ConsenSys raises $450mil, Alchemix v2 live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #336 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cesano and today's the 16th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so the kiln merged test net worked uh it went all well and good as far as i could tell i think i was asleep when this happened but it seems to have gone uh very well as you can see here from tim baiko post merge blocks were being produced by validators as an explorer you can kind of check out here to see everything that's going on uh right now and and tim obviously linked to one of the one of the first blocks there and everything like that so yeah i'm going to be talking about this a lot lately obviously i'm not going to rehash all of

what i spoke about i think that's uh you know everything went well there were a couple of i think minor bugs with clients like client specific bugs not to do with the spec or anything like that that were edge cases i believe um that were kind of like being worked on i can't remember exactly which clients were affected by this but there was a little bit of stuff there which is good obviously with these test nets kind of like show us that do i think it's going to result in needing another one of these test nets i don't think so but i mean even if it does i don't think that's it that's a huge deal but i don't think so i feel like um everything went as well as it could have gone with kiln feels like you know the devs are very happy with it everyone's

pretty happy with it and it's it's still live and running right guys like it's it's you know you can see blocks coming in and things like that if you click here you see the see the kind of blocks coming in you know 10 seconds ago 34 seconds ago blah blah as we expect them to here so you can visit this kind of like uh explorer i'll link it in the youtube description uh with this with this tweet from tim but very very exciting times i'm not going to rehash it all again guys i could talk about the merch forever but as you guys know um the kiln test net uh was was kind of like i guess like the last couple of months was being worked on um at least and now that it's live it we know we're gonna monitor it see how everything goes

uh developers can deploy their contracts to this sort of that to to this network see how it all kind of like fares with the new block times and all that sort of stuff so very very cool to see this uh anyway enough on the merge i think i've spoken about enough lately on to another big piece of news from consensus which are today announced that they have raised 450 million dollars in a kind of um usd financing round bringing its valuation to 7 billion usd huge huge value of funding around here guys like this is a series d and you know the first thing i immediately thought of when i saw this was how holy how far this industry has come especially consensus for those of you who are around in 2019 consensus basically laid off like god a huge

number of people from their workforce i think you know they had over a thousand employees and ended up having to lay off a bunch of people because of funding issues and joe lubin for the longest time was funding consensus out of his own 8th stash and you know obviously consensus has a few big uh ips like metamask and things like that and infuria but uh you know for the most part they were just bleeding money because they were funding a bunch of different things doing a lot of research development on on many different things which you know that's what they they were venture studio that's what they were kind of wanting to do but now they're doing these massive kind of like funding rounds and massive valuations it's just night and day difference in only three years so i mean i feel really good about this you

know obviously consensus is all in on ethereum they work on you know they kind of like fund ethereum things they work on ethereum they do a bunch of different things for the ethereum ecosystem and you know in their thread here they actually put out something uh that i actually quote tweeted here and i said chad census but essentially all proceeds from this round is actually being converted to eighth so this 450 million dollars that has been kind of like uh raised here is being converted to eth to further build consensus's quote-unquote ultrasound money position as a rebalance uh to rebalance its f to fiat ratio in line with consensus treasury strategy that's huge guys you know i mean i know some people were like why would that wild consensus announce ahead of time that they're um they're buying 450 million dollars worth

of eighth you know all this sort of stuff and honestly that i guess 450 million dollars given the daily volume of eighth and and given the fact that they can do that otc i don't think it would disturb the market too much we actually saw recently a similar size kind of like eth buy happened with jump capital when they had to cover the wormhole exploit but i think what it counts for is kind of like the confidence that consensus has obviously in ether as an asset and the long-term viability there but there's other deals that they could structure and things like that to purchase that amount of eighth you know it's not just a cut and dry market buy like like us like like all of us have to do and then i think i remember i i saw a quote i don't know if it's in this

thread but i saw a quote somewhere else where um i think someone at consensus said that their next fundraising round that they're going to do is going to be a series 8th so basically it's going to be a series e but series 8 because they're only going to raise eight they're not going to raise usd so they're going to raise direct 8 into their treasury just like the icos of old used to do and um kind of like sit on that in their treasury and i think they're going to be getting involved more with staking that eighth and doing a bunch of other things with it so very very exciting stuff there on that front as well but i guess you know 450 million dollars in in eighth you know eight doubles from here that's 900 million dollars right like when you when you're talking kind of like big numbers like

this you might think yourself oh you know i you know like me and you right like uh especially you guys are the new to the ecosystem you're chasing that 10 to 100 x right um but you're you obviously don't have 150 million dollars that you're playing with you're playing with a few thousand maybe maybe 10 000 20 000 or something like that uh and obviously a 10x would be would would you know would help you a lot right um but for consensus if they have 450 million dollars worth of eth a 2x gives them another 150 million dollars to play with right to actually reinvest in the ecosystem and all that sort of stuff and then you got 3x4x and it keeps compounding from from kind of like there and then especially if they do like a series eighth round and raise uh more money just in pure eath and you know i i

feel like and of course if they're staking it too earning that eighth reward i mean like seriously we've we're coming to a point i think just generally in the ethereum ecosystem we're in such a good position to fund all this sorts of stuff like think about the validator incentive program that i spoke about a few months ago that the ethereum foundation did where they gave um eth validators not you know not not ether on its own but eighth validators um to the different kind of like core teams and that way they're actually going to be able to kind of like sit on those validators but also earn the rewards from them and fund themselves through that once withdrawals are enabled right and all that good stuff there so i think that i just the merge as i spoke as i've spoken about before has like so many

second order effects and that's another one it basically allows for all these teams to get like funding through kind of like uh being an active participant in the network and obviously the increase sorry the ether rewards that are being paid out paid out of it kind of like an inflation there but the infl the issuance rate is so low under proof of stake guys and we offset it with the burn like i don't know i just keep thinking about this sort of stuff day in day out and it's such like a symbiotic relationship it's such a beautiful design and this is why i get so excited about ethereum as a whole is that we're designing something so awesome so so kind of like beautiful that uh you know that's going to last for for decades centuries hopefully you know thousands of years right and be sustainable that's

what we want we don't want something that just kind of lasts a few years and then falls over we want something that's long-term sustainable for as many participants that are involved as as possible here so and this is just one way you know through consensus doing their raise and then converting it to eighth and then doing this series eighth series um you know eighth round as i said before uh but yeah very very cool to see this race here congrats to the consensus on that all right so um i put out this kind of like meme today where i said building new layer ones in 2022 and i had the the spanish laughing meme dude you guys will recognize here um as kind of like an image that i captioned this was in response to a new layer one that uh i think mo i saw

multi-coin pushing at multi-coin capital and they love their layer ones i love their monolithic block chains i've spoken about how i think the monolithic design is wrong in the past but i think the reason why i'm laughing here is because i don't think bill there's there's been two in in in the last few weeks that have the high profile layer ones that have been announced i think it is such a silly thing to do it makes no sense the layer twos are going to absolutely obliterate them you guys know i believe this very very strongly and i feel like people are wasting so much time and money investing into these kind of like new l ones and on top of that not just from a technology perspective but just from a pure attention perspective there's already so many things to pay attention to on the layer

one front and then if you want to include layer twos in that because these monolithic l1's are trying to be execution layers so they're actually competing with layer twos and you kind of like put all that together how do these things expect to get attention even some of the most high profile layer ones that were higher profile for their time such as polka dot uh tazos uh you know bsc right they've all lost the mind like all i see people talking about these days is obviously ethereum right all the ethereum l2s i see people talking about solana um you know and avalanche as well because they have pretty they have pretty aggressive marketing i'll give them that um and and terra but i don't actually consider terra to be in the same ballpark there terra seems to be just like very focused on their stablecoin ecosystem and again

i've mentioned in the past so i think that terra being a layer two would actually be much better for them but you know i'm not gonna go into that debate again there but just think about like all the layer ones especially the ones from the last cycle like eos and neo and kutum and all this sort of stuff they all just lose attention completely because you for lay one to succeed not only do you need uh kind of like the attention but you need the developers to want to build in right you need people to come actually use it and to get those network effects and to grow that and it's extremely hard to grow that um so kind of like taking a holistic kind of view here on this sort of stuff i can't help but laugh honestly guys like i don't wish kind of like ill will on these

these teams that are building them i'm sure they're building them in good spirits and and with good intentions and you know i don't think the ones that i saw recently could be considered ethereum killers or anything like that or or even trying to be but i just feel like these things should just be built as layer 2s i think one of them had a privacy focus uh that was announced one of these l1 we have privacy l2s that are just going to obliterate them such as aztec right and then there were other then the recent one that was announced that i believe is called move i think they're targeting kind of like the decentralized um social media stuff i believe but then it kind of puzzles me because i mean isn't that what solano's trying to do like it kind of becomes like a narrative

battle as well where it's like okay well what are these these l1 is trying to do are they generalized are they specific okay well if they're specific then you know are they actually better than the l2s well no they're not from a pure technology perspective they are not mindshare it's going to be incredibly hard for them to get mindshare especially during these quiet periods like i didn't even see many people talking about these things the only reason i heard about it was because someone pinged me about it and it's like hey you know here's there's a new album being built and i was like oh my god again and then i saw multi-coin involved and i'm like oh god of course like multi-coin capital for those of you who don't know is headed up by um kyle simani and tushar jane they've been all about the monolithic blockchains for

ages and to their credit they've they've kind of like stuck to that one thesis they were originally really big eos balls and then they kind of like went away from eos because that failed and then obviously they've been solana balls but they really believe in the monolithic thesis but you know obviously i believe that's completely wrong i think that's the wrong way to to go about it they've made a lot of money on this thesis regardless but i'm talking from a pure tech perspective i just don't think that the monolithic design is going to survive long term um i don't think it's really surviving short term to be honest like if we had the world on board today they wouldn't be using monolithic l1 they'd be using uh i guess like uh l2s that settled to an l1 like ethereum i believe so that's why as i said i can't

help but laugh at people building not people but like the idea of building a new l1 uh so we'll have to see how the other ones shake out i believe the other one was called espresso or something like that the other one um i saw it i don't think i mentioned it at the time on the refill but i saw it a few weeks ago and then this latest one was move and i was just like so so puzzled guys like really at the end of the day i hope we don't see many more of these things come out because as i said before these things tend to if they have i guess like attention for a period of time in marketing they suck so much money out of this ecosystem um but i mean that's just kind of like how it works it's a free

market i'm not gonna kind of say that you know we should be denouncing these things because they suck money or whatever we should be denouncing them or kind of like criticizing them for their technology choices and we should be promoting things that are better and i'll always promote layer twos over layer ones because from everything that i've seen from all the people that i've spoken to all the smartest people everyone agrees that the modular design well almost everyone agrees that the modular design is the kind of like design that that is the path forward for scaling these things to the world and as i've mentioned before i feel like you know even people that are involved in crypto are so just perpetually behind on the bleeding edge of research and i actually don't think you can forgive that to be honest i think that if you're a protocol

engineer if you're working on building these kind of like platforms and building these layers you need to be up to date at least by you know i mean i i could give you maybe a monthly way on things but you know six we've been talking about modular stuff for longer than six months now and people are still building layer ones so when i think about that i i just can't help but think that even the people very close to this ecosystem are at least six months behind the you know basically refuel watches i'm gonna toot my own horny for a bit you guys know that if you're watching and pay attention to the refill every day you hear about all of this before the majority do uh but unfortunately not many people watch and listen to to the refill uh very much but more alpha for us at the

end of the day and you know it's funny i still think people just don't realize how close the merge is either as i mentioned so many times and every time a merged milestone happens people are like oh oh what last test net oh oh i what this came up on me it's like no guys like like it's it's been coming for a while like i just i don't i don't i don't understand like i get people have limited attention spans limited bandwidth but i mean the merge gets talked about every single day on twitter it doesn't even take much go follow tim biker and you're up to date like all you have to do is read tim baiko's tweets to stay up to date with what's happening with the merge um and then you know you can expand on that and kind of like go

for all the other cool devs and things as well if you want to um but you know and and even just kind of like watching listening to the refuel every day will keep you up to date with everything i don't know people don't want to put in the effort that's on them but i really hope we don't see any more layer ones kind of like shake out here i would rather see layer twos obviously being built even if they're forks i just believe it's a much better kind of path forward than building these new layer ones all right so i should have put this at the start when i was talking about the merge but rocker pool announced that their kiln infrastructure is set up and they'll be starting testing post merge uh on rocker pool very soon so you can see just a screenshot here there are a

bunch of these kind of like screenshots uh from different client teams and stuff like that just showing that the merge is going well and everything's working i think the rocketpool community and the rocketpool core team are very excited for this because uh you know as i've said before rockefeller's been working on their kind of protocol since like 2017 since they thought staking was going to come out in 2017 and they've kind of like had to change road maps here and there and change what they're doing and change timelines and they finally got to mainnet uh you know a few months ago but uh you know they're a very very core piece of the overall kind of like ethereum i guess protocol infrastructure at this point so i'm very very glad to see that they're kind of like sticking on the bleeding edge here uh definitely paying attention to

everything that's going on and i can't wait to see them flourish post-emerge as much as they've flourished pre-emerge so far all right so this has been a long time coming uh uh scoopy trouples from alchemics announced that alchemix v2 is here today and it is live so you can go to app.alcomix.phi and check out all the new features there um so what's new in v2 well basically as scoopy says here v2 allows for any arbitrary number of collateral tokens and yield strategies to choose strategies to choose from as token adapters are written and audited for v2 we can add an ever increasing selection of yield providers for your deposits on alchemics so that means you can in effect create your own yield aggregator from within alchemix v2 by mixing and matching collateral types and

strategies the sum of your deposits across collaterals and strategies is the basis for how much you can borrow greatly enhancing user experience in this little screenshot here there's more information in this thread i'm not going to read through the whole thread obviously but this is huge news i've always been a big fan of the alchemics project i've talked about them a lot on the refill before and they finally got v2 out there today now i believe that as part of v2 or as part of kind of like their roadmap and they continue to roam up here it's getting on l2s introducing kind of like uh better governance systems and dow systems there and things like that so looking forward to seeing that shake out as well but staying on topic here i want to talk about the theme of basically d5 just more generally right and how

i think d5 has been in the trail of disillusionment which is kind of like if you see the the hype cycle um you can like see that a lot of things when they first come out have like a massive spike in hype and usage and that's usually in crypto during a bull market and this is what i say this is what i've said about false sense of securities that that kind of like spike gives you and then it comes down really quickly and it goes kind of flat for a while and that's the trial disillusionment where essentially the teams the people they're still building but like there's hardly any action compared to what there was in the kind of like peak and we see this play out time and time again with crypto like all of us have experiences at this stage why i would assume that all of us have

experienced this not just in the markets but also kind of like the um attention cycles of different projects i remember when no when everyone was talking about alchemix and it was the best thing ever people were like this is super innovative this is awesome it's amazing and i know i don't really see many people talking about it and it's not just alchemics it's just d5 more generally and i think d5 really did have that massive spike during d5 summer now alchemix wasn't around during d5 summer but i think d5 came you know in d5 summer 20 2020 end of 2020 there mid mid to end and then since then we've been innovating here and there they've been like pockets of defy kind of like popping off like d5 2.0 we had for a bit and then kind of like that's gone gone i guess like sour as well

what i actually didn't like about d5 2.0 and i explained this on the refill when it was happening a lot of it was just ponzi's it wasn't actually any defy innovation whereas something like alchemix v2 is definitely innovation and alcomix isn't the only d5 protocol innovating here there are a lot of other ones doing it all in the background um right now but like when they're ready they kind of like release this to the foreground but still not many people are paying attention to it a lot of the token prices are in the gutter uh and i just think that's kind of like the natural progression of these things this is what happens during kind of like these hype cycles during new technology cycles and it's nothing to be worried about now not every d5 protocol is going to come back from the depths of the the

trail of disillusionment they're going to kind of like sit there uh and a lot of them are just going to fail or kind of like go by the wayside and that's totally fine too like 90 of businesses fail and at the end of the day these things are basically businesses right like yes we have our own kind of like quirks to them like dowels and community stuff and tokens and things like that but at the end of the day there's a team building something that one that needs customers in order to sustain itself so it's just a business right when you really break it down um and nine out of ten as i said businesses fail so don't don't be surprised to see a lot of your favorite d5 protocols potentially kind of like fail or fail to kind of like gain the distraction that they once had

it's just the natural thing here guys and it's also what makes investing so hard in this ecosystem because a lot of these things have tokens from the get-go before they even have any real product market fit before they've gone through their trial disillusionment and then you kind of like have uh have this thing where everyone's kind of wrecked on the token and you know ethereum went through this too don't don't get me wrong right ethereum went through this i believe during 2018 and 2019 but it bounced back much stronger it fell 94 percent and then it went up you know from the bottom to 4400 was like a 50x or something like that from 80 to 400 um or potentially more than that but you know that was a huge comeback there but but a lot of things didn't a lot of things never did other things had their

hype cycle and just like completely failed and that's the same the same thing is going to happen to a lot of things in this industry and i think you need to be acutely aware of that uh but um but yeah i'm excited to see kind of like a d5 renaissance happen you know as layer 2s kind of like progressively roll out as we get more and more using users into the ecosystem and as more and more people understand how to use this stuff i do think we'll see a bit of a renaissance there don't know what that means for the tokens i don't know if these tokens will ever go back to their all-time highs against eth like that's what's even harder right like going back to the like a lot of the d5 summer tokens that pumped they pumped when eighth was like three four hundred

dollars and obviously eight is much higher now than it was back then so not only do they have to get back to their d5 summer highs against um eth uh they have to kind of like uh i guess go even further than that to catch eighth where it is now and obviously it's a moving target as well so i'm not sure what's going to happen there but we'll have to see how that plays out but i guess congrats to alca mixia on getting v2 out the gates all right so optimism shared a screenshot today of hobby uh uh uh quality global kind of like uh i guess teasing support for optimism or at least supporting optimism it seems here as a withdrawal method so uh they have eighth uh heco which is i believe their own chain um and bep 20 which is bsc and

optimism and arbitrary now it seems arbitrary is great out there so i wonder if they're supporting albatroom yet i think they i think they are but um but yeah cool to see that uh optimism is is being supported or going to be supported by a major exchange here as i said before that is the holy grail for these l2s to get these exchange get this exchange support so that you can kind of like withdraw to to them and what i like about this is that you can see the estimated fifa withdrawal here faith mainnet it's three dollars for optimism it's 2.50 but i think so i think what exchanges can do here and i don't know if hobby will do this but i think exchanges like coinbase they can explain to users that hey if you withdraw your stuff to eat layer one you know yes okay this is withdrawal fee but

then there's a lot of other fees you know the fees are very high on ethereum layer one even at 20 grade whereas if you withdraw to optimism then the fees are much much lower and you get to kind of like withdraw for 2.50 or whatever you want to withdraw 8th or whatever um and then you get to enjoy those really cheap fees that are that are just getting cheaper over time so i think education definitely needs to be done there i'm hoping to see stuff out of every exchange i think coinbase can do a lot because they have their coinbase loan thing that they already have spun up so so yeah waiting to see how that plays out there but yeah cool to see this um let me know if it's actually live yet i don't have a hobby account but if any of you guys do let me

know if it's actually live and you've been able to withdraw to optimism or arbitrary here i'd be very curious to to to find out there all right so zk sync today announced that they will be paying out uh or announce a bug bounty program on immune fi or that with bounties that are going to be going up to 2.1 million dollars so you can check out this blog post here from immune fi what i find funny about this maximum bounty is that uh optimism i believe had a maximum bounty of two million dollars so obviously zk sings like well we're going to beat that we're going to do 2.1 million dollars so if you're a hacker if you think you can find a critical vulnerability and like i mean it has to be more than critical i think uh you know up to 2.1 million dollars

for critical bug payouts but in saying that um i think it depends on the severity as well you know you can see how this is up to right like uh i i think you have to find basically an inflation bug sort of what happened with optimism or something like that so if you can find that i mean you're gonna get yourself a two you know 2.1 million dollar payday so i definitely think that uh any aspiring kind of like people out there should definitely give this a go all the details about this is in the blog post here so you can kind of like go go check it out there's links to documentation all that sort of stuff and more details about this but very very cool to see more big bug bounty programs being announced for these l2s here all right so ryan uh we are wyatt i

think from polygon studios or the ceo of polygon studios i just shared today that they um that basically a image of the incredible talent that the polygon studios team has been adding so the new ceo is joining uh the studio from ea so from electronic arts where he has spent the last 19 years as their sbp player network uh his team will be tasked with supporting the developer ecosystem building on polygons you can just see the new hires here across the kind of like c-suite and vp suite um that seems to to be getting like a lot of heavy hitters i mean the ceo is from ea the cfo is from pennsylvania corporation uh the vp of gaming business development is from amazon a vp of game design is from mythical games and uh ben watley strategy here is from ea as well so a

lot of heavy hitters coming in here i think that as i said web 3 brain drain or web 2 brain drain is will real into web 3 and it's only going to continue guys i actually had a call with ryan recently and he um he's no i wouldn't say he's completely new to crypt or anything but he's relatively new and he's still kind of like finding the ropes of things but he knows his stuff when it comes to gaming so i think it's really cool that we're getting some kind of like outside talent uh that isn't necessarily crypto person bringing them into crypto putting them in charge of of kind of like these sorts of things and and seeing them run with it and seeing them and seeing them kind of like bring their web to expertise into the web 3 world so very very cool

to see that uh and cool to see these new hires from polygon studios here all right finally we have an update out of synthetic so synthetics perpetual futures will launch later this week anyone with an internet connection will have access to fully decentralized and composable perpetual futures with 10 times leverage to an easy to use trading ui at quinta dot io here so there's a blog post explaining more about this and this is again going back to what i was saying before when i was talking about alchemics about there's d5 teams that are still building and still building out like on their roadmap still executing still doing a lot in the background even though they're in that kind of like trial disillusionment there so i think that uh when you kind of like take um take that kind of uh i guess view of things it's

always good to see kind of like updates come out from these i don't know people used to call them d5 1.0 teams but i don't think so i think it's just all d5 right but it's good to see these updates coming out especially executing on long-term road maps and things like that so very very exciting and i guess speaking of synthetics i should mention that i'm actually on a panel and i'm going to be interviewing kane uh next next week at the blockchain week so very very much looking forward to that because kane's one of uh crypto's ogs he's got a lot of wisdom been been in the trenches for longer than i have really so very much looking forward to that and i guess another reminder to you guys that i'm actually going to be in sydney on tuesday for uh blockchain week and then i'm going to be coming back to

melbourne on wednesday for the events at marvel stadium there so hopefully i see i'll be able to see a lot of you guys there i know that getting a ticket is basically impossible it's it's a packed event but you'll you'll be able to watch everything virtually um and on on the kind of like tuesday i'm actually interviewing mehdi from uh sigma prime uh about all the stuff got to do with kind of like the merge um you know eth2 consensus layer stuff generally so that's going to be very very exciting as as well there i'm very much looking forward to it but yeah as i was saying guys do pay attention to these quote unquote older d5 projects they're still building they're still innovating they're still doing a lot of cool stuff and i think that they some of them not all of them will have a

renaissance quite soon where they basically uh have uh i guess you know escape that trail of disillusionment kind of like start getting natural adoption again and go on to grow to something really amazing that we can all use and get value out of but i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone