Alchemix launches alETH, Mark Cuban on DeFi & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #142 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 14th of june 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i you might not believe it but i have had a fair few people asking me lately if i'm still bullish on eth yes really i don't believe it myself considering you know obviously how uh how much time i spend in this ecosystem the fact people are still asking me this is weird but anyway i put out a tweet here where i said here's how bullish i am i have held all the eighth that i've ever bought with fiat from 10 to 1420 to 80 to 400 to 2400 um and now i think the price is about 2500 or something like that and i've never sold

a single way and i buy more every single day uh this is the truth i have really never sold any eath that i bought with fiat now of course there has been ether that i've gotten from uh from various means like through uh the daily gray on git coin i've got an eighth there uh and i've got an eighth via other means like people paying me to do things and stuff like that uh that i have to cash out for tax purposes because it's considered income but uh and when i take kind of like take profits uh from yield farming i'll sometimes go to eighth and then um i'll have to cash out some of that eth because of taxes you know any time that i've sold eight really has just been for tax obligations but all the ether i have bought with fresh fiat that was in my bank account or uh

buying eth i guess like uh from yield farming profits or anything like that after tax i have never sold any of this um you know from from the first time i bought at 10 in 2017 uh to the last time i bought eth or at least like the latest time which is today because i do buy eat every single day it's not like a lot of eat every day right it's a little bit every day but i try to buy whenever i can and that usually is like an everyday cadence now um whether that's like yield farming profits like especially when gas is this low i take yield farming profits um quicker than uh than i normally would because of the fact that the gas is low so i don't have to wait a few days for it to kind of catch up so the gas hit uh

the gas cost doesn't eat into my profits so i use that and i have income from other sources and things like that and i obviously like um i might sell my income that i get from other sources i'll put into eath and things like that so yeah and that's how bullish i am and i've said before i never planned to sell my eif like i've been moving most of my eth i think you know pretty much most of it is in staking right now um because like i just wanted to sit there i just want to stack more earth like that and then once the merge goes through i'm pretty sure i'm going to have most of my ethernet sorry almost all of my ethernet staking at that point and i'm going to keep adding to it keep you know spinning up more validators as i can as time goes on

and i just really don't have any reason to ever sell my eighth i just want to keep increasing my stack to me it's like you know i'm so bullish on ethereum and ether as an ecosystem so why should i why should i sell an salony like even i've gone through like my longer term price you know targets on on the refill before but really i don't kind of like have a have a price target in mind where i'm i'm kind of like i'm gonna sell here because i'm not gonna sell so for me it's just easy for me to hold to all of this because if you mentally kind of say to yourself okay well it doesn't have to be a whole stack but if you have like a small stack that that becomes your like permanent staking stack say it's like 30 of your eighth or whatever

and you say well you know this is a stack that i'm never selling i'm always going to stake it well then that 30 percent it shouldn't matter what the price is at the end of the day you should just be you know happy that you have it and you're staking with it and working to make sure that you preserve that amount you don't lose it you know through some kind of exploit or hack or whatever um even if you're ill plumbing with it so so from that perspective i you know that's that's kind of like i guess the um the play i make and this isn't for everyone of course i mean this isn't to say that i haven't sold other things for and taking profits into fiat i definitely have like other tokens that i've bought and things like that um i buy these tokens by leveraging my east

so putting my ether into a money market drawing stable coins against it and buying tokens now that is obviously risky i'm risking my ether in doing so but as i mentioned before i keep a rather low liquidation price here when i do that and i don't do that very often i i definitely do that um uh when the market's hotter for sure or when i feel like the market is you know going to get much hotter and getting getting in kind of earlier i think the last time i did that was december january for a few d5 tokens and then i kind of like sold some of them off as i i saw the market was uh was getting pretty overheated but i don't kind of look at that when i look at ethan i'm not definitely not a trader or anything like that um and some of them i did go into eth

like i've spoken about before actually this was this was in um i think it was october or something like that where i sold the dots that i had bought um in the ico in late 2017 i sold that for more eth i basically took what i needed for taxes and then reinvested the rest of it in eat so i do a lot of that of course and i think that's just the way to play it at the end of the day if you've got like a a really long-term mind uh outlook um then you should definitely be doing that uh i believe um it's not to say that's investment advice or whatever but that's just like what i kind of think is the good approach um and you know obviously if it's money that you're happy with kind of like it going down and being volatile then you

