BSC drama, Alchemix teased and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #61 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sasano and today is the 19th of february 2021 all right everyone let's get into it for today so i think i i kind of need to discuss this uh on the refuel today before i jump into all the updates uh from i guess the last 24 hours and you know there was a lot of drama i guess over the last 24 hours about binance smart chain and you know ethereum and ethereum competitors in general and stuff like that so i wanted to talk about that and i got pretty fired up on twitter i mean you know i personally i really just don't like the kind of like misleading marketing going on but i'm going to get into that but i do want to kind of start off by

saying that crypto runs on narratives right so what what you see across the entire kind of crypto space is like a story being sold from every project out there right ethereum's trying to sell a story bitcoin is trying to sell a story all the projects within there are trying to sell stories and that's how you get people on board with your mission right get people excited about your product get people buying your token and stuff like that so that's something to keep in mind while i talk about the rest of the stuff i wanted to talk about today um because it's very important right you see this play out across everything always it's just always the narrative the story you know if you have like a really great story then you can get a lot of users and get a lot of people buying your

token or get a lot of people paying attention to your project and that's exactly what's happened uh here and i'll explain why so firstly i wanted to start by saying i don't blame anyone for using other things other than ethereum right i don't consider myself an ethereum maximalist the reason i spend so much time in the ethereum ecosystem and and works hard and ethereum work so hard to educate people and support ethereum is because it has the values that i want to see upheld with this technology there is being decentralization permissionlessness and censorship resistance with uh you know a smart contract contracting platform built in you know bitcoin has those kind of um properties as well but you can't build anything on it right i mean you can but it's very limited right

so that's why i kind of like spend most of my time in the ethereum ecosystem and then within that i like to support projects that stick to those ideals as well right because for me especially with decentralization if you're just building a centralized thing then you can just build it on a database and it's better you don't need to build a centralized blockchain to achieve that goal right so the only reason you do that is because you have a token attached to the blockchain that you want to kind of like sell right and that's part of the narrative weaving as well so you know i understand that people are using other things because the fees on ethereum are high totally get that i mean i don't like paying the fees either like i'll be honest i mean it is annoying when i go to uni swap and

i pop up and you know there's a meta mouse pop up and it says 50 dollars i'm like oh right this sucks um but you know i i guess i'm a bit more tolerable of it because of the fact that like i'm so involved with the ecosystem you know i know what's coming down the pipeline i try to use the layer 2 solutions when i can but the ecosystem still needs to be kind of built out there so totally understand if you know i mean most users can't afford these fees and they just want to do simple things like a trade or whatever and if there's an alternative out there offering you cheaper fees but you know you you kind of like don't really care if it's not decentralized or whatever that's fine like i totally totally don't really haven't have an issue with that

but i think you know in the long term ethereum and decentralization still going to win uh for various reasons but i think you know there's also this this concept of like and and i guess this isn't supposed to be about binance smart champ in particular but it's supposed to be about i guess like centralization versus decentralization but i want to focus on on bsc binance smart chain because that's what everyone's talking about right now right so you know people say to me oh you know poor people can't use ethereum or people with not much money can't use ethereum and i i agree that's fine but at the same time the only things you really do you're doing on binance smart chain is playing in the casino right i mean ethereum has a casino as well with d5 don't get me wrong you know not all of d5 is like super organic bank

the unbanked or unbanked the bank's activity right where it's um you know not casino-like activity but you know i on on binance smart chain it's pretty much all that right it's just all like massive speculation now poor people are not doing this right they don't have the money to do this in the first place so on that note i just don't see that right um you know if they want to go there and they actually just want to do trades of certain things and get involved with the technology that's fine but if people are literally like i'm using the kind of word poor literally here like if you're in poverty if you're living paycheck to paycheck sort of thing or even less than that then i don't think you're going to be putting your money into crypto right um i i mean i just don't see why you

would right why would you blow your money in a casino when you you need to kind of like buy food or whatever right so or maybe maybe i'm wrong though i don't know but the way i see it is that the people that are using kind of binance smart chain right now are the people who are just chasing the money right chasing the casino and those people you know are coming from ethereum most of the time too and you know yes they may not be able to afford the fees on ethereum um but the thing is though if there was no casino on binance smart chain they wouldn't be using it i i don't think right there's just money falling from the sky so i think that's a big reason because if ethereum had low fees and there was still money to be made on

on bsc then people would still go there like i just don't think that the fees are the major driver here they are a driver and they play into the narrative that binance is trying to sell here but i don't think that they're the main reason because without the money without the carrot and the stick right without the incentives people wouldn't really have much reason to move over so i i think that's kind of like the main thing there um my main issue with bsc is the misleading marketing i actually don't care that it's centralized and it's it's doing whatever and they're like doing incentives to get people to come across and giving people money i don't care about any of that right what i care about is even like the ceo cz saying that it's decentralized saying that apps on there are flipping uni-swap in in

volumes when you know it it's very obvious that a lot of the volume is faked because on a low fee chain you can actually fake the volumes very easily and if you control the whole chain you're paying yourself the fees anyway so you know from from what i can tell most of the volume is faked right and that's just to juice up the narrative again right if you can say oh pancake swap flipped uni swap in volume by faking the volume then you can sell a narrative and pump the bnb token which it actually has been right it's been working and the other tokens too so as i said at the start all all narrative right and you see how this keeps playing into it every single time everything that is is kind of being marketed is to sell that narrative and i and i should know i

came from marketing right i was a full-time marketing person at set for 18 months and i still do marketing stuff so i know how the game is played and you know i to finances credit they're very good at this but at the same time they're they're misleading people so that's what i got really upset about today not so much about people using bsc or thinking that it's like a threat to ethereum i don't care about that right and i get that like a lot of users don't think about decentralization as the first property that they're looking for when using this kind of technology but for me it's like okay well then what's the point right just build something centralized and let people play in that um and tell them that it's centralized don't lie to them like i just i hate the lies right and the misleading

marketing here so that's that's kind of my problem there and then i see some people saying oh yeah okay you know bsc centralized it can decentralize over time it's like no that that's not that's not what can happen bsc is a straight clone of ethereum right straight up clone literally to the point where they didn't even bother to change some variable names so it just says ethereum in their code right and that's fine it's all open source you can fork it but what they did was they forked ethereum they cloned it they removed proof of work mining they put what's called delegated proof-of-stake in and they have 21 nodes that are running the entire network now these 21 nodes are all owned by binance like that's that's not even like that i don't think they try to hide that fact um it's all owned by blind so

essentially it's just a binance kind of centralized chain now what they did to achieve scalability right because you might be wondering oh if they just cloned ethereum then how do they achieve scalability well with these 21 super nodes right as they're called they don't have to worry about things like state bloat and and blockchain size and whatever right they just they take the cost of that on themselves because they're making a lot of money from the price of b b going up and other kind of things they're doing on the chain so they basically increase the gas limit um you might have heard me talk about the gas limit before and how that is a bottleneck for scalability on aetherium it's currently set to 12 and a half million on ethereum i think on binance smart chain they jacked it up to like 50 or 60 million

and they can keep pushing that up right if they if they hit those ceilings so that's why the fees are low because they haven't hit that ceiling yet i think they're at 40 network capacity whereas ethereum's obviously at 100 plus percent right at all times at this time so that's what they've done there right and that's how they've been able to to kind of like get the fees down but at the same time they're still using the underlying ethereum technology which has its own quirks it has its own limits there's only so far you can push it before you start running into a lot of these issues now cost is a is a big thing but obviously binance can bear the cost because they've got billions of dollars so that might not be an issue for them but the issue is on the tech level so

when they start running into these kind of ethereum specific kind of tech problems and bottlenecks because they've just forked it and they don't actually understand how it works they're not going to be able to fix it so from that point of view they're not even going to be able to decentralize because in order for them to decentralize they need to just introduce everything that they took out to achieve that scale anyway so they need to introduce either ethereum's proof of stake or proof of work back into it they need to cap the gas limit right they need to lower that and they need to basically have a healthy fee market going to support the network and pay validators as well out of like block rewards so they're never going to decentralize i'm just going to like put that out there it's always going to be

centralized but that doesn't mean that they can't succeed right they can of course succeed and they can of course get users because they have lots of marketing money and they and they're not shy about just like saying whatever they need to to get people to come across so that there's there's that kind of aspect to it um for me i think that again i said it before the battle is not really bsc versus ethereum at the end of the day it's centralization versus decentralization because it's very easy to create centralized platforms but the reason why ethereum exists is to decentralize all of those functions the reason why d phi exists is to decentralize those functions it is not to just replace the existing kind of i guess banking cartel that we have today with a new cartel

that a quote-unquote crypto native right that's not what i'm here for and i'm sure a lot of you aren't here for as well so you know if we're just settling for that then i'm out right if we're just going to settle for centralized kind of chains where it's just like casinos and no one cares then i i'm out personally like that's not what i'm here for and i'm glad that there are a lot of people in the ecosystem here for those ideals and sticking kind of with it and that's why i will stick with it but you know if if everyone kind of gives up then that just makes me lose hope like and that's why i said today on twitter it's like you need to keep fighting for this sort of stuff you need to fight for decentralization because the people who who want centralization

they can move faster they will you know lie about it they will be able to scale easier by making sacrifices right and it's just going to be harder for people who want the decentralized world to take off to kind of get it there and it's going to take a longer time ethereum's taking the long and hard path towards scalability uh and and because of that we're kind of like being punished in the short term because we haven't fixed the fee issue yet on ethereum and users are kind of bleeding to these other things because it's a bull market we have a lot of new people coming in they don't care about this stuff right um but i don't think that's a good argument to say that users don't care so we shouldn't care about decentralization it is on us as the early pioneers and builders and educators

to kind of make sure that people know what they're getting into i i feel a deep responsibility to that and to do that and that's why i'm always kind of like educating i mean i do a video every day i do my newsletter every day i try to educate on twitter um because i i just feel a responsibility there as well so there's that aspect to it um and i want to see ethereum win um because you might be thinking to me to yourself okay well you only talk about a theme we don't talk about other chains like there's cosmos and polka dots and a bunch of other changes right for me i want to see ethereum win and like retain like most of the market share because it's it's the most credibly neutral and decentralized blockchain that we have today besides bitcoin and obviously as i

said before you can't kind of do what you can do on ethereum on bitcoin now for these other networks to reach the level of the centralization and credible neutrality that ethereum has it's going to be extremely difficult they have different architectures that kind of sacrifice decentralization a bit to achieve greater scale yes even polka dot does this right which is seems to be everyone's kind of favorite um outside of like ethereum i i've noticed you know a lot of the other chains do this and i haven't seen something that kind of like i mean you know i think the cosmos ecosystem is probably the closest to how ethereum's kind of building out right now in terms of like having these bridges between these different kind of layer twos and stuff like that and and but i think cosmos is still like a

delegated proof-of-stake model or at least a model where they kind of like have centralization of validators i haven't looked too deep into it i've been meaning to but outside of that i can't really see any other projects that kind of speak to me in the same way ethereum does so that's why i'm so focused on ethereum and also it's a time thing i mean like there's so much happening you know i cover it every day and with the video and the newsletter and spend all day every day looking at this stuff and i still can't keep up so you know i'm having the most fun in ethereum too and it's just like i'm not going to go to another network and try and kind of like keep up with that i'm sure this stuff happening but like it'd just be too hard right at the end

of the day uh so yeah i mean i know i've gone a lot i've gone a lot i've gone on a lot here about all of this but i just think it's very very important to understand all of these trade-offs and to understand kind of like why i was upset it wasn't about like me feeling threatened by binance smart chain or anything like that it was me just looking and watching all this misleading marketing going on and people just falling for it and feeling really bad about it and i was just like i need to say something i need to kind of put this signal out there that this is what this is you know just be aware of it right you can go play in it i'm i totally understand if you want to do that um but you know as it exists it's a centralized kind of platform and

in saying that long term i believe decentralization wins but as i said it takes a lot longer for decentralization to build out than it does centralization because of the various trade-offs it's just slower moving right at the end of the day so yeah overall isn't me trying to be a kind of like eth maxi or coping or whatever i think whenever someone says that to me it's like a cop out it's like well that's just like actually debate the points that i'm talking about don't just say i'm coping or whatever because i i'm not right um you know i do get upset about these things but i don't get upset about watching like another chain kind of get market share i guess i get upset about the misleading marketing that that first and and you know i'm being generous by calling it misleading marketing

to me it's pretty much scamming people because you're just direct you're just straight up lying to them by saying that it's decentralized um when you know yourself that it's centralized like you know cz knows this he's not he's not stupid he's actually pretty smart um and he's been able to grow his exchange you know pretty large so i can't just say he's he's an idiot or whatever but i just think that he is it's pretty gross right i just don't like that and it's not something that i'm within these within the ecosystem for and i don't want to stand by and just watch it kind of play out as well so yeah i guess end rant there i just i think it's very very important to keep this top of mind as we progress through this bull market there's going to be a lot of noise a lot

of new people coming in it's on us to educate them and just let them know that what they're playing with is not equivalent to ethereum it is not the same thing um and what we have in ethereum is different and what we're building is different and i think banteg had a really great tweet here about you know describe ethereum's values how many brave builders it has brought into the world how many people it is enamored now try to describe bsc's values right and there's nothing there right it's it's it it for me it is all about the values the spirit the soul of aetherium and that might sound a little bit cringey to to you for me to say but i don't care like this is what i believe in and like i'm not gonna uh sacrifice my beliefs just for some short-term gain um you know whether that be monetary or

kind of user experience i believe that ethereum will scale i believe that it will fix all our problems but we will stay true to decentralization to do so and we will not kind of compromise on that as one of our core values so yeah end rant officially there let's talk a bit more about some some more positive things i think actually i think this tweet from matthew feinstein is about scalability so let's talk about ethereum scalability here so the layer two ecosystem on ethereum is obviously being built out right now it is still kind of i guess like small but quickly quickly evolving here and there's a few different ways you can onboard one of the ways is that you can go from layer one directly to uh i guess say loop ring for example

but that's unfortunately costly because you still have to spend uh spend the layer one fee that spend a fee on on layer one to do this um and then there's other ways that haven't been implemented yet like batched onboarding where you can actually pull capital together in a trustless way on layer one so only one fee has to be paid for potentially one 000 users moving into layer 2 right so that'll come but hasn't been implemented yet in a big way the the third thing is uh on ramps of direct fiat on ramps into these layer 2's which i think loot brings working on but hasn't been put out yet so as i said this is still very early and then the biggest way to get or at least the fastest way to get people onto layer 2

is through centralized exchange and service on ramps so you could imagine say coinbase right having an on-ramp from their centralized exchange to a loop rings layer two right so you could say when you go to withdraw eth for example on coinbase it'll have a drop down menu and it'll say withdraw to ethereum mainnet or withdraw to loop ring or or some other solutions as well and then you could have like a little explanation there of what it is and say you know loop ring is a layer two solution on ethereum it gives you cheaper and faster transactions right and you can do this this and this with it it doesn't take much to educate these users right and the reason why this is so powerful coming from a centralized exchange is because they are the front door they are the port of entry

for new people and new people are the ones who are going to have the worst experience because imagine a new person comes into ethereum today they buy ease they buy tokens they withdraw it to their wallet and then they go to uni swap and they hit with a 50 transaction fee for a trade and all the stuff that they've been hearing about ethereum and d5 crashes right all the good stuff all the positive stuff right about the future of finance doing these things crashes because they're like why like this is crazy 50 dollar fees is insane and to be fair they're not wrong right it is insane i i'm not defending the high fees as something that is uh a good thing for end users right i have argued before about how high gas fees are good in the short term for the entire ecosystem

um for a variety of reasons but for end users their first experience shouldn't be a 50 uni swap trade so instead if we get them onto like loop rings layer two they can spend uh i think it's like two cents to do a trade on there right and get the same experience as they would get on uni swap um and then that's their first experience into ethereum so i think that's incredibly important and i think exchanges should do this like if you if you know someone or work in an exchange or like you know if you're just a customer send a kind of message to them and say please integrate layer 2 solutions right it is not very difficult to do and it just requires the attention of these centralized exchanges to do so and it saves them money as well because they're paying transaction fees for

users to go you know out i mean and they're also sometimes putting the transaction fees on users to withdraw from from their exchange which is also a bad experience too so yeah i think um you know matt tweeted out a bit to like gemini coinbase and kraken to get these kind of um onboarded and all you have to do is use this api call within uh looping zk roll up uh kind of documentation here and it's that easy right so i think this is this is how we kind of beat the i guess the binance smart chains of the world and how we beat off the competition is that we basically get these centralized players to uh integrate layer 2 and to be fair some of them have already experimented with this coinbase integrated optimism's test net on their coinbase mobile wallet app but

as obviously as it's a test net there's not many apps available yet there's not much going on there but i think coinbase given that i think they're an investor in optimism but they've already done integration with optimism when the optimism goes live in a in an actual capacity outside of like a guarded launch like when a full maintenance capacity i can see coinbase adopting that which i think is really cool but they need to adopt more than just one they need to do like a handful of them of the biggest ones to make sure the users have a choice and you know users can can basically choose where they want to go because the end state for ethereum is that most users will live on these layer 2 solutions rather than the ethereum main net because we want to preserve that decentralization and the only way to do

that is to push people to layer 2 because layer 1 has to be you know be incredibly neutral and it will always be limited because of that which means that the gas phase will potentially always be high but we we can fix that with layer two solution so that's what i'm betting on of course and that's what a lot of the people in the ecosystem are betting on but we need these centralized exchanges to help us out here i think so i spoke about ether cards the other day so just i wanted to give another quick shout out here that their sale details are now live so i'll link this in the youtube description and you can go check out how the sale is going to be run all the details about it how you can get your hands on some and everything like that so yeah definitely

um go check this out i mean i talked about it the other day basically this is a kind of a new trading card game or at least a trading card collectible game on ethereum where you can buy a bunch of different cards and they have like different traits and things like that which give you kind of bonuses across the ecosystem and stuff like that so yeah definitely go check this out if that was something you were interested in the other day that i was talking about it so alcomix is an upcoming d5 protocol that's been teased for quite a while now and they put out a blog post today called a prologue this is a little bit of a kind of mission statement i think uh and then they kind of like tease that it's coming soon so i think they're going to be officially

announcing very very soon so if you don't know or haven't been paying attention to this project i definitely go suggest giving them a follow here on twitter so you don't miss the announcement they call themselves defy alchemical synthetic tokens so yeah looks like they're doing something very interesting here and they're gearing up for an announcement uh but their prologue was pretty cool you know they basically give that gave their their mission statement here and what they're kind of like trying to fix with these systems but very short teaser but i figured i'd just bring it to to your attention anyway so you could go check this out when you've got some time so andre put out a new tweet today basically saying that you can now do uh 200 000 synthetic atomic swaps between sbtc s eth and susd

uh so this is really cool i mean this is the cross asset swaps uh sorry the synthetics atomic swaps that have been teased for quite a while here so basically what you can do is you can see on the on the contract here with yearn you can go from like sbtc to susd in a really big way like 200 000 swap so really really uh you know deep kind of liquidity here uh with uh huge trade sizes so obviously a lot of us don't do trade sizes like this is this is kind of whale territory but whales are the ones who bring a lot of liquidity here so giving them more options to do these larger trades is very positive i think for the overall ecosystem here so yeah really cool from andre here and i guess you can look up the the transaction on ether scan and

see what's kind of going on here i was looking to the contract so yeah if you're a developer you can go read this contract i mean i'm not and i you know i read this and i'm like yeah yep those are some words there so yeah if you're a dev definitely go check out the contract there so block native have updated their uh mempool explorer um they've refreshed it you can now uh watch your your wallet the top stable coins and the top decks is on there now i think there's a link to this somewhere if i go to their website here might be able to find the link because i've spoken about the mempool explorer before and about how it lets you basically uh you know look into the mempool and kind of like get a view of it because right now with block

explorers you basically look into what's already happened on the blockchain whereas the mempool is what potentially is going to happen so that's where all transactions go or at least all pending transactions go uh before you before they're included in a block and no they're not always included in a block some of them fail right some of them are reversed some of them are cancelled things like that so yeah you can basically i think uh if i go here i can go to their explorer uh and find and kind of like show you what it looks like here because it's actually pretty cool i've played around with it before if it's going to load up here it's taking a bit long to load unfortunately um but yeah i mean i guess like i can talk to a bit more about what this is so as i said it lets you explore the

transactions that are in the memphis waiting to be included in a block and this kind of like helps people and helps different teams with like looking into kind of activity of users and you know bot activity mav activity front running all the stuff that i've spoken at before on the refuel it kind of lets you do that so yeah here we go if we go for a live example click here to connect and monitor your own wallet address i don't want to do that right now i want to do kind of this so this is monitoring kind of like the stablecoin transactions within the mempool so you can see here i mean this probably doesn't mean much to you and it's scrolling by pretty fast but this is basically json data and this data can be passed into like any kind of application that you want to kind of

track what's happening here and kind of like see what was included what wasn't included in in a block and you know was it a front run transaction was it not um so yeah really really cool tool here from block native and definitely go check it out if you haven't already all right so last thing i wanted to talk about here was that um christie's auction house a very very big auction house uh for art is uh accepting eth as uh payment for for this kind of people auction that they're doing and i kind of tweeted out here that ethan's money uh because they're accepting it which i thought was really really cool um i thought you know in particularly in particular it's cool to see you know eat his money coming alive in general right i mean i mentioned the other day

how a lot of the nft economy right now is priced in eth uh a lot of it runs on eighth you know it basically exposes people to holding eth and using it as money using it as kind of a store of value sort of things like that so really positive to see christie's here which is not like a crypto company right they're a very kind of like outside of crypto company accepting kind of crypto here and accepting it specifically uh for this artwork and i think this is actually going to go for a lot this artwork what it is it's basically uh 5 000 of people's pieces um like here you can see it on the picture here so uh well there's the pay wall you can't see it anymore but basically you can see it in the thumbnail here um and basically uh i think this is gonna

be quite a large auction i'd be surprised if it if it goes for less than a million right you know it's probably gonna go for a few million because people is very very large and famous he has uh 200 000 followers almost on twitter over a million followers on instagram and he basically creates uh 3d art pieces every day and he's been doing that for the last 13 years like every day so there's a lot of hype behind him he's already done a few sales he's made a few million dollars off of his art um through the nft space so this is just another one here and the fact that christie's is accepting eighth is really cool because obviously you can accept if you're doing the sales on ethereum right but this sale is being done through this traditional auction house so good to see each being used as money

uh you know even outside of the ethereum ecosystem here all right everyone that's it for today's episode i hope you enjoyed it thank you for watching and listening subscribe to that youtube channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up join the daily grade discord channel subscribe to the delight newsletter and i will catch you all next week thanks everyone