Alchemix upgrade, ETH as a store of value and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #93 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano today is the 6th of april 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i put out this tweet a few hours ago because i was reflecting uh today while i was kind of like sitting on the on the computer scrolling through twitter and i basically said that i was feeling a bit emotional uh because eighth was holding steady over two thousand dollars and it still is it's up at the 2100 mark here and i was just kind of like thinking about 2018 and 2019 when the sentiment for ethereum and eth was just so incredibly bad and incredibly toxic and it felt like that the bear market kind of would last forever right that it would never end and then i

kind of finished offset saying kind of we made it fam now i think we made it in some respects and in others the journey's just getting started right from what i mean by what i kind of meant by saying we made it was more so kind of we made it through the worst of i i think like of what we're going to see in the future because during the bear market especially during 2018 and 2019 not only was its price like really bad right and it kind of like fouled 90 plus percent in 2018 alone but also the use cases just weren't there yet there was like a little bit of d5 here you know a little bit of dow stuff here there was like basically no nft stuff uh you know nfts were a joke at that point because of the

cryptokitties kind of saga from late 2017 so from that perspective you know it it did certainly feel like at times and people kind of like that i know questioned like what were we doing here like was ethereum actually gonna change the world is you know was the things that we were building actually going to go on and become like billion dollar unchained businesses and protocols and stuff like that it definitely was not a short thing and then on top of all of that you had the toxicity coming from certain camps especially the the bitcoin camp where uh they were like you know ethereum's kind of dead it's gonna it's finished uh it is its demise right the price is kind of like dead the platform itself is not gonna amount to anything blah blah blah now that's easy to fend off these days

because it's so obviously you know untrue and we have so many use cases and we've got so much economic activity to show them that it's not true but back then especially when the price was really bad it was incredibly hard to convince anyone because the fact is like we were like a lot of us um ethereans back then we were bringing up you know arguments and and fighting back against the but we had like a tiny community behind us we didn't have the price action to behind us to get more people involved with it and unfortunately a lot of what happens in this space is dictated by the price of different assets so from that point of view it was just incredibly hard to defend ethereum back then but these days it is incredibly easy uh i think you know it's actually been wild to see the

sentiment change on twitter from even like people that i wouldn't consider to be like i guess you could call them bitcoin maximalists i considered to be just bitcoiners who you know didn't necessarily think ethereum was anything special didn't really care for it was kind of indifferent about it now those people are like really kind of like into ethereum they actually think eath is a is a good asset to hold they think it's a store of value i mean it's just totally wild and for those of you who just weren't around in 18 and 19 and didn't live through that uh you know that's just kind of like i guess a tldr on what it was like back then it was very very very different and it's just completely insane how much things have changed in just 18 months right we went from essentially ethereum and

eth being dead or being considered dead to ethereum being considered by not only the people in the ecosystem but the people outside of it to be the future of finance the world settlement layer we've gotten to the point now where people like okay you know ethereum is going to win but like what else is going to win right what what else is going to be a really used platform in the future like what other blockchains and things like that so yeah it's been it's been insane to see that but i won't drone on too much about that uh i just always like reminiscing and thinking back and kind of taking a bit of a break to think like how far we've come because it you know life comes at you so fast right and you know if you if you don't kind of like stop and think about it sometimes it

just gets ahead of you you're going to miss it you're going to kind of like you know might get to a point later on in life you're like wow i wish i kind of took time to reflect on that and took time to kind of take it all in and that's what i try to do from time to time especially in this industry where it's just absolutely insane like the the industry moves so incredibly quickly that it's very easy to lose sight of things uh you know it's funny because uh i i've kind of put a thread out about this before about the short termism in this space where everything needs to happen like now and if it doesn't happen now people aren't interested in it right um you know it took for example it's it's taking longer than people would like for the layer two ecosystem to mature on to