know you've got to consider that as well anyway enough on that i just wanted to address it because i kind of thought it was a bit funny that people were kind of asking me if i was still bullish on eighth like that's uh you know you know what i mean like that's that's a funny question to ask but anyway i'll leave it at that for now i want to move on to this interesting tweet which was basically a meme from uh fiscantis here and uh this is the topic of today's delegate newsletter as well so you can go check this out but he basically did like a virgin valueless governance token uh person versus the chad gtc or git coin token holder here uh and he basically you know i'm not gonna read out the whole meme you can see it'll be linked in the youtube description if you

want to go check it out but he basically says that these kind of like valueless the virgin valueless governance token is uh he's basically holding things that uh holding a project doesn't have a vision you know probably most of the projects are fork it's basically a ponzi you know it's uh it's basically like a coin for lack of a better word whereas holding a uh git coin the git coin token the gtc token is holding something that actually means something because the token is used to coordinate um uh different problems within the bitcoin ecosystem used for governance there it got air dropped to people that are very aligned with kick with a get going ecosystem um it got listed on binance and coinbase doesn't even care um and vitality can't stop simping uh the the bitcoin holders because give italian obviously loves get coin and all

those kind of benefits here um now i guess like full disclaimer i i hold uh gtc obviously um hold it hold the hold the sizeable amount of it you can see it at sassel.etha if you want i'm very very transparent about that but uh generally um i think what i spoke about in the newsletter today was basically around this uh i guess concept of just tokens in general and like why i think people have the wrong idea of tokens because a lot of people think tokens are you know shitty or evil or useless or just like completely pointless and i think that that definitely misses the forest for the trees i think of course there are a lot of tokens out there that don't deserve to exist that don't need to exist that are complete rubbish a lot of them are scams right but in in kind of those scams uh there

is there is definitely diamonds and i think that the git coin token is definitely one i think that there is a bunch of other you know tokens out there uh that that uh that uh um i i think have long-term value and can accrue long-term value i'm not going to list them all because i don't want to be seen uh to be given kind of like advice of what's the token to buy or anything like that and definitely don't take my um i guess like uh i guess like um sorry my my positivity towards gtc as a signal to buy it but i guess my point is is that it just depends on how these tokens are designed and distributed those are those are the the two main points that i look at so when you first look at a a governance token for example that gets issued by a

d5 protocol because they want to decentralize the first thing i i always look at is kind of like what the distribution looks like is it heavily weighted towards team investors or is it heavily weighted towards community if it's heavily weighted towards community how are these tokens coming to market is it through an aggressive liquidity mining campaign or are the tokens basically in a treasury that will be distributed to people who do work for the protocol over time i've spoken about the index cop a lot before and how the tokens are distributed via a very modest liquidity mining program and they're also distributed uh via i guess like um uh the the treasury uh two people that are contributing value to the index co-op that's the same play i

think what's gonna happen with git coin where they're gonna just distribute gtc tokens uh to various kind of things here whether that be you know directly in the platform or just kind of paying out to people that are i guess helping out uh the project and things like that um and then the kind of like the second uh part on the distribution is if i see a project that has a really aggressive liquidity mining campaign i won't even go near that token because i really think that it just turns into this perpetual kind of like uh commoditized farm and dump thing where you have these people coming in just farming like locusts and constantly dumping the coin and then the passive holders of the coin are actually hurt because what ends up happening is that the market cap will just keep dropping over time and and the price of the coin

will obviously keep dropping over time but if you're a farmer and you're you know you're you're kind of like not um not hurting from this drop because you're farming and dumping you are the one profiting from it right but if you're a passive holder of this token you're essentially being completely destroyed because these farmers are dumping on you um and your size of kind of the pie is going down because more issues are being told being um sorry more tokens are being issued rapidly here um so those are like the two major things i consider the third thing is kind of like you know does this token capture value and if it doesn't capture value right now is there a good reason for it not to because i think a lot of people get caught up in expecting tokens to capture value from day one or like very early on in in a

