ConsenSys raise, Coinbase listing, zkPorter and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #99 - 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 is the 14th of april 2021 all right every day everyone today is a very big day for the crypto ecosystem i'm sure you know many of you are aware that coinbase is a direct listing on this stock exchange in the us today but before i dive into all of that i did want to point out that you know it's price action's been pretty great lately right we're at fresh all-time highs i think the the latest all-time high is around twenty four hundred dollars here uh we've come down a bit from there of course but i think obviously this price rise can be mostly attributed to the coinbase hype right but also the fact that uh you know a lot of us

believe that ether has been undervalued for quite a quite a while now but yeah obviously it's been going up for for for a little while i'm not sure you know how frothy it's gonna get from here i think it depends on what happens with coinbase um so yeah i think just just wanted to kind of point that out and just kind of do a bit of a celebration on the on the video today but i think the the real news to talk about is of course coinbase going live on the stock exchange here with the ticker queen so fred ursum uh one of the co-founders of of coinbase put together this really nice thread here you can go read it it'll be linked in the youtube description but it basically talks about the history of coinbase here um but and i wrote about kind of like

what's what i think is gonna happen today and why this is such a watershed moment for crypto in the newsletter but essentially i think coinbase is going to its valuation is going to be really high it's 150 billion or something like that that's going to be worth more than a lot of u.s banks so um you know some of them including the goldman sachs and even uh non-us banks like hsbc it's gonna be worth more than them it's gonna be worth more than popular fintech companies like square uh and then you know when you really kind of take all that into account i think it's gonna really take people uh you know off guard right and shock them especially people that don't pay attention to crypto you know think it's a scam or think it's a fad or whatever and then you have this pure play

crypto company that is literally 97 or something of their revenues something high like that comes from crypto trading is going to be worth more than some u.s banks right 150 billion dollars plus like i'm i'm expecting it to kind of um go much higher than that but uh you know from from that point of view you kind of look at that and you're like okay well this is going to legitimize the asset class as a whole because there's going to be so many doubters and so many people who thought it was a fad they're now probably going to think to themselves wow like did i miss something here like holy crap i i i thought bitcoin and ethereum were dead right i thought all this stuff was dead i thought it wasn't gonna gonna go anywhere i didn't think people were making money out of this i didn't

think there was real businesses here and obviously there is right obviously there's billions of dollars being made every single day by the entire ecosystem made and lost you know depending on what you're doing um but from that point of view i think that's what's going to cause the kind of paradigm shift here and and that kind of watershed moment for the asset class in general now of course you know a lot of coinbase's growth is tied to the growth of the crypto markets so if the crypto markets cool down then coinbase will cool down as well uh but i do think that um coinbase will become a nice little index product like not a literal index product but like like a kind of like signal to show like how i guess well the crypto markets are doing in general like how hot the the markets are

at any given time and kind of like the health of the overall markets as well so that's another kind of positive thing there and on top of that i also think that coinbase will continue growing and i do think it's going to be a trillion dollar company eventually and that's just gonna i mean that sort of stuff is just like such an amazing story as well like coinbase has a really great story behind it i mean fred says says some stuff about that in his thread here but if you just think about it it was a company that started you know literally out of like a two-bedroom apartment as fred says here it was launched when bitcoin was only worth six dollars so basically nothing the asset class was literally back then it was it was it was just majority uh bitcoin was being used

to buy drugs off silk road like that's not a not a secret um and it was basically a thing for like people really deep into the into the cypherpunk movement to kind of play around with so you know there was this company that launched back then uh the the early investors took a massive bet because crypto was in no way a sure thing back then like 2012 i mean definitely uh very very risky so investors took a massive bet on this company back then and obviously they're being rewarded for that now but just that that story is going to be something that i think mainstream media really wants to tell they really wants to you know hype up because it it speaks to i guess the american dream right a us-based company started from a two-bedroom apartment uh turned into like a multi-hundred billion dollar company now

right off the back of this kind of crazy crypto thing that's in the news because we have like obviously nfts blowing up and and you know the price is going nuts so crypto's all in the news right now so all of that kind of combined together is just going to create like a perfect storm here and you know short term the volatility is probably going to be quite high in either direction going to go up going to go down right but long term you know the growth prospects for coinbase are there it follows a lot of what the crypto markets do it's definitely very uh very very hyped up in terms of like how much it can grow from here as well i'm sure they're not just going to be a transactional business forever where they rely on crypto trading fees they're going to lean into their other

business kind of units here over time but yeah in general this is going to be the biggest thing you know you may be watching the refuel before this goes live i think early afternoon maybe 1 30 p.m eastern standard time in the us this is expected to list um directly on on the exchange here uh but you may be watching it after i mean i i'm just really really curious to see what happens here i think i'm gonna be in bed by the time at least i think it's about eight hours from when i'm recording this so i'm definitely gonna be sound asleep so it's gonna be fun to wake up tomorrow morning and have to catch up on all this stuff that's for sure uh but yeah i think this is gonna be really huge for for crypto overall and i'm really excited to see

this kind of play out over the coming months uh and speaking of that you can actually track all of this um we're using using the block's new data dashboard for coinbase cr so there's a bunch of different kind of metrics here tracking revenue uh gross profit verified users and things like that i mean coinbase has almost 60 million verified users here that's that's pretty crazy right uh and then a bunch of other you know different metrics here so yeah definitely go check that out if you uh want to i guess get more information about coinbase and there's one more thing here but binance is listing coinbase's uh stock token on their exchange as well so you can trade like fractions of a stock on there and things like that i thought this was quite funny considering binance is in direct

competition with coinbase but at the end of the day if they don't list the stock it's not gonna change anything the stock's still probably gonna go like hard and coinbase the business is still gonna still gonna grow so i think that this is just a way for them to generate some more revenue and hype around the exchange i mean you know the tweet itself got some insane engagement i mean over 10 000 likes and you know a lot of retweets and stuff like that uh so yeah it was quite quite interesting to see this but if you want to trade coinbase's stock on a crypto exchange then binance offers this ftx offers this of course so you can go do that there um but yeah that really really exciting we'll see how it all plays out over the next few days so speaking of exciting things coming

out in the future vivek here put a really interesting tweet out today which basically just summarized all the kind of really exciting things we have to look forward to in the crypto ecosys ecosystem but specifically the ethereum ecosystem so obviously in april we have the coinbase ipo we obviously have the berlin network upgrade going live in the next day or so i think it's less than 30 hours now um in may we have unisof v3 going live i do think that uh that um layer two for unisop's gonna go live in may as well uh we have other layer twos going live before this too like i i'm expecting arbor trim to go live uh very soon as well uh june he says he has a summer break i mean i'm sure there's gonna be stuff happening in june right uh july obviously ip1559 is tentatively

slated for that and optimistic roll-ups being uh optimism's public mainnet launch that's what they said uh you know uh july hopefully hopefully they don't miss that date again august uh zk porter l2 which was announced la uh yesterday which i'll be talking about in a little bit and then end of 2021 we might get the merge now this is just some things i mean there's plenty of other things to look forward to and this is to say nothing about you know most of the other stuff coming to the different apps on ethereum right like uni swap obviously v3 is going to be huge but there's so many other things coming to different apps that is going to be just as big um and you know i mean obviously the the main themes to watch right now are the layer twos the one five five nine

um the uh the general scalability and the merger right and he didn't even mention that in in may i think maybe june or july as well we're gonna have the first e2 network upgrade as well so i was talking to a friend today actually and i was saying to him like you know like we talk about all this bullish stuff constantly about ethereum and we just hardly ever talk about each two and he's two is like a massively bullish thing that's coming it's just that it's not in like i guess the the main etherium kind of ecosystem right now it's like it's separate own separate thing but it was just funny that we were talking so much about all these different things happening and we just didn't even talk about eth2 until we both realized like ah wow it's actually happening right it exists so um you know that that's quite funny

as well but yeah really great tweet from vivek here i think it was a great way to kind of put in perspective what we have to look forward to over the next few months in ethereum land so justin drake put out another interesting kind of tweet today about uh eats ultrasound money properties so basically what he's done with this graphic is he's taken the 30 day and 100 day moving average of uh the transaction fees on ethereum so the gas fees um and he's basically put like uh these these kind of like labels here for ultra mark 1 mac2 mac 3 mac 4 um and depending on how much each is being burned each day he kind of like calls it um you know a different name here so essentially the chart

uh ultra you know if we got to ultra mac four we're at just above two right now um uh so so at uh we would be at four if the uh based on the 30 day and 100 day moving averages um we would be uh burning four times more uh each that is being issued by proof of stake which basically corresponds to a two percent yearly supply a decrease uh under an eip1559 world and under a proof of stake world and obviously he's made some assumptions here you can see on the left hand side there's two main assumptions here the first being that 20 million each is staked for reference currently there's 3.9 million each staked so the more eat steak the higher the pos issuance is so he's being very aggressive here or at least sorry conservative about this i

i would think that 20 million eat steak we're probably not going to see for a while if if ever maybe we see 10 million but 20 million seems like a pretty big target at this point and then the second assumption is that there's a 70 fee burn now is it hard to know how much of exactly how much of the fees is going to get burned is it going to be 30 50 70 it's not going to be 100 but uh we won't know until 1559 is is kind of like included here but the fact that we're already up to um you know based on kind of like the uh the moving average here we're already kind of up to ultra mark ii uh you know and and i don't think layer one fees like even even though flash spots has kind of decreased the spikes in them and they're

not like super high i don't think layer 1 fees are ever going to be you know back down to cheap levels again i think they're always going to be um you know high and pricing out pretty much like most use cases and eventually layer 1 changes becomes the settlement chain for high value transactions and for layer 2s and things like that which is fine you know it still means that that is getting burned lots of fees are being paid which is which is really cool as well so yeah i mean justin's done some very good work here memeing uh the ultrasound money thing i know that a lot of people might think it's cringe or whatever but i i think it just like takes the existing sound money meme and kind of makes fun of it in a way right but in a way that can be mean

because you can just like use the bat signal here right which is pretty funny you can kind of um meme about ultrasounds in general like i've seen a few memes about like um you know an ultrasound being done on on a pregnant woman and like being the baby which i thought was quite funny so i think any good kind of meme lends itself to other memes around it and it divides people right there there are memes that a lot of people think are really crappy but they're really popular so i think that that adds to like the um the the kind of like viral nature of it as well so yeah really really nice chart from here i can't wait for 1559 to go live so this is not just theoretical anymore it's actually being practiced and i can't wait till you know someone creates like an ethereum gas

burn um bot where they track how much each is burned each day based on the on the gas fees paid so yeah that's going to be really fun to retweet pretty much every day so a big skye who is a community member at index co-op pr tweeted out this interesting uh kind of supply breakdown for the index co-ops aum so as a lot of you will know a lot of different kind of d5 protocols have yield farming on them where they're paying out tokens for a tvl for example right or for a um now the index cop has 158 million dollars worth of aum here but 82 of it is unincentivized which means only 18 of it is incentivized by index tokens so only 18

of that aum is being rewarded with index tokens and i i think this doesn't just apply to index card but i think in general this is a metric that should be applied to every defy app because if you're incentivizing aum there's normally mercenaries right mercenaries and people they're just farming it and dumping the token and they're not like capital that's going to stay a lot of the time they're not capital that's going to actually use the app after the the incentives run out right so i think tracking this unincentivized tbl is really really a really great way to see just how much your i guess core user base is growing the the user base that doesn't care about the token incentives that just wants to use the actual products that that you come out with now of course the index co-op has products like the d5

pulse index which is very popular the 8th leverage index as well flexible leverage index to fly and the metaverse index that was released recently so you know it makes sense right people want to use these products like you want to use the dpi because you want exposure to defy you want to use the the fly product because you want a leveraged eat exposure you know metaverse index for exposure to the metaverse all these sorts of things so i think that's really important to pay attention to and i hope other kind of default apps uh you know start start marketing this stylus kind of stuff will start tweeting out about this this kind of stuff here so zk sync made waves yesterday by announcing this new l2 construction that they've come up with called zk porter now what this is it's basically an evm enabled

layer 2 that they are planning to ship in august now what's really funny about a lot of these kind of like l2s right now is that they're beating their chest if you imagine like you know primal humans in their eight form beating their chest to try to show off their strength right that's exactly what all these layer twos are doing and that's why i call them like the layer two wars or the scalability wars because you'd even see in this graphic they've kind of compared what they've created with zk porter to both optimistic roll ups and zk roll ups um but they're basically saying you know zk porter coupled with zk roll ups is better than kind of optimistic roll ups here now there's details in the post about kind of why they say this and there's a thread here as well and kind of like why they think their

solution's better and vitalik actually posted a rebuttal to this too and and alex from from uh zk sync also posted a rebuttal to vitalex rebuttal which is in this this reddit thread which you can go um check out in the youtube description but essentially um what it comes down to with these layer two solutions is where they store the data so um you may you may know i mean i'm not i won't go through exactly how this kind of works in detail you can read the post for this but essentially you can either store the data on chain on ethereum or off chain now if you store the data off chain you're relying on essentially what's called a data availability committee or some some kind of like um i guess an entity to make sure that the data that you need

is available to you now there are worries around this where basically the the kind of detractors say well if there's like an offline data availability community then really you're not getting ethereum security because you're relying on these kind of like data providers to provide the data right and if they don't they could kind of like you know freeze the system steal your fun sort of thing and there's a lot of back and forth going on right now it's very hard to kind of know who's right and who's wrong and who's more right or who's more wrong or whatever right i think at this point in time what i am just waiting for is these things just to go to a public main net that's it just show me what you got right don't tell me what you've got show me what you've got i'm bullish on all the l2

teams i think they've got incredibly smart people behind them but you know this this kind of like chest beating and this marketing not just from z casing from everyone like all the l2 teams do it right and that's fine you know i mean they're not the only ones that do it like the defy apps do it right every every product does it that's just part of marketing but i i just i just want to see this stuff go live right i'm just you know hyping it and teasing it and everything's all well and good like yeah cool awesome but at the end of the day users just care about using it and and people who who are kind of following along with this just want to see that it's live just want to see that it actually does what the kind of like developers claim that

it does and i'm not saying it doesn't do what they claim that it does but you know there's only so much you can like trying to chest beat about things and and and then kind of like uh without without releasing something now zk sync is promising a testament in may for this uh and then obviously they're promising their mainnet in august here taking dates with a grain of salt i don't want to repeat of what happened with optimism again for any of this sort of stuff i think that's why a lot of the l2s aren't really giving dates uh right now i know arbitrary hasn't given a date starkware's not really giving um you know dates for the apps that they're deploying they have given a date for certain things like caspian i said that was going to go live in like june or something like that

but in general like dates in in ethereum is something i take with a huge grain of salt um you know especially after what happened with with optimistic rollups public mainnet launch um but yeah anyway not to be too negative here this is really bullish if it works i just want to kind of like uh stay grounded right i don't want any more of this kind of i guess like super hyped up stuff that everyone gets disappointed by when it doesn't meet people's expectations managing expectations is something that i think more people or at least the ecosystem in crypto as a whole should practice more of because we really don't do a good job of it we really love to hype things up and it's simple you hype things up because you have a monetary kind of um investment in it right you want to make

money you want to want to hype up a token that you're holding so that it goes up in value that's fine i mean we all do it i do it for eth there's nothing wrong with that i don't think um but yeah i just can't wait to see these things live and usable and these claims kind of like put to the test by a live environment on on mainnet here so yeah as i said there's this response on on reddit uh you can go check this out it'll be in the youtube description uh it's really it's pretty good for vitalik and then and then alex's response as well and they also did a response thread uh here too which you can find uh linked in a reply to to my kind of tweet here which of course is in the youtube description as well speaking of layer twos dydex continues

to grow here so their layer two perpetuals exchange is growing they have 70 million dollars of weekly volume 15 million dollars in open interest uh they have positive funding rates uh right now and zero gas fees on layer two with a bunch of different assets that they're trading i mean i spoke a lot about dydx yesterday so i won't go too deep into it right now but essentially i mean the same thing that i said yesterday this is just going to keep growing it's going to grow much faster than i think people expect it will uh and it's going to get to i think you know billions of dollars in trading volume over the next few months so i'm i'm pretty bullish of that for sure so block native released their block native simulation platform uh last uh last night yesterday that they're calling a net new capability for the

ethereum ecosystem that unlocks profit potential for traders and helps protocols intercept malicious transactions now this is timely because i mean i spoke about mav the other day and flashbots and things like that now what this simulation platform does is it basically allows people to simulate uh all marketable pending transactions in real time so essentially um you know when transactions go into the mempool some of them you don't exactly know what they're going to do until they've kind of executed but what this platform allows you to do is it allows you to essentially simulate any kind of transaction that you want using using this platform to see if that if it's going to succeed or not or to see what other people are doing and this is actually what a lot of people do with their mav activities where

they would actually set up bots and they'll kind of instruct these bots to do something and they'll run their own simulations on their own kind of um i guess like pcs and things like that but it doesn't cover everything right there's no it's not there's not a there hasn't been a generalized platform for this sort of stuff and that's what block native is doing here and the reason why this is important is because there's been as i explained the other day there was a scent there were sandwich bots uh kind of attack out doing kind of like sandwich um i guess mev uh and front running people and they kind of like got exploited by by someone because their simulations were wrong essentially they they basically uh fell for some some poisonous tokens uh which was quite quite quite funny to see right but still not something that that i guess

like traders and and people who are trying to extract mev wants want to happen here so yeah this is basically what block native's new platform allows you to do here and you can go use it yourself i mean this is really going to apply to people who want to you know participate and do mev or just traders in general that want to see what's going on in the mempool or just anyone in general right basically it it does what uh people like to call illuminates ethereum's dark forest the dark forest being the the the mempool the pending transaction pool there so yeah really exciting launch here from block native you can see here i mean i i don't know how many of you are going to you know play around with this like of your viewers i'm assuming a lot of you aren't you know traders or like

super technical people or people that are doing some kind of mev stuff but this this definitely helps a lot with with that and it helps the developers as well to kind of see what's going to happen uh if you were to simulate certain transactions and stuff like that so yeah even if you're not any of those traders or developers or whatever still something to go check out play around with something to learn about i think it's it's just really cool it basically what it does is it allows you to basically look into the future essentially because you get to simulate what a transaction will do if it was actually to execute on the ethereum right if it was actually to be mined into a block uh which basically allows you to you know to see into the future so i i always think of this meme you know from

um from the avengers movies where uh doctor strange is basically saying you know i saw like millions of futures and only one of them did we succeed sort of thing it's the same with this like you can go see like lots and lots of different futures and you know there may only be one where your simulation succeeds and then you might be like wow if i do this i can make a profit right and i can win that's that's what this basically this platform gives you so yeah if you're interested in learning more and doing more stuff with that definitely go check out this post from block native here all right onto the last bit of news here which i think is the one of the biggest pieces of news from the last 24 hours i mean there was a lot but this is essentially

consensus announced that they closed a 65 million dollar formation round basically a fundraise uh from uh different kind of partners uh including mastercard jpmorgan chase uh maker protocol labs which is behind filecoin uh and something called the greater bay area homeland investments limited which has a bunch of chinese characters there must be an asia asian-based kind of company here i think from bushy capital yeah from from asia and there's a bunch of other firms as well including uh the lao uh alameda research uh behind ftx here a bunch of other kind of ecosystem participants as well uh and essentially you know this is going to allow um consensus to focus on

basically bringing d5 and web 3 apps uh to base the enterprise sector uh which is i mean look at this we have visa doing you know settling on the ethereum mainnet we have mastercard partnered with uh or invested in consensus here we have maker as like a default app invested in consensus here i think think consensus is really great in the enterprise sector you don't see a lot of it going on in terms of like the public kind of stuff that's going on but you see a lot of it in you you know um come to fruition over time and it takes longer because obviously enterprise corporate stuff just takes longer to get done uh but i think this is like super positive here and you remember the other day i kind of i think i mentioned on the refuel that they released metamask for

institutional investors as well or institutional clients which kind of falls into the enterprise sector here um i'm sure they're going to allow like all the enterprise clients that they have to use all of these kind of tools that they have like infuria truffle consensus diligence which is their smart contract ordering firm auditing firm quorum which is basically uh a hyperledger basu which is like an enterprise ready ethereum client and there's so many things that consensus does and a lot of this stuff is definitely done uh behind the behind the scenes here are definitely not like very public like other kind of i guess companies and apps are within the ecosystem but nonetheless extremely bullish and you know just seeing kind of like jp morgan invest is not surprising because they've worked closely with consensus before

on on quorum which was a fork of go ethereum uh and i think consensus uh i guess acquired um their kind of like blockchain development kind of uh i guess sector here uh and then yeah they invested in it protocol labs and filecoin i mean ipfs uh file coin protocol they all have a very close relationship with the ethereum ecosystem and so do protocol labs uh they have a huge treasury as well huge water chest and i think file coin being utility chain is going to add a lot of value to ethereum over the long term as well uh same with other things like r-weave other utility chains there which i think are pretty positive too so yeah really bullish news out of consensus here and uh i think that's it for today i mean i i i went through a lot i think i

sped through it here i'm at 25 minutes but i i think um you know in and tomorrow's refuel it's gonna be pretty exciting to go over what happened on the coinbase direct listing right it's gonna be a very wild day i think so yeah strap in and enjoy the day everyone i'll be sleeping through it of course but i'll catch up tomorrow morning but anyway i'll stop rambling for now thank you again 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