grow and things like that but that's all just gonna be a distant memory soon because these things are gonna go live on main net these things are gonna get usage you know as i've said before the optimism to delay to like july for their public mainnet means means nothing in the grand scheme of things so i think just you know having that long-term outlook and also pausing maybe just once a week to take kind of stock and kind of i guess like take it take it all in right take the previous week's worth of stuff all in and you know if you know i know i kind of do this video every day and obviously a lot of you watching every day are kind of on top of all this stuff going on in the ecosystem but you know you might watch the video and then close it off and then kind of

forget uh so that's why i also do like a weekly recap on through ether with the newsletter and the podcast because it's good to get like the the highlights of the week as well and to kind of get a refresher there so yeah you can check that out too um the ether you just have to just to kind of google it to ether.substance.com as well there um just a little bit of a shiel for you there but anyway let's kind of move on to i guess like the news from the last 24 hours uh our first bit of news is that if you have a bitcoin grant you can go claim your payouts now the cool thing about this is i think that anyone can actually click claim match here but that doesn't mean that you'll get the funds if you click claim match for someone else's grant

it'll just kind of like send the um the funds to that that that person i think that's how it works maybe maybe it doesn't work like that because i did it for both ethub and the the the daily gray um but esub's address was different to the daily grace so i'm not sure but you know it might work like that but anyway if you have a grant definitely go uh go go claim it there so samsung put out this this funny tweet today where he said found a critical bargaining contract that's over four years old possibly the oldest to ever be discovered full story coming soon so keep an eye out now there are not many smart contracts on ethereum that are over four years old um you know you think about it four years ago it was 2017 uh a lot of the i guess contracts from

back then um have been kind of like superseded by v2s of different protocols you know maybe he found a critical bug in ether delta maybe he found it in uh the wrapped ether smart contract which i doubt um because i i don't think he would tease it like this i think maybe what he's found is a critical bug in a contract that is just not very much used anymore but it's kind of or it's kind of like a dead contract uh and he wouldn't uh i guess like he definitely wouldn't be saying this if it was still an issue right if the bug was still out there i'm pretty sure i would have been patched by now but very very curious to to see what he's found here and for those who don't know samsung is a basically you know is famous within the ethereum ecosystem for catching

critical bugs in many important smart contracts that other kind of people have missed and that auditors have missed so he's pretty much a genius when it comes to security uh catching security issues and different smart contracts and vulnerabilities there he works for paradigm one of the best kind of funds in the space and um you know uh the the talent at paradigm is just insane and samsung obviously adds to that but yeah i'm gonna keep an eye on this and once he kind of puts out the full story i'm sure you'll all see it but i'll also go over it on the refuel so kyber network put out uh i guess like yesterday they launched their mainnet beta for the kaiba dynamic market maker or the dmm protocol now i've talked about this on the refuel a few months ago

when they uh kind of like uh i guess announced this so what the dynamic market maker kind of exchange is it's basically a next generation amm designed to optimize fees and enable extremely high capital efficiency for liquidity providers now this might bring a little bit of bowels within with unisop v3 right it's the same goal of unisof v3 where they're trying to make it much more efficient for lps and trying to optimize fees as well so kyber dmm uh as i said it stands for dynamic market maker and it kind of works in a similar way where there's dynamic fees so the the fees of the protocol will actually adjust based on market conditions so based on the trading volume and price volatility should reduce kind of impermanent loss

for lps and maximize returns uh for the for the takers here programmable curves this is kind of like i guess how you can have a a you know a concentrated liquidity and unisop where you can have like a a curve uh style like uh you know bonding curve or you can have like a a classic uni-swap style curve or a classic amm style curve here um and then there's permissionless liquidity contribution so anyone can provide liquidity by depositing token by depositing token inventory into various pools and any taker you know for example dapps aggregators and users can source liquidity from the dmm now that's basically the tldr of how it works you can read through this thread for uh i guess a deeper dive into this but what i did want to kind of talk about a