project's life cycle and i think that's the wrong way to look at things because protocol revenue should be reinvested into growing the the project in its early stages it shouldn't be paying out to you know some random passive holders who just stake the token and are demanding like a yield on their tokens i actually think that is incredibly damaging to a project long term because if you look at it uh some of the most successful projects are the ones that collect uh i guess like protocol revenue and then distribute it back out and kind of like grow the project i mean look at yearn for example they they actually started off by having it so that you could stake wifi tokens and the yield would go to sorry the yield would come from protocol revenue uh but but that didn't do anything for the project that just paid out to these

kind of passive token holders who weren't really doing anything for the project now um now the way it is is there's a buyback and kind of like uh sorry a buyback program where they're basically buying back wi-fi tokens with the protocol revenue and paying this out to contributors and you own just keeps growing it's it's growing really really fast um they've they've been able to set up programs to incentivize liquidity like their partner program and stuff like that so i just think that there's so many ways to design tokens both in the correct way and the incorrect way and we've seen these experiments play out over the last few years you know we started off with things like utility tokens where you actually had to hold the token to use the app and that was obviously um you know in hindsight a a very big

non-starter from the very beginning no one wants to have to go and acquire some kind of token just to hold just to be able to interact with an app that they want to could you imagine if to trade on unisop you had to own uni tokens in your wallet and you had to own a minimum amount of uni tokens that wouldn't work i think it works for things like um communities like gated communities say you have to hold 100 tokens to get into this community that works but i don't think it works if if you're trying to get people to use your product because no one is going to do that i mean you're basically charging people a variable kind of amount because the tokens vary in value and you're making them hold this token that varies in value just to use your product too much friction there

so so utility tokens failed then we had like this this thing where people were just like oh we're a staking token you can stake and kind of like earn fees and it's like okay cool and then now we're at this point where it's like we have a bunch of different mechanisms built into these tokens and i actually think one of the best designs is the rver token right now because what ave does is that you can stake your arvo tokens for a portion of protocol revenue but from my understanding a portion of the protocol revenue also goes towards an ecosystem reserve that is used to basically build out the protocol and reinvest in itself but on top of this obvious takers aren't just free riding they're not just getting this money for nothing the people that are staking their other tokens are actually uh providing a backstop to the system so if

something was to happen if there was an exploit or whatever that happened on the on in the rv protocol the first line of defense is basically selling off uh ave tokens from the stakers to cover the uh the shortfall in the protocol so this is i guess like uh similar to makers kind of um mechanism where they print mkr tokens to make up for the shortfall whereas instead of printing tokens are they just just sells off tokens of stakers and kind of socializes the losses with the stakers because the logic flows that the stakers are governing the system as well and if they make a bad governance decision that leads to a kind of like exploit or if they make a bad decision or if they're not monitoring the protocol as they should then they should be the ones to take the hit first and i agree with that

so there are a lot of different designs out there i think there's going to be plenty more going into the future um but we're going to see how they play out but yeah more on this in the newsletter today if you wanted to check it out uh but i'll leave it at that for now so tim bico provided an uh i guess like a thread like he always does on the latest ethereum all-call debs call uh i think the most interesting part of the thread to me was that the dates for the test nets for eip1559 or the london upgrade which includes eip1559 were moved back a little bit as i've mentioned on the refill before i expected a one to two week delay on london due to a bug that was found in one five five nine that was a consensus bug so that needed to be fixed um these

are the new test net dates uh the the roxton fork on june 24th gurley on uh june 30th and rinkerby on july 7th so uh i think from testnet to mainnet they want they want to wait at least three weeks so i think uh the best we can hope for right now is a july 28 main net date but that hasn't um been chosen yet that'll be chosen after the test nets kind of go live um but july 28th or it could push into august if uh the developers don't feel comfortable enough at the court the courthouse don't feel comfortable enough kind of um rushing it out not rushing it out but like launching on july 28th yeah so that's the latest on london on one five five nine it's not too far away still i mean as i

said this isn't a big delay um you know this is basically if it goes into august it'll be three weeks who cares we've waited over two years for this i can wait another three weeks um and especially if it means that we're launching this um you know properly and we're not rushing it to maina or anything like that so yeah there's the latest update on on london so starkware announced today that they have launched their alpha version of their new their stark net kind of uh uh a product here so stuck net planets they're calling it um this alpha is on the roxton test net so what stucknet planets alpha offers is it's the first step to their main net release for for kind of our stock net um it's a permissionless touring complete zk roll up it is not evm compatible it uses its

own language and a virtual machine i believe language is called cairo and it uses its own virtual machine to process that but developers can still implement their business logic of choice in a smart contract and deploy permissionlessly on starknet the state transitions of stark net are proven off chain and then verified on chain much like ethereum users can interact directly with these smart contracts here so i'm actually glad that starkware is taking a different approach with this where they're not going for like the evm compatible route they're actually going for um you know using a new language that they believe to be an improvement over solidity uh called cairo and they seem to be using their own kind of like uh virtual machine here as well which i think is fine because we already

have enough evm compatible stuff i believe we have polygon we have arbitrary we have optimism we have zk sync as well so stark we're taking a bit of a different kind of approach here i think is very very good for innovation very good for seeing what works what doesn't work and things like that so really excited to see this uh you can go read this uh blog post it'll be linked in the youtube description it has a bunch more information in there so mark cuban posted a blog post to his blog today called the brilliance of yield farming liquidity providing and valuing crypto projects in this blog post he essentially goes through kind of like what he believes the draw of defy is why it's such a game changer why it's a game changer for businesses and why it's just like a million times better

than you know the existing businesses in in meat space essentially i highly recommend going in giving this blog post to read it's really great to get his perspective on this i've spoken about mark cuban a lot before on the refuel where i said basically that i was very impressed by his knowledge of d5 and ethereum and the fact that he's playing paying such close attention and for someone who basically is a is a billionaire who's got a lot more stuff going on in his life than than ethereum and defy i think uh particularly defined nfts have caught his attention so much that he seems to be focusing a lot of his time on it which is really awesome to see and i've i've said before how i think that someone like mark um who has a completely different audience that he reaches um as opposed to someone like me

or bankless or whatever and it's really great to see him keep pressing on with d5 here so go read this it'll be linked in the youtube description below so this is a chart that i've actually been monitoring for quite a while i'd actually saw this back in january and i was like okay let's see how this goes so every few weeks i would check it and i would see it tick up and i'd be like oh okay this is really cool and then it keeps picking up and ticking up and kicking up and then eventually it got to a point where the percentage of the uh supply and smart contracts was actually is actually now at the same level it was during the dow now why is this this significant well this is 23 of all 8 in smart contracts and the dow on back in

june 2016 was able to get getting so much eath in it because it was the only thing you really could do with your eighth back then and the dow was a huge deal for everyone that was around back then or even like everyone who's heard about it you'll know all about the doubt so i won't talk about the doubt here but you can see here that during 2017 2018 and 2019 until really d5 summer kind of took off ethe in smart contracts remained kind of flat or like ranging or kind of range bound after the dow fork here and it's also good to to keep in mind that 23 of all eth in um smart contracts in june 2016 was less than it is now because the supply of eighth was less the supply of eth on june 2016 was 71 million 23 percent of

that i believe is 17 million ish maybe um i i think so uh maybe a bit more than that maybe 18 or 19 million but anyway uh and today there's 115 million each so 20 uh 23 of that is about 27 or 28 million eighth so it is even more eth on a on an absolute basis not just on i kind of like this percentage basis here and that means that at current prices uh there's 63 billion dollars worth of eth in smart contracts whereas in june of 2016 there was only 230 million dollars worth of eth because june of 2016 the price of it was 15 uh and and today it's about 2 500 so this is just absolutely incredible as i said i've been watching this for a while i've just been blown away by this and

you may be wondering okay well what does this mean like what smart contracts is eth in well this counts the deposit contract so the the contract that you have to send your eth to to get into eth2 that's 5.3 or 5.4 million eighth right now this counts d5 of course which is at 9 million eighth i think something like that discounts uh supply in bridge contracts so when you send your ether to a bridge to go to another chain like polygon or bsc or you want to go to a layer 2 system like loopering or something discounts that i think there's like all up maybe two two and a half three million or something like that in those contracts then it also counts multisig so the gnosis multisig is a smart contract wallet um same with something like argent smart

