CME ETH futures, Loopring/DeversiFi team up & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #17 - 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 and today's the 17th of december 2020. all right guys it has been in a very exciting last 24 hours as i'm sure you're all aware btc is back over twenty thousand dollars for the first time in three years ether is also running up uh currently over six hundred and fifty dollars uh which is quite quite crazy um there's a lot of kind of news coming out about how uh traditional kind of uh i guess uh money is coming into the space now through bitcoin and through ethereum uh through ether uh it's been crazy i'm sure you know everyone's seen all the craziness on

twitter and on reddit and things like that um it's just it feels uh it feels good right it feels really good it feels like a really nice christmas present um but i guess enough on the price what i did want to talk about was a few of these announcements i guess got to do with with the prices and why the prices are kind of continuing to rally here so there's a billionaire hedge fund uh that came out a hedge fund man uh hedge fund manager called alan howard that came out today and said that he's backing a a little known fund that's buying bitcoin and ether now we've been seeing over the last few days or few months even all these kind of traditional finance funds and institutions things like that they're

mainly you know buying btc right they're getting exposure to it in one way or another but lately we've been seeing eth be included in that bucket uh so btc and ether really the only two that that kind of fall into that bucket but the only two that this big money is going to invest in is going to even look at right because they're the two blue chips of crypto quote-unquote blue chips um and on top of that there are they're the kind of most liquid assets they're the only ones that they can get into with any size and with confidence as well so i thought that was very interesting that uh you know this fund in particular is going to be buying ether as well as btc and i think you know i've said it before on the daily grey refuel and a few other

times that you know outside of crypto it's all about bitcoin right it's bitcoin there's bitcoin that bitcoin's always in the news then when you even just like set foot in crypto you start hearing about ethereum right you start hearing about d5 you start hearing about eth and why you know why it's valuable how you can stake it all these sorts of things and especially like you're exposed to eat pretty much immediately because you know if you're using ethereum you have to pay gas fees so you're immediately exposed to eth um and then from there you kind of like fall down the rabbit hole as well i guess depending on how far you want to fall um but yeah so it's quite uh bullish to to see this news i'm really really glad to see this you know just thinking back to a couple years ago when we're in the

depths of the bear market especially during 2019 if you had told anyone that traditional money like big traditional money would be buying into eth as a financial asset people would have laughed at you even the most bullish of of eth balls would have said i don't think so um you know maybe that's too early uh because you know we're only a year a year out from 2019 right uh and the kind of eighth has kind of changed completely in 2019 it was just like the the the the perma eath bulls that were really into it like there was a small community of us were really into it we were saying you know yes it's you know what it whatever it is now it's spent a lot of time in the hundreds and two hundreds but we know that each is eventually going to correct up because it's got all

these things coming for it and 2020 has really been that yeah in terms of price not even just price right development d5 obviously exploded and things like that i'm going to go into that a bit later uh in the episode about the growth of ethereum especially over the last three years uh but yeah it's just it's funny how fast sentiment changes in this space right it's funny how fast things can can come to be viewed as uh viewed in a different way uh even to even just a year ago but i guess like a year in the crypto space is like 50 years in your life right you know the industry pretty much reinvented itself in a year so yeah really really cool to see that and on that note cme group a really big futures kind of exchange that listed btc

futures back in uh december 2017 uh they announced that they're going to be launching an ether futures product in february of 2021 now you know this has been expected for quite a while there's this there's been this meme that it was coming in weeks and not months like eat the futures product and this was because joe lubin said this quite a while ago so it's obviously been in the works for a while but last night or i guess earlier today uh for for most of you uh yeah the cme group kind of came out and said yeah we're launching this product which kind of came out of nowhere and it came out like literally as btc i think hit 20k this night kind of news came out there and then eth just raged up on the news um but it's just yeah it's crazy uh like

cme group is huge they've been a massive player in the in the bitcoin trading space especially during this year this is like a main avenue for big money to get in uh to to kind of these products so obviously they see that there's demand for these products and they want to support them in their exchange so yeah really really bullish news just all around and uh i mean it certainly does feel like we're heading into another 2017 like bull market that's both exciting and scary right you know i always feel like you know oh you know i didn't make the most of the bear market right because it's it's going to get a lot noisy um i was around in 2017 there you know it's funny because in 2017 it was all reddit it wasn't really twitter there was

twitter but it wasn't really a big thing as it is now and i i'm already seeing the craziness and the noisiness so i think that we're going to be seeing a lot more noise um so yeah it's always good to to kind of be prepared for and to make sure that you you realize there's going to be more noise and you need to like kind of follow the signal uh obviously i consider myself one of those signals so i'm always going to be feeding you you guys are really relevant information i'm not going to just be shilling like charts and things like that all day um i'm not going to be talking about like all these random coins and things uh but this is you know bankless the defiant d5 there's so many kind of ethereum media orgs now that always signal very high signal um

ratio to noise um so definitely you know keep on keep up with them keep tabs on them if you want to stay you know with it i guess and and not get lost in all the noise that's about to come that's just a fair warning on that one all right some news out of uh loopering and diversify today so they basically announced that they're launching a layer two committee called l2 to the power of two or l2 squared um so basically loopering and diversify both have layer two based ck roll up decentralized exchanges i've spoken about it in the past you're probably well aware of it i think uh if you're in ethereum these are i guess that the leading kind of layer two decentralized exchanges um based on

order books so loopering also has their amm layer two uh decks as well so like a unisop-like decentralized exchange but their main product has been that order book exchange and same for diversify so they've teamed up to do to to kind of launch this uh this committee um and they're uh basically they they can they perform this token swap between the two teams as well so each team now holds their each other's token and basically the purpose of this committee is to basically i guess that push forward layer two scaling when it comes to decentralized exchanges uh and things like that um you know they go through on the blog post here you know that there's going to be a there's there'll be challenges from the

trend for of a transition to layer two from ethereum layer one of course um you know they talk about how vitalik's uh roll up centric ethereum roadmap stresses the importance of layer 2 and it's going to be like an ecosystem-wide effort right to get all this done so if you want to read the full post i'll i'll definitely link it in the in the show notes but really good to see this i hope that we see more teams kind of join this and work together uh you know layer two still gonna be very relevant going forward especially as the market heats up the gas prices are just gonna get really you know ridiculous again i mean looking at it here you can see on my screen if we just open this at a time of recording the rapid price is 233 gray and then 177 for fast and then you know

even 100 for standard which is not cheap uh you know it's still cheap to send ether out but doing you know smart contract interactions things like that is is not cheap and it's going to basically uh mean that we need to adopt layer 2 asap to kind of like handle all the coming load of people that are coming into the ecosystem and want to want to use these products so great to see this out of loot ring and diversify here very very keen to see where this goes in other layer two news the optimism team is basically saying that the final phase of their optimistic ethereum testnet is in motion so basically uh you can follow their step-by-step guide to to prove fraud if you find any

within their layer 2 system and win a reward for contributing to the security of their layer 2 system so i guess this is like an open kind of i guess bug bounty for their layer 2 system to to test their fraud proof technology uh they have all the instructions here this is definitely not something for uh people who aren't very technical you know this is quite a technical thing you have to do things like install docker um you know use github um pull things down from github uh use things called verifiers to to kind of like submit the fraud proofs and things like that running a node so if you don't know what any of those things mean um you know it's probably not for you unless you want to learn what they mean and i encourage you to learn

it's always good to learn a new thing until enter kind of learn how to spin these things up there's a step-by-step guide here um it doesn't seem that detailed so i think you know it might be a bit hands off uh hands off here but i'm sure that if you join their discord channel you'll be able to ask questions but basically um yeah this is this is really cool i mean final phase of their test net which means maybe this is like a teaser right now for those who don't know uni swap is working very closely with optimism to explore potential kind of uniform on layer 2 solutions so if they're in their final phase of the ethereum test net for optimistic uh roll-ups or their technology or whatever um could unisoft v3 be coming out sooner

rather than later maybe in q1 2021 right i think it will i think january february or march we will see a unisop v3 i think we'll see some sort of uniform layer 2 coming to market as well uh it's going to be big i think 2021 is going to be big in general it's just we're almost there like we're 13 days 14 days away so two weeks away from the end of the year uh from end of 2020 which has been a very interesting yeah i guess inside and outside of crypto but uh yeah i'm looking forward to seeing if if my predictions are right here and we get a unisop v3 and q1 i'm pretty i have pretty high confidence in that not because i have any special knowledge but just because um it kind of fits into what i've heard

from you know public sources what i've seen what i've been reading kind of connecting the dots as i've done here uh with with with this sort of thing with these sort of sorts of things so yeah looking forward to seeing if that plays out so another app went live on mainnet today called perpetual protocol uh so basically you can now trade ethan btc perpetual contracts with up to 12 12 times leverage on chain at perp dot exchange uh there is no gas fee during your trades for doing this so basically if i load up the site here it kind of gives you the description what it is so perpetual protocol is a decentralized perpetual contract protocol with virtual automated market makers

to provide guaranteed liquidity uh so you know basically we can start trading here i'm not going to connect my wallet or anything but you can see it on screen it's a very familiar looking kind of exchange right for anyone who's used kind of an order book exchange before and for those who aren't familiar with what a perpetual product is it's basically a product that can be traded in perpetuity basically on leverage so um sometimes when you open like a position and you have a contract a normal you know non-perpetual products there is a time limit on it so you might say okay i'm going to have this contract for a month and in a month it's going to expire whereas perpetual products never expire they're continuous you can have a position open for as long as you want whether that's a short or

long position and this is one thing that hasn't actually come to ethereum in a big way yet it is a very very popular product in the centralized exchange space everyone knows about bitmex right there a bit there's a bunch of other exchanges that offer these products but now we're getting them on ethereum and in within d5 which i think is about time i mean if you think about it right uh these products are so popular it's it's weird that it's taking so long to come on on chain but i think you know there's a few issues to work out right like implementation issues scaling issues all those sorts of things um i'm sure there's like a bunch of other things in there like oracles and things like that uh but great to see perpetual protocol bring this to mainnet today

i am looking forward to seeing how fast this grows there's of course other projects like mcdex or mcdex i think it's how you say it um there's other perpetual protocols like dydx that have been around for a while um but i guess i mean i wouldn't say they have failed to gain traction but they're not they're nowhere near as big as their centralized counterparts right because uni swap obviously is challenging it's centralized counterparts whereas these perpetual protocol uh like just not just perpetual protocol but these other ones haven't really done that yet um and i think that might be because of scaling uh because amms don't require as much scaling as uh perpetual protocol uh water perpetual products do

so i'm curious as to how they're actually offering no gas fee on trades here i haven't actually read into that um but i'm sure there's there's some some reason for it but yeah i haven't read into that so i'm gonna i should i should look into that uh kind of after i'm finished recording here but um yeah so that's that's cool to see as well so interesting to see how fast this grows i think if i mean if there is no gas phase i think this can grow quite quite quickly uh so curious to see how it plays out all right a new product on uma today so basically the uh you my chica filler team uh launched mario.cash so on this website traders can mint synthetic bitcoin cash uh and then they can basically go long

or short bitcoin cash on balance balancer by doing this uh it's and and this kind of synthetic bitcoin cash or mario cash is collateralized with actual uh btc uh in the form of rent btc so that's ren kind of networks uh decentralized tokenized btc um so basically if we go here onto mario oh there's noise i better mute that mute site okay so basically yeah you can see here you can basically unlock your wallet you mean some mario cache here and then you can go trade it on balancer so really cool product i think uma's been making or uma has been making a lot more moves lately they recently partnered up with yam as well that i spoke about the other day

uh it's great to see these kind of like synthetic asset protocols getting more use i think we need more of this uh synthetic assets or synthetic trading is huge within both centralized trading and just and the kind of traditional financial system trading as well so really excited to see this and see where it goes all right announcement that may have gone kind of flew under the radar today but i actually wanted to put a bit of a bit of light on here was that american express has invested in a crypto trading startup called falcon x now what falcon x does is it basically i think it's acting as like a bridge between the crypto world and the traditional finance world and i always like i've spoken about this

before but i always like monitoring these products because i really do think that if we want to have this kind of quote-unquote mass adoption and we do really want to have this money coming in right we need to bridge in the traditional finance space and to do that we need players that are familiar with that space to to build these products and to invest in these products and that's exactly what american express is right uh you know amex is known all around the world they have like a very big institution very big company very big kind of footprint uh worldwide they have a lot of experience within this space so i think that they are definitely going to be playing a part here and moving this along obviously we already have paypal um joining the fray as well there's

other companies joining uh from the traditional finance space i mean square is famous for offering you know their bitcoin product and getting a lot of volume through that we just need more and more of that we need to cover all our bases here we need to make it as dead simple as possible you know we have td armor trade we have other kind of things out there we need to make it as simple as possible people to get access to this asset class and you know particularly or or or um kind of like um ideally in a tax advantaged way as well right we already saw grayscale's products getting you know really lots of lots of volume flowing through and they're very popular because they're tax advantaged so i think uh i am going to be keeping an eye on what happens with this uh and you know any more of these

announcements coming out as i think they're quite important all right another main net uh kind of sorry another project kind of uh kind of uh hit maintenance today uh alpha x from alpha finance so this is another perpetual swap market uh basically uh and it was as i said launched today uh alpha finance is kind of has this product called alfa homura uh which basically has all these uh these products inside that they've been doing like leveraged yield farming and things like that i've been getting a lot of attention lately but basically as i said what this is is it's a it's a perpetual protocol sorry perpetual kind of product uh you can see here that there's an early access form

and they've got screenshots and things like that so it's i guess it's not really like an open launch or anything it's just like them detailing what this is so as you can see on screen here's a screenshot of the nice little ui they have here you know similar to perpetual protocol and that it's it's simple there's a chart there's a place to buy and sell or long and short and things like that and then yeah they go through i guess like who are they who they're targeting what their unique features are and things like that so apparently there's no funding rate kind of payments uh within this and if if you trade perpetual perpetual products before you know what funding rates are i won't go into it now it's it's more of like a trader thing um uh there's like advantages of having

their long and short tokens comply with the erc 115 standard which wraps into erc20 tokens so yeah there's a bunch of things going on here and a bunch of things that alpha finance is innovating on here with alpha x which is really really cool to see but i mean i i just went through all the advantage of advantages of perpetual products and why i think they're going to be huge so it's good to see another team getting into this space all right last thing to talk about was a tweet that i put out last night that i actually wrote about in the daily gray newsletter as well but i did want to talk about it for those who missed that so this table here and for those listening you won't be able to see the table but basically

this table here uh compares if when it first hit 500 on november 29 2017 to today right so you know i if you did 500 for the first time since 2018 about a month ago and i wanted to compare various metrics between when it first hit 500 and today just to show that when we first hit 500 like i actually think that ether at that time was extremely overvalued it wasn't like you know we especially at 1400 like we had we didn't have eth2 we didn't have any of the usage we have today we didn't have any of d5 we didn't have any of that stuff so you can see that in the chart here sorry the table here you know if you look at the the locked in d5 row we were only at 10 million in 20 november 2017

and i couldn't even tell you where that 10 million was or what it was locked in because we didn't even in it we didn't even have maker until december 2017. so i mean i pulled that from d5 pulse so i i should go back and look at what protocol that was falling under maybe it was like auger or something like that i'm not sure maybe one of the earlier protocols but yeah not totally sure there but basically that grew to 15 billion dollars today which is a 150 000 increase so we've had a massive increase in d5 usage right d5 pretty much became a thing during the last two two and a half three years uh since we last had uh kind of 500 in november of 2017 other things like uh 24 hour transaction

count was 565 000 and now it's 1 150 000 and you've got to remember that november 2017 was at the tail end of the retail mania right there's a lot more activity in terms of uh you know if we were to compare it to like the start of 2017 it would be like nothing right and we're not even in the tail end of a retail mania in terms of like a bull market yet uh so you know it's always funny to see that we've actually doubled and we're still in a kind of like early stage bull market the the next thing here like average fees over the last 24 hours so even as i said we were at the tail end of a retail bull market and we only had 166 000 of average 24 hour fees on that day whereas uh

yesterday we had 2.6 million dollars a 14 uh 1 470 increase from from that date and this is because of d5 right this is because of stable coins as you can see the stable coin growth at the bottom went from basically zero dollars to 17 billion dollars uh this is because it costs more to do the more complex transactions on ethereum uh so i think that to me is the i guess most obvious kind of growth metric that i look at is how much fees is being generated how much demand you know how valuable is the network to transact on if people are willing to spend you know all these kind of fees every day you know millions of dollars of fees every day then they're obviously

doing valuable things on the network that are worth more to them than the fees and we saw this play out with yield farming right you know even if you had to spend 200 to get into a yield farm depending on how much capital you put in you could have made that back in like a day right depending on what yield farm you went to um so it was always worth it and the more capital you had obviously the the more worth it was for you and then finally i guess i won't go through every metric but i added locked in eth2 staking here so it was 1.5 million eighth uh it was zero in 2017 obviously uh and it's 860 million dollars worth probably more now this was done at an earlier price but uh it's funny because if i was to compare to just like a month

ago or like a month and a half ago before the deposit contract launched this would be zero so we basically went from zero to almost a billion dollars of ethan eth2 within six weeks or whatever it is uh which is totally insane but i threw that in there because it was just fun to see that in 2017 everyone was just like oh eat two's coming you know we can expect these two now it is too soon and it took you know until now to get there but now that we're there it's just so so bullish we've locked 1.5 million each in there for a couple years now it's securing the network you know um we're testing it with almost 1 billion dollars worth of live value so this stuff is is just insane um all these metrics are insane right you can see them yourselves here on the

on the video uh and if you can't if you've listened in on the podcast just go check out the link to the tweet world chat which i'll include in the show notes and you'll be able to see um but yeah i really like doing these comparisons because it really puts into perspective the kind of growth that we've seen over the last you know two three years for ethereum all right i think that's it for today everyone thank you for tuning in i hope that you're having as much fun as i am watching i guess the prices go up of course and you know participating in all the mania that's going on on twitter and things like that uh if you haven't subscribed to the youtube channel please do so give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord and i'll catch you all

tomorrow thanks everyone