little bit was kaiba and where they kind of sit in the ecosystem now i remember speaking about them a few months ago or a couple months ago or something like that and saying that i think that they were kind of like trying to or needing to reinvent themselves at this stage um because of the fact that they they were basically an on-chain liquidity protocol that um essentially was like on a dex aggregator but they kind of i think lost a lot of market share to um the likes of like one inch and i guess some some of the other ones like dexag which is now slingshot and things like that uh so they kind of have to like come up with something something new and kind of differentiate themselves and i think the dynamic market maker here is definitely a product that looks extremely interesting

and and may just be that product for kyber i mean you know for those of you been around for a while you know that kaiba has been around since 2017 they did a massive ico back then something like 70 million dollars i think um so they've obviously had to have a lot of runway have a big team and have been very core building block within the d5 ecosystem for a long time now uh so yeah i'm hoping you know this this kind of works out for them we see like a resurgence in popularity for kyber here because yeah as far as the i guess like being a dex aggregator in the the way they were doing it was through an on-chain liquidity pool sort of like what zero x does but that was kind of i guess like um less capital efficient and less popular than just like the dex

aggregators that allowed you to just pull from different kind of i guess like liquidity pools on ethereum um so kyber kind of was i was going a different path there but i think this uh this dmm here is gonna is gonna lead to some more growth so congrats to for getting this to mainnet um in a beta fashion here to kaiba and i'll keep an eye on this for sure so yearn finance uh put out this uh i guess like this this summary of uh yearn y volts at a glance here and you can kind of see i guess like the most popular vaults uh in terms of like how much money they have in them and the revenue uh generated by each of these vaults it's pretty cool to see that the highest revenue

generating volt is actually the synthetic eighth volt uh so the s8 um well the curve s8 volts essentially here and then you got like uh a couple of others around here like usdp that's a stable coin i can't remember what it is i think maybe it's paxo stablecoin i don't know um then st which is staked either from lido uh the three curve pool which is uh the very famous stable coin pool and then a bunch of others here as well so yeah you can see the tvl of each of these pools the biggest uh kind of like pool seems to be the yv die pool uh still stablecoin pool with 170 million dollars i think a lot of that's coming from alchemics because alchemix uses yearn as kind of its its yield aggregator here

but yeah i really like this i mean it's just like a quick kind of one pager on for the week of kind of like the yarn vaults at a glance here and you know i think this just speaks to kind of like yearn and how they've been building for for a little while now kind of maybe not quietly but quietly for the wider ecosystem you you you all from d5 somewhat will remember how much attention euron had back then and then i think the kind of like newness and hotness wore off and then we kind of went into the d5 bear market and i think since then people have kind of like ignored yearn which is which is dumb in my opinion because of the fact that um they they've actually been building like some really great products and their tvl is still being growing i

think they've got like two billion tbl or something like that and you know i just noticed today the price of the wi-fi token is starting to go up again um and i noticed that because i still hold my wi-fi tokens i still think the project is really really good so just a disclaimer there but um i think you know there should be more teams that do this right giving a glance into your protocol putting it in a nice graphic so people can see kind of like the growth and and where the revenues are being generated from and stuff like that this is kind of like i guess a an earnings report right for for the company but like at a glance and it's not the company the protocol so to speak so yeah it was really really cool to see this from uh from yearn i hope more

protocols follow follow what they're doing here so the total crypto market cap is now two trillion dollars i think it's more than that now like 2.1 trillion dollars which is quite crazy right i mean i wrote about this in the daily grade newsletter today um and what i actually focused on was how we calculate market caps like circulating versus fully diluted and stuff like that um but that's not what i'm going to talk about today what i did want to talk about is just how crazy this number is so when you take this number and go on coin get go and look at the the assets bitcoin accounts for what 1.1 trillion dollars worth of of this and then you have ether which is 250 billion and then you have like a bunch of others between 10 and 50

and then you have like this long tail but the funny thing is the long tail is like uh the the top 100 is one billion or more in market cap now which is insane right like and if you look at the top 100 there's a lot of stuff in there that doesn't have any business being worth what it's worth which is just absolutely crazy but those those things actually don't really move the needle much right because if you think about it if there's like 50 billion uh sorry 50 projects with a one billion dollar cap each that's only 50 billion right so and if you look at the total crypto market cap being 2 trillion here 50 billion of that is a very small amount it's like two and a half percent or something like that so and you know bitcoin can move 50 billion in market cap

with just like a small price rise doesn't have to move very much um so that's why a lot of that is is kind of like concentrated at those kind of like top assets there and you know it's been funny to watch kind of like i guess the bunch of the other assets in the top 10 just like go to like 50 billion essentially right 50 40 30 billion there and there's still assets in there that don't belong there i mean i just saw xrp pumping today and i was just like what the hell like this is just scaring me i mentioned that yesterday how there were all these kind of things you know going up in value really quickly that signal to me that were in like a late stage bull market but i'm not even sure anymore i just don't know you know we have so many

bullish catalysts coming up that i think we're going to have like a a pretty good next couple of months at least like if we think about it the coinbase um kind of direct listing where coinbase lists on the stock exchange in the u.s is going to be absolutely massive you know it's going to open at 100 billion market cap right out the gate it's probably going to go higher than that um you know as people bid it up it's going to be the first kind of i guess um exposure that a lot of the traditional finance system can get to the crypto asset class because a lot of them didn't want to touch i guess bitcoin or ether or any of the asset assets directly so they're gonna definitely buy coinbase it's like a a blue chip kind of like tech stock you know based in silicon

valley it's got all the hallmarks of something that you would want to own as like a traditional finance kind of i guess like shop a fund manager or a bank or an institution or something like that so that's definitely going to get bit up for sure that's going to bring a ton of attention into um the crypto space and on top of that coinbase now has to report do quarterly reports so they have to do earnings reports they have to kind of uh you know talk about like what their growth's been like and stuff like that and actually doing one of those today so i think it's due in about what seven eight hours from when i'm recording this so i'll go over that in tomorrow's refuel but i'm really curious to see what the growth was like i'm betting they had a massive amount of growth in q1 so

because it's the q1 earnings report i'm betting they had a lot of retail growth in q1 if you actually look back on it uh so i'm really curious to see that but you know what what i'd actually be more curious to see something like binance because if you really think about it you know coinbase is very u.s centric but binance is is pretty global if you look at it and binance has a lot more assets so if you would if you have a coinbase account that's all well and good but you know if coinbase doesn't have the asset that you want to buy it's more than likely that binance is going to have that asset so you'll have just accounts on both so i think that finance's growth would have probably been more explosive than coinbase's for q1 but i think coinbase is still going to be a really great measure

to see kind of like you know if you know how much retail investors are here how many new investors a year because as i've said they're definitely here we can see it playing out in the markets right we can see all the new money coming in but i'm curious to see just how um how i guess like uh how crazy it just it is because that will give us a kind of a a nice indication of what kind of i guess like stage in the cycle we are in because if it's like absolutely explosive numbers from q4 last year to q1 then you know you might look at that and be like okay wow you know this is this is pretty crazy right now maybe the maybe the top the cycle top is near and as i've said before i have no idea i have my concerns and doubts and i have

my reasons to be bullish but we'll have to see how it all plays out so yeah you know i mean this total crypto market cap could be at 4 trillion by the end of the month we just don't know right i mean bitcoin can just double and and kind of like carry this whole thing from here so we'll have to see how that plays out for sure uh but yeah i guess like big milestone here maybe we'll go to 10 trillion before the cycle is done who knows that's a that's a pretty big market cap i think that's like the mic cap of gold right now or maybe a bit under what gold is so yeah we'll see how that goes so alchemics completed their transmuter v 1.1 migration which is a massive upgrade as they've said here so basically what this transmuter did was uh it basically added a way to get