contract wallets it counts all these smart contract wallets as well and that quickly adds up to what we're seeing today so you can see that it's just it keeps going up it doesn't seem to want to go down and this also speaks to another chart that i've shown on the refuel before about the the amount of eth in smart contracts versus the amount of ethon centralized exchanges this just shows that the ethereum economy the ethereum on chain economy and system is growing at such a rapid pace and it's actually being used um you know fundamentally not just used i kind of like what it was back in the day just for the dow the ethers in many different places right now so i'm going to keep monitoring this chart i'm going to go over this in the next data pump for those uh in in next month's data

part because i think it's really interesting there's a bit more i can talk to here but that basically explains you know where all the eighth is and just incredible that 63 billion dollars worth of eth is sitting in smart contracts rather than sitting on exchanges so alchemix finally launched their al eth product so for those who don't know this product allows you to basically leverage your eath and and borrow al eth and i think right now uh there's going to be uh i'm not sure if it's it's live right now but it's going to be live soon where you can put your al eth into an amm lp farm and farm lcx tokens as well as whatever other rewards are put on there uh so basically to to get into this kind of like um this product it you basically deposit each and for every

four if you deposit you can borrow one al eth there's a debt ceiling of 2000 al eth right now that got hit pretty much instantly i don't think it's been raised yet so definitely um you know if you're waiting for this product you have to wait until that kind of limits uh raised there but this is really cool because this again is a self-paying loan for those of you who know alchemix you'll know about the self-paying loan of of the dye product that they have where you can basically put die in and you'll get uh uh you'll get like al usd and then that will pay it as a loan and then that'll pay itself off and you're able and you're able to kind of do whatever you want with the al usd and you can't be liquidated same kind of thing here where you

deposit uh uh you put deposit eighth you can borrow one ai for every four eighth and do whatever you want with that al eth whether that and while this kind of like pays itself off so um obviously not much to do with it right now since it's a new product but you'll soon be able to do a lot more with it so this is really exciting uh it's just a way another way to stack eath another way to kind of get a yield on your ether so peter pan posted a really awesome diagram of the index co-op community or the index card team here now i've spoken about the index cop a lot before on on the refuel and i think this really is the best community in d5 right now you can see that it's very structured uh it's been set up with different working

groups that i've kind of spoken about before down the bottom i think my camera is cutting off on the left side here but but down the bottom it says d5 partners institutional investors otc desks and then exchanges and custodians influencers and retail investors and then you can see up the stack where this kind of uh all kind of leads to here and kind of like what what feeds into it and then at the top you can kind of like see it's the index cooper leadership at the top and then uh it feeds into like the organization and then all the different kind of working groups meta governance treasury analytics um and then where set sits in this and where the method methodologists sit and things like that so i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check it out for yourself and but i do think that

i i still think that the index copy is the best community in d5 they've got the best structure here and i absolutely love what they're doing so uh anton from urine has teased a yearn v 1.2.0 ui facelift so this is awesome i mean i still think that the yearn uh interface can do with a lot of improvements so i'm glad to see that they're actually working on this so you can see here like in the images that i'm showing you uh basically what it looks like this is very different to what it currently currently looks like on the live site and i think over time this is going to get better and better that's my one gripe with yeon is that the interface or the ui that they have right now is kind of meh it's not really you know very user friendly it's definitely

not something that uh you know my grandma's gonna use or anything like that and neither is this to be fair but i think as time goes on it's just gonna improve over time and i think that for d5 natives you know a lot of this stuff doesn't matter too much but if you want to get more and more users into this ecosystem user interfaces and user experience is definitely going to matter uh big time here so instadap has raised 10 million dollars in fresh funding here the uh round was led by standard crypto a crypto fund and other investors include defy alliance uh long hash ventures and uh yeon founder andre cronje here so this comes on the heels of their 2.4 million dollar seed round that was uh was done last year i believe uh

where investors were coinbase ventures naval and pantera now for those of you who don't know instadap it's basically a middleware protocol that sits between different d5 protocols and the user where the user can use instadap to basically do various functions within d5 not just on ethereum but i believe they they support polygon as well so that's really really cool and it's really cool to see them get more funding here they're going to have a token coming out soon they're not they haven't been shy about that they're gearing up to launch it uh and i'm sure there's going to be an air drop to instadap users i i'm not sure if you could use instead app now and get the airdrop maybe they're going to clue into that and think that people are going to try and game the system but if you have used instagram in the past i

would personally expect an airdrop from this but it's still good to see that they got you know 10 million dollars of funding especially even in a down market right like it's still good to see teams getting funded and having like certainty that even if the market stays like this for a while they're still going to have money to kind of build out their products because you know the best products are built in bear markets at the end of the day so alpha finance launched their alpha launch pad incubator program over the weekend so this launch pad program will basically multiply the value acryl to alpha stakers grow the alpha universe create key building blocks in d5 and grow talent and dev mind share across the ecosystem so this is really really cool because there's been a bunch of

these kind of like launch pad initiatives kind of i guess launched lately you could say uh sushi swap has one with their miso kind of um thing which is i guess a launch pad slash kind of token issuance platform there's a bunch of others out there i believe yeon has a program around this i think you know i can't remember off the top of my head there's a bunch of projects that have this and and the goal really is to capture the talent because there's so many projects out there that want to create like a universe for themselves but talent is scarce so how do you create a talent well sorry how do you capture talent well you you do you do these programs where you kind of create a launchpad and you give these kind of new d5 founders that want to launch their products access to your

existing kind of knowledge and experience and and reach and everything and we saw this play out in in a similar way with uh the yarn ecosystem where they started not acquiring but essentially partnering up with a bunch of different default protocols out there and basically bringing them under the urn umbrella so obviously sushi swap is one there's pickle finance there's uh there's a bunch of others out there and the best and i think cover protocol and things like that and this worked like a two-pronged approach basically got these projects under the urn umbrella and added value to the urn ecosystem uh but also killed off competition i think that was another goal there they didn't say that but i definitely think there was a way to kind of kill off competition so still really cool to see this from alpha finance one of the best teams in d5

still um definitely go check out the whole thread and the blog post for more information on what the alpha launch pad is here uh and i think i'm gonna be on to the last thing i wanted to talk about today which was this absolutely brilliant thread from bobby ong from coingecko so he put together this thread that basically goes through how to stay safe in crypto uh and there's i mean there's it's a it's kind of a long thread here there's uh how many how many tweets in this thread there's about i think 17 tweets in this thread going through the best practices with links to different things and how to keep yourself safe how to keep yourself from getting your crypto stolen you know links to different things about like the best hardware wallets to use and stuff like that i just thought this was very

important to bring out because this was something that was asked during the ama uh if you want to watch the recap of the ama it's up on youtube by the way but someone kind of like asked the questions like how do you stay safe like what's the best way to interact with kind of like crypto do you just do it with like a naked metamask would you use a hardware wallet my advice really um the simplest advice i can give is always use a hardware wallet don't keep more than maybe some kind of like a little bit of spending funds on a naked metamask because what ends up happening is that metamask is very easy to kind of like exploit because if someone gets a virus on your on your pc or some malware they can basically back door or man in the middle and they can kind of steal your

funds on metamask or they can make you send transactions to people that you didn't want to send transactions to which means that they could essentially uh go you know go in the middle of your transaction and and and trick you into sending tokens to them so that on the service level i mean the bare minimum i would do was do do all my transactions through a hardware wallet but you can also be man in the middle attacked via that as well as i explained on the ama where you could be signing something on those hardware wallets that you didn't mean to sign because someone sent the transaction to it by doing a man-of-the-mill attack there so this thread goes through all of that it's got links to different kind of hardware wallets and stuff like that and how to do things like remove contract approvals like smart contract approvals

um and make sure that you're securing your mobile phone and not and not having two-factor authentication are uh powered by your mobile number it should be powered by a separate app so yeah i'll link this thread in the youtube description you can go check this out it's got so much good info in here i mean it's very very popular 10 000 likes 3 700 retweets so yeah go check that out if you haven't yet but that's it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone