can see here that there's a notifications flying in if people kind of like interacting with nft such as minting in nft receiving one obviously you'd probably just kind of like watch someone's address for this sort of stuff and be able to kind of like watch what they're doing what nfts they're kind of um you know buying or speculating on things like that which i

think is really really cool as i said before the mobile wallet space is going to heat up really really um wildly in 2022 and beyond there's you know as i mentioned argent there's rainbow wallet i mean obviously metamask has a mobile wallet this coin baseball zap is designing one elvis coming out with one it's gonna get crazy and i just can't wait until we have like a really really really nice mobile that has all the integrations everyone wants with kind of like l2 integrations bridges all that sort of stuff there it's going to be awesome but i think that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks

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