boosted yields on your die deposit so the yields are now 37 percent on your dye deposits and this then and you know you might be wondering how can they get 37 on die well and they explain it here and i'll quote well instead of just the current 80 million diet earning yield now 280 million diet is and that larger capital base translates to more yield for depositors boosting it three times from standard urine volts as more depositors come in this boost will go down however so it's probably i mean there was 37 when it launched like 23 hours ago it might not be that right now i haven't checked but it's still definitely higher than what it was so i mean i think alcomix right now and i hold lkx tokens just a disclaimer there but i think alchemix right now is the best place to get yield on your

die uh currently uh in terms of like the highest yield uh for a protocol that i mean hasn't been around very long so the risk is there but for a protocol that is doing very well and then you can actually boost that because you can kind of like put it into like a curve pool and then put that in sorry mint alusd out of this put that into a curve pool and then put those curved tokens into the alchemix farm and farm lkx tokens so i mean this is just like a yield burger going on here which is crazy so if you've if you've got some stable coins i would suggest that they're kind of like um giving this this a look here through alchemics and definitely consider the smart contract risk of course and stuff like that and maybe not don't put all of your net

worth into it or anything like that but still it's just great to see that teams and different teams of different projects are coming up with i guess really really uh innovative ways to maximize yield for depositors at the end of the day and you know a lot of people might think this is too good to be true but this is all accounted for like this is all unchained completely transparent there is no kind of like money being printed out of thin air here it's not possible to do that with the way this is set up so um yeah this is all real it's all it's all well and good um the the risk obviously is the smart contract risk um but that's i guess like all of d5 right now uh you know but alchemix is definitely newer than most defy apps so just a bit of caution there but

definitely go check it out if you are looking for somewhere to earn some yield on your die so dan from from the block here put out a really great thread where he basically broke down what the private funding uh kind of rounds look like right now and he basically said that q1 of this year was a historical quarter for venture funding private funding in the crypto sector with roughly 3.18 billion dollars allocated to different projects so you can see the breakdown here most of it was ghost went to crypto financial services which isn't d5 i don't think because he split defy up into a different kind of thing here i think that it's like the the centralized services and the trad fire services here and if teasing gaming had it is even

bigger i mean i think that is in part due to uh you know the flow kind of blockchain thing uh with like the nba top shot and all that they raised a ton of money i mean i looked at that and i was like this is just insane that's a lot of money that they raised but that takes up a lot of that i think infrastructure i think a big part of that is definitely the stock wear raise which is like 75 million dollars um so the infrastructure includes like you know layer twos and stuff like that d5 of course is still there but a lot smaller than i would have thought it would be which is quite crazy uh trading broke trading brokerage of course uh enterprise protocols and data analytics as well which is a fair chunk here but yeah that's 3.18 billion dollars in

just the private markets which is which is pretty insane right now and you know i was actually kind of thinking about this and i kind of think to myself this is just another i guess signal to me that things are pretty hot right now uh there are evaluations right now in private rounds that are getting way ahead of where the tech is there are some private rounds where people where they're being valued at like one to two hundred million dollars and they don't even have a product yet right nothing is live it's basically just a it's more than a white paper it's there's like kind of i guess like an alpha sometimes or a test net but there's nothing on main net the the raise wants to kind of i guess get done before they go on to mainnet and stuff like that so some of these valuations are

definitely very uh getting very ahead of themselves but it's also a function of these teams wanting to raise as much money as they can while i guess the market's hot because if we do go into another long kind of bear market maybe it goes for a few months maybe it goes for two years i don't know these teams want to have runway right because we all know this is the future but the markets can remain irrational you know for for a long time you know in either direction mind you doesn't matter if it's up or down it can remain a rational in either direction so from that point of view a lot of projects are just raising more plus capital is so easy to come by right now there is money flying absolutely everywhere because everyone's made a lot of money in the last year

there's a ton of new money coming into the ecosystem that isn't crypto native that wants a share of what's going on especially in the private rounds because they want to get get in as cheap as they can so yeah there's a lot of that stuff going on as well which is just another signal to me that we are in such a full-blown bull market i mean you know it's basically i would have to say like it's at least mid-stage if not like mid to late in terms of like where we are but as i said before i don't know like you know this could just be the adoption cycle right this doesn't have to be one of those kind of like typical crypto i guess bubbles where we just go up really quickly and then crash but the other flip side for that is that i'm

seeing so much just absolute crap pump that just gives me pause i'm just like okay there is adoption in like d5 and nfts and stuff like that but there is also like this massive bubble in the in just so much vaporware right now and so many scams you know are we going to see like all that money just flow back into the legit projects or is it going to get to a point where just like the fresh money just runs out people just get tired of it and everything just dumps together typically everything just tends to dump together right so we don't know who knows we'll see but yeah pretty insane kind of growth here i guess in the private investment space so last thing i wanted to talk about was i mean something that i've been talking about for the last i guess like

maybe a couple of months now about traditional finance waking uh by people waking up to eth as an asset now you have uh this traditional finance person called i think his name is anthony scaramucci here as far as i know he is not a very popular person because of his politics or something i didn't really follow that so i don't know what's going on there but he he he's a billionaire fund manager and he has been paying a lot of attention to crypto lately but the reason i mean because because of him being a billionaire fund manager and because of him having a lot of clout within that traditional finance space and a lot of connections i did want to bring up something that he touched on in this video and you can watch this video i'll link it in the description but basically what he said

is he both referred to ether as a story of value and he also said that he needs to get his clients from non-crypto to bitcoin and then he can get them from bitcoin to everything else which means he has his eyes set on eighth for sure he he understands the value of eighth he actually said some things about that too but this kind of like speaks to what i was saying uh um what i've been saying is that the leap from non-crypto to crypto is absolutely massive right for a lot of people it's just it requires a change in thinking it requires especially for older generations where they they didn't grow up with like in a digital world so it requires them to kind of i guess rewire their brains a little bit and accept that these things are real it's not a scam it's not a ponzi

and then once they've accepted that the leap from bitcoin to eth and other assets is just so small right because they can just be like okay well this is like bitcoin except they can do all this other stuff essentially so that's another thing that i kind of wanted to mention there and then i said this is your alpha because it is i i have no doubt in my mind that eth is like as i said before ethan is the next thing to get the the public company balance uh uh balance sheet treatment where a lot of these big companies just have eth on their balance sheets they're not just going to stop at bitcoin they're going to buy more they're gonna going to be ton more our traditional money coming into each is now viewed as a story of value by not just people within the

crypto ecosystem but with uh from from from outside of it ethereum as a technology has so much promise and so much kind of like usage and so many so much real usage it has validation for big companies like visa i mean all these things are compound together to create this massive kind of i guess opportunity right now and you know eth might be a little bit you know expensive for some people at over two thousand dollars because just a year ago it was like a hundred dollars or whatever it was or 200 or something like that but at the same time i look at market cap right 250 billion bitcoins at a trillion i mean bitcoin is at a trillion based on you know much less than what i think eth can can grow based on like in terms of utility and stuff like that you know

ethereum doesn't even have its pos issuance or erp one five five nine yet you know i actually have a kind of a little bit of a theory that we're gonna run up until one five five nine goes on to uh the ethereum main net in in july hopefully and then we may have a bit of a cool off period not not investment advice but that's kind of like the thesis that i have i'm not going to be trading around it or anything like that but if i had to guess you know the hype of one five five nine you know the narrative is there um the hype of like the merger getting closer and closer as well d5 all this new money coming in i mean you know we we might go until july before we have a have a call off i don't know maybe we we call off sooner than

that who knows but really great to see people viewing ether as a story of value i think that narrative is going to keep getting larger and larger keep getting more kind of like into people into different people's minds and more people just going to buy eth because of it so yeah i'm holding tight for sure not selling any of my eth that's for sure uh but we'll see how crazy things get over the next few months all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for watching and listening be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up join the discord channel subscribe to the newsletter and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone