The Daily Gwei AMA Series #10 - 18th of September, 2021

Transcript

all right everyone i think we're gonna get started here so uh hey everyone thank you for coming to the 10th daily way ama series as you all know by now i do these every two weeks um thanks to coffee for setting up the calendar invite for this once again uh the way this ama works is that if you want to ask a question feel free to raise your hand you can see the button down the bottom of your discord screen there um otherwise i'll just be reading through the questions that were asked in the ama series channel if you don't want to ask your question on stage you can ask it in the ama series channel and i'll answer it at the end once i've gone through the ones that i've already noted down on my list here um and obviously this will be recorded and uploaded to youtube within

24 hours with timestamps as well so if you have to leave early or you come late or anything like that you can check it out on youtube so without further ado let's get started with the first question from the ama series channel that comes from omit 23 who asks how do you determine if the project team app incentive community has po has a positive sum mission and what are some positive sum projects that you are seeing in the ethereum ecosystem as someone who's still learning to evaluate projects listening to the refuel is great is a great starting point to begin my own research but i still don't have a good system in place to identify great projects so it's quite hard to identify great projects especially during bull markets because what ends up happening is that you'll have a lot of projects that go live and a lot of the time they'll have

a token and then because that's a bull market or maybe the project does kind of like some liquidity mining what will end up happening is if this project will look like it's doing really well because they'll get a lot of liquidity in they'll have like a lot of total value locked and you'll see people talking about it and whatever but a lot of the time it's usually just because people have bought the token and they're thinking oh well you know i'm speculating on this i'm just going to talk about it on twitter so i can i can pump the token price up and if there's liquidity mining incentives in place for this project well then the higher the token price goes the more uh kind of i guess like apy you can earn from these liquidity incentives the more total value locked and you know then it makes the project look

good but it works the other way as well when the token price comes down liquidity leaves and then you can kind of have a death spiral from there so it is yeah it's definitely hard to don't kind of like feel down or anything about not being able to identify something i guess just from the surface level stuff you definitely have to dive deeper into into various projects i think it's also like on a risk curve if you kind of get involved with the project and on day one well then the risk is much greater than getting involved with a project on like day 365 right for example because you'll have a lot more data to work off from day one all you've got is okay well you know you maybe spoke to the team briefly and they seem they seem cool and maybe you look at the idea or their white

paper whatever they have and you you think yourself okay this looks cool maybe this can work and kind of get involved from there but it's still extremely risky because it's day one you don't know what's going to happen from there but then on day 365 of the of the project you'll have a whole year which is which is a lot of time in crypto especially our worth of data to look at and say okay well this team's legit they're they're building they've still got traction despite not maybe maybe they don't even have liquidity incentives or anything like that uh and then you kind of like get involved from there it's not a binary thing it doesn't have to be like day one or day three six five but the longer that a project has been around for usually the the kind of like i guess more credible it is and and the

easier it is to determine uh i kind of things you mentioned like you know how good the team is how good the actual idea is is there actually a product market fit here um you know are they still just paying out huge liquidity mining rewards or that have they actually got organic traction you know what's their community like is it just full of people who are in it for the token um or that do people actually care about the project and actually care about growing the the thing uh so yeah that's obviously a lot easier to do a year in than it is on day one um so that you just have to kind of like decide you know what your risk profile is do you want to invest in a project you know both your time and money on day one do you want to take that massive risk for

potential massive ups upside or do you want to get kind of like involved in a project that's been around for a while and if you look at there's a lot of the top projects out there they've been around for for quite a while now i mean bitcoin obviously has been around for a very long time now uh ethereum since since 2015 and you make your way down the list on coin market cap and and not even just like the layer ones just all the different projects like d5 projects for example uh one of the top default projects maker it may seem boring from the outside but they're a top defrag project for a reason they they have their [ __ ] together right they have a really great team they have a really great dow structure um they have a product that people like it's got

product market fit same with other ones like rv and compound and unisop as well obviously is a fan favorite i think pretty much everyone has used uni swap at least once in their life at this point uh sushi swap is probably you know a really good example of something that if you had a bet on it from day one uh and you kind of like bought into the mania you would have been down on your investment for quite a while and and it was actually super risky because um i think that without the leadership of of mackie who actually took over from chef nomi originally who has now stepped down as some of you will know um i think without his leadership sushi swap would have probably died off and it wouldn't have actually um gone as far as it's gone so that's the kind of risk you play at the

end of the day if you had bought sushi once the kind of like hype died off i think it was trading at maybe 60 or 70 cents and then it ended up trading at like 15 or 20 dollars at the top there and i think right now it's about 12 well you would have made like a decent amount of money there from doing that but obviously the risk was much much higher than buying um you know something else you know whether that be kind of like eighth or some other kind of project out there so yeah there's there's a money side to it but then there's also the the kind of like uh social cycle like do you want to invest your time into a project that is inevitably gonna fail obviously you don't but you're gonna that's gonna happen from time to time i

remember personally back in i guess like 2017 2018 when plasma was all the rage about layer 2 scaling i invested a lot of time in keeping up with different kind of like plasma projects reading all the the research on it kind of getting to know uh you know what was going on in that ecosystem and i don't really look at back on it as a waste of time you know i think plasma definitely is not a technology that is going to be used kind of at scale going forward i think it was a sp i mean it's a roll-ups are like a spiritual successor to plasma we took the the kind of learnings from from plasma and applied them to roll-ups but uh i think you know with technology it always evolves over time so you can't kind of get caught in that mindset of oh

i wasted all this time learning about this technology when these new ones come out and kind of replaced it i mean there's new technology that replaces everything all the time you just have to kind of adjust your mental model and you have to learn something new and that's just the way it is right and some people don't want to learn something new they want to be stuck in their old ways and we see this all the time i mean you know there's always the jokes about about the boomers who don't want to learn anything new they just want to stick in there kind of like um you know what what they're used to and that's totally fine but by doing that that doesn't make a good investor that doesn't make um someone who kind of like is a free thinker and i can actually kind of like think

critically about different projects within the ecosystem and kind of like make calculated bets on them whether that be with your time or your money so uh yeah hopefully that kind of like answers your question gives you a lot of context around uh kind of like how to evaluate different projects i mean if i was to dive a little bit deeper on kind of like what i look for personally in projects i definitely weight the team as the the kind of like biggest thing um because even if the product that they're building doesn't have product market fit if the team is is our really good builders if the team is cohesive if the team actually cares about what that what you know building something cool then they can always pivot and and build something different or maybe build something new as part of like their suite of products so i always

look at the team first then of course i look at the products that they're building like does this actually make sense does that have a product market fit will it scale will people actually kind of use this thing um will it actually work all that sort of stuff and then you know i go down the list from there after those two things you know it's really a toss-up between kind of like okay what does the community look like i think community is pretty critical but i would say that that the core team and uh the product idea has to be good or else the community is just not going to come and then from there you got you got a bunch of other things you could look at like we know what are the liquidity mining incentives like do they lend themselves to to parasites coming along and just

mining uh you know the incentives dumping them then the token price kind of trends down over time which destroys the community i've seen this happen plenty of times uh and then yeah you have a bunch of other things down the list that you can kind of look at as well so yeah hopefully that that kind of like answers your question and give you a bunch of context around that all right the next one comes from sodium star here who says hey anthony after yesterday's refuel so this was the refill i think on the 8th of september i thought your position on privacy and crypto seems a bit schizophrenic on the one hand you are laughing at politicians when they are worried about unmeditating crypto but on the other hand you are super bullish on zk tech or zero knowledge tech with private transactions being one of the applications such as

aztec railgun etc how do you reconcile this in that sense isn't crypto an actual threat to all current nation states that eg rely on fair taxation so the way i kind of look at privacy within crypto is is a bit kind of like nuanced here you can have privacy at different layers uh layer one privacy uh there's blockchains that focus on this such as zcash which has shielded addresses or you have monero that has like privacy by default so pretty much every transaction is private on there uh that's not what ethereum is going for ethereum i don't think will have privacy built into the protocol itself and there's a few reasons for this the major reason is that um when you do this you introduce kind of like a a bit of a scary situation where if there was a bug that happened especially like inflation bugs

where uh just say for some reason there was a massive bug where someone could mint like you know 100 million each to themselves well you wouldn't actually know that that happened because um of of the privacy uh uh features within the protocol if this happened on monero you wouldn't actually know until um that kind of like money i guess like floating into an exchange or you kind of like uh were able to do some maybe on chain analysis or anything on stuff like that but the way monero is built is that it's extremely hard to kind of uh tell if not impossible to tell what's going on there um so that's why i think like privacy on layer one uh in in protocol is not gonna happen but with ethereum you have the benefit of smart contracts where you can definitely do things like aztecs shown this off

where you can basically use zero knowledge tech to build privacy into into layer one smart contracts but again it's not private in the sense that it's kind of like totally shielded you can still audit it you can still see okay well you know um according to the the cryptography here this actually still plays by the rules this actually still makes sense and this you know this is actually correct uh so it's like you can fake anything right um but then kind of like when you think about private privacy and kind of like hiding yourself from the government for example and stuff like that i mean i think about this is the same way as cash with with cash um you know there's a lot of people who will do cash jobs or a lot of people a lot of shops that will be like that will take cash and they won't

actually report like the total earnings to to avoid paying tax so i mean this already happens at scale within within the kind of like non-crypto world so that's how i think about it with with crypto and it's already happening regardless of privacy or not where people aren't um i guess like declaring the amount of money they've made they're not declaring taxable events they're not paying the tax that they should pay and with privacy obviously it's going to be much harder for i guess these kind of like uh maybe on chain analysis tools or governments to kind of look at the chain and be like okay well this is what you owe this is what you owe so they're always going to rely on the centralized exchanges so if you ever want to cash out to fiat well it's going to be very hard to do that if you're not

paying taxes because everything is logged on a centralized exchange and he's kept for a long time and if uh you are audited uh or kind of like if the exchange is audited all that information goes to the relevant tax authorities and then they can find discrepancies in that they can basically say well you put like ten thousand dollars in and you took twenty thousand dollars out where did this extra ten thousand dollars come from and why didn't you declare it on your tax return sort of thing so there are different kind of like ways that can work out there and and a lot of it is also enforcement uh via i guess like sorry enforcement enforcement of the law via threat of enforcement where they're basically saying well if you you know willfully dodge your tax obligations then you can either be subject to massive fines or

you can be put in jail and that's how a lot of the laws work right where there's just kind of like the threat of enforcement that works to to basically keep people in check even though it's very hard to to police everything at the end of the day so hopefully that kind of like gives an extra bit of extra color about how i think about privacy i think that uh just generally privacy is a fundamental human right it shouldn't be something that we should be what uh saying oh well we shouldn't have it because governments won't be able to track us i mean or won't be able to see like uh things like um people's kind of like tax records or stuff like that i think that's kind of like a bit of a i mean it's kind of like a bit of a slippery slope to go down because then

you know you start kind of saying well i mean if the government can access everything that i'm doing on chain well that's okay it's whatever they only want to know about it for tax reasons well i mean as we've seen uh i guess like through the political sphere it's more than that you know you can use these on-chain kind of transactions to uh monitor kind of like political dissonance for some for an example there just imagine some country out there who's like okay well we know that our opposition is being funded via crypto so let's track all the people finding them via crypto and let's label them as political dissonance and let's kind of like uh i i kind of like ban them from certain things and kind of like put a mark on there not a mark on their head or whatever but like

ban them from government services or kind of like call them out publicly and stuff like that it gets really dark really quickly you know the more you think about it so that's why i think that privacy on ethereum is is a fundamental human right uh not just on ethereum but just generally it is a fundamental human right and we should still work towards it with with the zero knowledge technology and i think we will i don't think it's a choice of like are we going to do it it's just kind of like um when when is it going to happen it's it's not an if so hopefully that gives you a bunch of extra clarity around that sodium style all right one here from dom uh it's a bit of an off topic question where does the l in cecil 0x come from so the funny

thing is i've had the nickname sasso since uh i was 12 years old in year six in high school it was just something one of my friends kind of like came up with as a nickname and it stuck at the end of the day obviously the the sass comes from my surname but yeah there's no kind of like l there so people always ask that actually it's a very common question um i don't actually remember why my friends started calling me this they just did and it's funny because like my friends in real life will alternate between like sass and sassal uh it won't really be kind of like one of the other um as kind of like a hard rule but uh yeah it just stuck over the years and it kind of became my on-chain identifier obviously the zero x is a homage to the fact that every ethereum

address starts with 0x as kind of like the the prefix there so yeah hopefully that answers that for you dom all right on to one from monkey king who asks what does the future of ens domains look like for you is it a good investment like how people invested in dot coms in the 80s will.eight speeder.coms of the future i was investing in enos domains that i assume could be the future uh crypto metaverse companies and curious if i'm wasting my time and eighth um so i i don't know if you'd seen this monkey king or not but a few weeks ago ens actually integrated um normal dns kind of like names like dot com and and whatever into their app uh sorry into it like as a feature within their system where essentially you could tie your ethereum address to a com so if you own

apple.com you can do ah without having you know sorry if you own apple.com you don't have to own apple.eth you can tie your ethereum address to apple.com and people can use apple.com as a normal ens name just like they would apple.ed for example so from that point of view i don't think it would be a good investment because i don't see companies going out there and prioritizing buying a e s name just with dot eth on it um instead of just using their already kind of like owned.com like i don't see google being like oh well i'm going to spend millions of dollars you know they're not going to spend millions of dollars which obviously is a random error to them but i just feel like you know maybe google's not the right example maybe they would do it but i feel like on on kind of like

the the the most kind of like businesses sides of things or the most most people side to things they're probably not going to go through the hassle of spending money just to get the dot eight they're just going to stick with what they already have plus it simplifies things as well if google can just say oh well you know we have an ethereum address and it's tied to google.com that's much easier than trying to i guess like say oh it's google.ed and then all the people who have no idea what dot eth actually is will be like uh you know they'll have to go learn about it or they'll just kind of like not resonate with it at all so yeah i mean obviously this is an investment advice but i i personally aren't uh aren't investing in ens uh names because i knew about this for

quite a while that they were implementing this feature and i knew that it would be and you know because they had publicly spoken about this for years and i knew that that would kill kind of like any speculative value on these sorts of things but i do think the future of ens is very bright i think it's obviously a much needed kind of like service within crypto i think it's i mean i'm actually a little bit surprised that it hasn't taken off uh you know as much as i thought it would at this point i thought people would be using ens names more regularly to kind of like send stuff to people whenever i ask people for an address um you know i hope they give me an e s and obviously not everyone has an e s on their address but if they do

sometimes they'll just send me the full address they won't actually send me their ens name and i'll be like oh that was weird like you know what what's the point of that so i was trying to make a make a point of kind of sending sassel.exe to people as my ans name instead of the address and if you want to double check it you can always do so on etherscan but i think it's just much easier doing that then kind of like having to go copy paste my address in and and whatever and it's just like much easier for me to type out so yeah i think the future is very bright there but i personally am not speculating on ans uh domains uh because of the fact that you can tie your ethereum address to any kind of tld whether that be com or dot io or

whatever else is out there at the end of the day so yeah hopefully that answers your question all right so one here from johan the thorn who asks or two here actually the first question is if gas fees serve as an economic disincentive for spamming the network how are l2s able to combat spam given their low fees so the loaf i mean this is funny because they'll two still have fees as we've all probably experienced by now and depending on what kind of like i guess spam attack you want to do it it will kind of like be a different cost like if you want to keep continuously spamming the network then the cost is going to be very very high because even at like very cheap fees say like one cent it depends how many it depends on how many transactions you're

sending but even a kind of like one cent fees uh that adds up really really quickly right like if you do 100 transactions it's it's a dollar and then and then it kind of grows exponentially from there but as we all know a lot of these l2s um don't offer like one cent fees just yet i mean the ones that do and the ones that will in the future such as like i guess like the validiums and volitions of the world will have different ways to deal with spam as well uh there's kind of like quality of service things you can put in you can put in place that essentially you can actually so this is a fun fact about l2s and even l1 but like l2s because this is uh in the context of ethereum you can actually import kind of like i guess uh measures to identify

spam transactions and kind of like filter them out of the network or at least tag them as low priority transactions and it's fairly trivial to do this as well because spam is is really easy to identify at the end of the day uh you know spam transactions usually take the form of kind of like um you know quick succession transactions doing very similar things um and you can kind of drop them i i don't know kind of like what what that's going to look like i don't know if any of the l2s have that right now but i i think it's kind of like trivial trivial to kind of um tell what is spam and what isn't but then you kind of like fall into a little bit of a i guess like controversial area where you're basically like well you know is the network deciding which

transactions they want to accept or not and the funny thing is is that like miners and stakers and then l2 kind of like sequences will already have the ability uh sorry already have the ability to do this they can drop any transaction that they want if they see spam hitting the network they can decide not to include it in a block uh the the miners can kind of like this is why we call these networks censorship resistant and not censorship proof because the miners stakers sequences whatever you want to call them whatever you know whatever block producer it is um can definitely censor the transactions as they see fit here the reason that they don't um is because a lot of the time you know it's because of the fees of course and a lot of the time it just doesn't make uh sense from a

game theory point of view for them to be censoring transactions but if it's pure spam well then no one's going to complain that pure spam is being kind of filtered through but i don't think there's any there's been any large scale kind of like example of that happening just yet um but yeah i mean like that that's another way of disincentivizing spam on the network but generally fees are a good way to do it and then you also have kind of like i guess the hard limits in place for for blocks for example uh you know the gas limit is what we call it in ethereum that kind of puts an upper bound on how many transactions can happen and stuff like that and it's funny because there was actually a bug that happened during end of 2016 called the shanghai dos attacks which you should read up on um

where the network was basically slowed to a crawl for about a month because there was a lot of um spam transactions kind of like in the backlog that kind of um bloated the state and had to be filtered through so there has been examples of this happening before um and yeah it's it's definitely a um i mean fees are an easy way to kind of like i guess not fix it but like mitigate the issue but um you know as you mentioned with l2s that have really really low fees they're going to have to employ other mess methods because there's some l2s out there that will offer um free uh free transactions because there'll be like a validium or a volition where they'll store the data off chain and and they'll just kind of like put other things on chain like the pro put the proof on chains for example

um and in that world and if they're offering kind of like free transactions well then they'll probably do some some kind of like quality of service themselves where they filter out transactions based on you know identifying them as spam or not so there's definitely trade off cr but hopefully that answers your first question now the second question you had was could you explain why the concept such as enterprise blockchains exist blockchain seem to only add value over a database with multi-party access if your system needs to be decentralized for enterprise use cases such as any intercommunication between a handful of banks it doesn't seem to meet that criteria so i think a lot of the enterprise blockchain space is really just these r d departments being like hey like we we saw this new technology we want to you know do some r d here uh can you give us

funding because obviously within a big corporation uh there's business units and each business unit will get funding depending on kind of like they have to justify their funding right to to kind of i guess like the treasury of of the um of the company so you know what better way to justify new research and development funding than bringing up fancy words like blockchain ai and machine learning at the end of the day that's maybe a more cynical take on it uh but i think that that applies to most of it but that's not to say that these things don't have value i think the value of of doing the r d on kind of like the quote-unquote enterprise blockchains is getting to mainnet eventually now we saw this recently there was the eoi nightfall project which has been i mean around for a while now a few years now has gone through

many iterations and that was pretty much a private blockchain project or enterprise blockchain project that that kind of like didn't hit main net um or it would hit main in like limited capacities but now it's gotten to the point where they're now working with polygon and they want to bring this to mainnet ethereum as a rollup instead of keeping it closed off within the enterprise kind of ecosystem of whatever company it is whether that be ey or something else so from that point of view the r d that they did was was worth it because now we're going to get like one of these we're going to get another roll up where it's gonna be uh fully private it's gonna be like a hybrid between uh zk roll up and an optimistic roll up and polygon's gonna leave the charge there as well which is which i think is really

cool too so yeah i think a lot of the time it's just like buzzwordy get get funding for new ideas to kind of like research but at the end of the day um uh the ones that do succeed in bringing their kind of like enterprise blockchains to market will be the ones that use mainnet and leverage mainnet it'll basically be like the intranet and internet where each kind of like enterprise will have their own intranet um you know whoever's ever worked for like a company like especially a big corporate you know that they all have their own intranets that can't be accessed from uh from the internet unless you have special access like it's not it's not open to the public internet you have to go through different kind of like proxies and everything like that to get in it's going to be the same thing with a

lot of these enterprise chains i believe where they're going to have these internal kind of intranets that can talk to the ethereum net for example so they can bridge in and out of in a kind of like way where it's not open to the public but it can still interface with the public uh chain uh obviously that being ethereum so yeah hopefully that answers your second question there yawn all right one here from matthew t and this is a big one so i'm just going to get a drink and i'll continue on which give me one sec guys all right so let's get into this one from matthew t who asks would you give a give us a deep cut on solana and what

you see is the pros and cons of this chain and its long-term potential it's pretty easy to feel fomo about it given recent price action and at least one major eighth bullet trust has tweeted positive remarks about solana recently um and i think that was the question there so i've talked about celina i think a little bit on the refill before obviously i've talked about it on twitter as well and there's been a bunch of people talk talking about it like over the past few weeks because of its its price rise i mean this question was asked on the 9th of september which is pretty much the heart of its of its major rise but my kind of view on salani is not one that's totally positive i actually think that give i mean kind of like not thinking about the decentralization trade-offs that celina has taken just thinking it

from a pure tech perspective i actually don't believe that solana can do what they say they're going to be able to do which is scale um to the whole world on layer one without sharding so for those of you who don't know solana's kind of i guess narrative and marketing has always been we think that uh you know all the other chains doing kind of like a layer one layer two approach it leads to fragmentation so we're going to do everything on layer one where we keep everyone on the same kind of layer everything's composable and we're not going to do sharding or anything like that and we're going to be able to scale to the world uh and you know and and and it's going to be all well and good and i don't think that's the case at all i mean we saw recently and as i said this question

was asked a couple weeks ago but we saw recently with them going offline for 18 hours that was due to the network being spammed uh by basically bot transactions which kind of like blew up not blow up the validators but kind of like sent them offline because the network couldn't handle the load and the network couldn't handle the load is because a lot of the validators weren't actually uh running the required hardware and even the ones that were i'm pretty sure there was kind of like a either a software bug or there was something that that happened where those spam transactions as i was just talking about before weren't filtered through uh and and that ended up kind of like leading to an overload of the network now they claimed that they that were able to get 400 000 transactions per second well i mean it was really zero transactions per

second because those things weren't processed but if you think about it from in terms of a demand perspective 400 000 transactions per second that that's bots that's not real kind of people that is that is pretty much all bots and the network boasts that it's able to do 50 000 transactions per second today and normally averages around 2 000 but pretty much all of that belongs to uh validator related activities so for those who don't know um the solana validators have to vote on things and those votes are counted as transactions on the chain so if you see that they have like 2000 tps well that is basically you know i think 90 of it belongs or even more than that belongs to the validators so there's that aspect to it but i'm going back to what i was

saying about not being able to scale on layer one just from a pure technology standpoint it doesn't work because if you look at big companies that have already scaled kind of like centralized databases to the world they all employ various uh kind of like measures to make sure that they can't be dosed because essentially what happened with celina was a dos a denial of service where there was just too much activity transaction activity and because they say that they can scale to meet that there was nothing put in place to kind of mitigate that because their fees are really really cheap uh and everything like that it just it wasn't a costly thing to do uh uh it wasn't costly to kind of like um do or do all those transactions and it eventuated from an ido as well so everyone was trying to get into this ido

and bots wanted to kind of like get in and buy these tokens but with with the centralized kind of like databases and and stuff like aws they all employ different techniques such as load balancing they employ sharding they have quality of service uh kind of like um technology that drops uh different kind of like packets of information if they identify that as being a dos vector they have things like cloudflare that that um that manage that as well i mean there's plenty of other techniques there's a laundry list of them that they go through and some of these techniques can be used on on blockchains but the problem is is that most of those techniques require centralization they are not things that can be done in a decentralized way and that's why ethereum for example is not going down that road because we want to keep the

chain as as much as decentralized and secure as possible but the trade-off is that layer one is expensive because of that the fees work to basically stop the spam and the gas limit works to stop the spam at the end of the day because it's just too expensive to to do something like that and we also keep it uh you know easy for people for anyone to run a node or or a full node or anything like that whereas on solano it's basically you know very very very hard or you need like kind of really beefy hardware to do so so that's like from a technical perspective now the reason why i talk about the tech first i want to move into like the decentralization second is because the tech dictates the how decentralized this this chain can be so for those of you who don't know

solana right now has 20 validators which are basically super nodes sitting in kind of like data centers they are not validators that you can run on a home pc it's not like the validator that i have for my uh that i have sitting behind me in the refuel videos on my little pc that you see um for eth2 these are validators that are extremely beefy hardware i'm sure some of you have seen the hardware requirements i mean the minimum which i actually think is not enough these days of ram is 128 gigabytes i think the the you actually need 256 gigabytes now and then the network throughput that you need is insane and the only way the only place you can get these kind of like hardware is in a data center it's it's probably not economical for you to build this at home and on top of that you need i think

seven hundred thousand dollars worth of uh sold tokens just to become a validator and that just to turn a profit as a validator and that's not to become one of the 20 validators this is that that currently have the power to halt the network that's just to become a validator in general because right now 20 percent of the val sorry 20 validators on solana have 33 of the stake which means they can either censor transactions or halt the network altogether so they can basically come together and say okay well we're going to hold the network and basically send it offline no one will be able to do anything so that's to me is like an extreme trade-off to get scale which isn't really scale because we've seen it already kind of like fall over there it was an 18-hour outage like that is

uh you know very very bad the only longer outages that i know of um i think there's like iota i had like a six-week outage but i mean iota is like a whole nother thing i'm not going to get into that and then a few other ones as well but i mean solana's whole boasting was about you know being able to scale to the world and then they say oh we're still in beta it's like well i mean your token's not trading as if you're in beta and you're not marketing as if you're in beta you're not kind of like warning users about this uh you know everywhere on kind of like your network and stuff like that so i think that was a bit of a cop-out but um you know that that all kind of like lends it uh kind of like builds on top of the

technology there that i just don't think that um they can scale to the world at layer one and then you know they'll hit back the slanted people will hit back and say well you know moore's law dictates that every two years that the amount of transit transistors on a kind of like computer chip doubles well i mean that was true for a while but it's not true anymore if you actually look at moore's law that has slowed down considerably and it's it doesn't show any any kind of like signs of speeding back up again but even still the amount of demand there is for block space is by is going to out outpace moore's law even if it does still kind of like play into effect here or just like hardware improvements in general by orders of magnitude the the demand for these networks is is pretty much infinite

there are they are monetary networks people have a lot of ways to make money on them a lot of ways to profit on them and that makes people kind of like fomo and then it makes kind of like bots come into the play as well because everyone wants to get into the latest opportunity um and if you have a network where you boast that you can basically offer really really cheap fees uh basically i mean the fees that they have is what 0.001 uh dollars or something like that something crazy um that lends itself to bots kind of like uh being like a huge part of the network and these bots aren't just doing things like arbitrage or mav or anything like that they're doing they're spamming the network they're they're kind of like um very para parasitic at the end of the day um so i mean hopefully that gives

you kind of like my my general thoughts about solana and this is just on the tech and decentralization side i think there's there's kind of like a lot of other things to talk about as well but i don't want to kind of like get into that there's obviously the i mean i don't want to go into detail about it but like at a higher level there's obviously the poor token distribution where it's very very insider heavy where most of the tokens or a large chunk of the tokens belong to vcs funds um the team and stuff like that uh and a lot of these are stakers as well so and and you know they're kind of like permanent stakers too uh because of the fact that like why would you sell when you're earning such a like a high staking yield which i think is like

seven or eight percent on solana right now so uh that's a lot if you have like millions and millions of tokens or like tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens and you're one of the top validators well you're making a lot of money from from just staking solana there so there's that aspect to it there's also the kind of like i guess like people involved i mean they rubbed me the wrong way it feels very kind of like trader driven more so than kind of like organics grassroots community driven so that's just a personal kind of thing for me i don't i don't really care to be involved with that sort of stuff um and you know i actually think on the on the tech side of things solana is probably going to end up pivoting to doing kind of like this roll

up centric road map that ethereum is doing where they scale via layers or they um do do sharding or something like that and the funny thing is is that i think if they do that well what's the value proposition from there like i i don't actually think there's much of a value proposition left because everyone's saying well you know solana is is better than not everyone like the people who are celina fans are saying oh you know it's going to kill ethereum it's better than ethereum because it can scale um and you know we have really cheap fees but the problem is is that they're comparing it to ethereum's layer one ethereum layer one was never going to be that where we can like scale to the world yes we have sharding coming along but sharding is going to uh kind of like uh enhance

layer two it's not going to allow layer one to scale to the point of solana and i've explained this in a recent newsletter i did uh but basically the reason for that is because we want layer one ethereum to be super decentralized super secure and we want it to be the settlement layer for all these layer twos and the funny thing is is that solana could actually just become a layer 2 on ethereum they could be secured by ethereum and they could be the execution layer in a layer 2 where they could do everything they're doing now they could even keep their token but they would instead just you know they were instead of their validators kind of like validating the security and the decentralization of the network they would just be kind of like producing blocks as sequences and then and as validators of course but like not

in the same sense of a layer one validator and then they would inherit ethereum security so i actually think that over the longer term there's gonna be much more kind of like i guess competition within the layer twos than there are of other layer ones because with the with layer twos it's much easier to kind of like tap into i guess like ethereum security and leverage ethereum security and leverage ethereum's kind of i guess like decentralization and community rather than bootstrap your own layer one protocol i think the layer one error is like coming to an end or you know i think kind of this is the last hurrah for them because ethereum layer 2 is is here it's we're scaling there's a lot of um kind of like a projects now on there there's more coming every day and it's

showing the world that well you can still have your own token at layer 2 you can still do everything you want to do you can experiment with without whatever tech you want to experiment with you don't have to use solidity you don't have to use the evm um but like all you have to do is pay for your security on ethereum and and and you know we've seen kind of like layers who's like arbitrarily doing that lately where they're basically batching their transactions to ethereum same with optimism of course and all the other l2s out there so i think thinking about that from that perspective is a is a funny thought as well because at the end of the day um i think a lot of these layer ones uh i kind of like pointless but some of them have good tech some of them have like

innovative tech but why not just be a layer two on ethereum get all the benefits of ethereum's decentralization and security and community um without any of the drawbacks of being labeled ethereum killer or kind of like having to boost up your own security and as i said you they these chains can still have their own token like it doesn't that doesn't have to go away um so yeah i'm gonna be interested to see how that plays out but yeah hopefully matt that gives you kind of like my i guess overview of solana and this is exactly why i don't pay attention to solana and people call me an ethmaxy for this but celana does not represent what i want to see in in the blockchain world it is not anywhere near decentralized enough i actually don't even think it's decentralized at all if i'm being honest

i think celina is fully centralized um i think that if it wouldn't even require like a nation state to go after them i think that if enough of them colluded together they could do serious damage to the network we saw with their 18-hour outage how kind of like they basically had a discord channel where they were kind of all talking to each other and being like okay well this is how we get the network back up and it's just i mean and you know it was just a crazy thing to watch play out to be honest especially after all the hype and everything so yeah those are my general thoughts there and you had another question here on celana there and yet another question here matt was about layer twos where you say if layer twos will be a scaling solution for the ethereum ecosystem a high gas feeds a

potential obstacle just to move east to the layer two in the first place for ethereums who are well capitalized is maybe negligible or non-issue but what about people with limited financial resources that does that initial gas fee represented deterrent or even a deal breaker if ethereum is going to truly scale to hundreds of millions or billions of people what are your thoughts about this issue um so there's actually a pretty easy way to get around this issue especially if you're bridging into layer two from a decentralized exchange you can have pools so this is what seller actually does right now where essentially they'll have like a a kind of like smart contract that everyone can pull their funds into so you'll deposit your funds kind of like uh into it and then uh eventually uh and then and

that's you know much cheaper than depositing your funds directly into kind of like the bridge contract to get into layer two because you're just basically doing a simple send um so everyone just like uh kind of like deposit their funds into the smart contract and then it'll reach a certain uh a kind of like period of time or to reach a certain threshold where that smart contract will do a bulk deposit into this layer two and then you'll get credited the coins on layer two so that's i think what's going to happen with a lot of these centralized exchanges i think that that's the kind of like play they're gonna go for because they know that layer one fees are are going to be high for you know probably for forever at this point um so they're going to like um look at that and be like okay well we

need to do batch kind of like deposit into these layer twos and they may just eat the cost for their users at the end of the day just like cost of doing business but even if they don't the cost should be the cost should be much lower than if this user was to kind of like deposit into layer 2 directly um and even you know what i was thinking about this the other day as well i think the funny thing about it is with layer 2 is especially with these bridging solutions uh is that you can actually potentially bridge into these layers who's not just from ethereum but from other chains as well like these other cheaper chains like the polygon pos chain for example if you go from use use hop and go from polygon pos chain to arbitrim well uh you know it's

not it it's a different kind of like it's not technically a bridge it's more of a kind of like um this uh cross chain swap but if you do that then it's much cheaper than going from ethereum to the layer two but yes your trust assumptions are more there because uh it's it's not the same thing as like a trussless bridge or anything like that um and it's like it's like a um it's like a transfer through a decentralized exchange uh cross chain kind of decentralized exchange there so yeah there are multiple kind of things you can do here i would encourage you to check out seller's solution as i said they already have something um it's they call it a public transportation system for for d fire or for like i guess um for ethereum which i think is a really cool way to frame it because it's kind

of like well you can either choose to drive your own car into the you know into work or you can catch a public transport driving your own cars obviously much more expensive because you have to maintain the car petrol costs uh parking in the city is really expensive um whereas catching public transport you just have like that much lower fee for drive for into you know to ride the train and then you'd have to find parking or whatever you just get off at the station and and that and you're all well and good from there that's exactly what sellers kind of like solution does so yeah hopefully that answers uh your couple of questions there matt all right one here from fran who says with the okay this is another solano related question um with the current prompting of solana there's a lot of media emphasis on tps and how the main

problem with in ethereum is low tps but i'm not really convinced on tps as a suitable metric to judge blockchains there's a lot of other important things like decentralization security etc but i don't really know how to measure those things or compare between networks what metrics do you think are useful for judging the long-term potential of a blockchain and where might i find this info so i totally agree with you tps is a very poor uh kind of like metric to compare blockchains against because as i mentioned before about solana like they boast this high tps but i consider solana to be totally centralized so what's the point in having high tps if your blockchain centralized at the end of the day right doesn't really make much sense from there but also i think at the end of the day uh solana and

other layer ones that claim to scale on kind of like you know at the base layer are not competing with ethereum's base layer they're competing with the ethereum l2 ecosystem and this is something that i think a lot of people miss is that ethereum l1 um maybe maybe originally the the original creators of ethereum back in the early days thought that ethereum layer 1 was going to be the thing where we scaled but as as kind of like it came into view that layer 2s were the way we were going to do this on ethereum layer 1 has never been the long-term sustainable solution for scaling execution so and for scale for scaling to like the world where users can sit there and do all their transactions and stuff like that and layer 2 is going to be where users do that and we're already

seeing that kind of play out there but i guess to your question about kind of like how to measure these kind of like things like decentralization security or long-term health sustainability of the network there's a lot here and there's actually a really great piece from balaji that i think he published in 2017 called quantifying decentralization so i suggest giving that a read but i can give my kind of take on this so decentralization is i mean it's a word that gets thrown around a lot and i don't think many people actually understand what it means and how many how many facets are coming to play here it's not just the nodes it's not just the validators but it is it is a lot more than that so i can run through the list off the top of my head the nodes and validators count for a lot

like if if people don't have the ability to run their own full node on consumer hardware to actually check the rules of the system for themselves i actually don't consider the chain to be very decentralized and it's funny because like bitcoin has talked about this all all the time and you know they try to fight ethereum sometimes by saying oh no one can run a full note on ethereum which is is total crap like i run full nodes i know many people who run full nodes it's very easy to do it's and i run it on consumer hardware so that's just pure fud um but that will they're definitely right about the fact that people should need to be able to run their own full node to be able to validate the network and validate the rules for themselves and uh you know to be able to kind of like check if

anything's going wrong and and kind of like point out any issues with the network as well from a security standpoint so there's that aspect to it then there's the decentralization of the ones that are actually producing the blocks such as the miners currently and the mining pools and in the future stakers and staking pools so there's a metric called the nakamoto coefficient that basically measures the decentralization based on i guess like entities so if you have like three mining pools that account for more than 51 of the network well then it you know the logic goes that you have a lower nakamoto if um coefficient than one that has like five mining pools for example i actually don't think this metric is is great i think it it lacks a lot of nuance because mining pools do not equal individual kind of like um miners mining

pools are very easy to switch like a miner can be blinding on one pool and then if that pool decides to do something dodgy well they can just switch their miner to another pool very quickly it's basically an instant switch um and then you know and then with kind of like staking you have an even bigger disincentive within staking pools in that uh you don't want to stay with someone who you don't consider to be trustworthy uh if it's a centralized um kind of like uh solution because you get slashed um we've got like inbuilt slashing mechanisms for for doing dodgy stuff on the network so that's the disincentive there and there's a whole bunch of game theory that goes around that goes uh goes with it as well where it's actually more profitable almost always to just play by the rules of the network

than try to attack it um but obviously you know we we're trying to build these networks to resist nation states and nation states don't necessarily care too much about profitability or anything like that because they have um essentially unlimited military budgets a lot of the time and they can just kind of um keep attacking the network and and kind of like try to destroy the network that way but i don't you know i mean that's kind of like the end game it's not something that that a lot of people think about but for me i want ethereum to be able to survive that so that's why i'm like a very big uh kind of like advocate for people running their own notes for keeping ethereum's basically as decentralized as possible and decentralization leads to security as well like as i was just talking about um

you know solana trying to do everything at kind of like layer one uh and having kind of like such a i guess like um having a network that's so prone to getting spammed uh led to it being offline and that's a liveness kind of failure for 18 hours which means like that to me that's actually like if that happened on ethereum i would consider that to be a very very bad thing like i consider that not to be something that kills ethereum but it would kill a lot of the credibility in ethereum because 18-hour outage for people kind of like not being able to access their money not being able to kind of like save their positions um because with an hour there's a lot of kind of like second-order consequences of it as well where essentially if the price of like eighth was to deviate too much from the price

that when when kind of the network went offline say the price was three thousand dollars and then when the network came back online it was twenty five hundred dollars well you have like a lot of stuff that could go wrong there's a lot of people that would get liquidated instantly there's a lot of mev that would go on a lot of like the um amm pools would go crazy and it you know a lot a lot of that stuff can can kind of happen very easily and and on top of that as i said it will kill the credibility in ethereum there as well so decentralization allows us to um make these networks anti-fragile so you've said you know you say with like bitcoin it's it's always running like it's for all for all the crap i give bitcoin and for like how bearish i am on

it i mean it is incredibly uh incredibly anti-fragile where the network just continues to run it keeps producing blocks nothing fancy goes on i mean that's also because they don't really do anything to upgrade the network through hard forks and they move very very very slowly so that's a trade-off that they take whereas with ethereum we do move a bit quicker where we do regular hard forks and they sometimes lead to errors i mean we saw recently there was the consensus bug um and then there was kind of like the infuriat uh sorry not the inferior thing the uh the the geth kind of exploit and then there was the inferior thing in december um where inferior didn't kind of like update their nodes and kind of like there was another exploit that was triggered uh so i mean yeah these things happen but uh ethereum being kind of

like decentralized and secure people running their own full nodes and things like that make it so it's less kind of like bad than something that's like totally centralized uh so so that's kind of like the things on the on the nodes and validators but as i said that's just one kind of like small aspect to it i think another big aspect is how decentralized is kind of like the governance process of getting upgrades into the network so for ethereum and i think i answered this on the last ama that i did its governance process is extremely decentralized it's it's not using on-chain governance it's using something called basically uh i mean you could call it off-chain governance so it's basically called rough consensus where we basically look at the ecosystem we look at the social signals from various different parties within the ecosystems

whether they just you know regular community members nodes um you know economic kind of like entities such as exchanges miners and validators of course and stuff like that the the the core devs uh app developers all that sort of stuff we look at all of that we take all the information in and then we come to a decision of okay should this eip which is an ethereum improvement proposal be included in the network or not so and for ethereum because the community is so diverse and because there's so many different players and and it's such a large community uh it has a very great uh kind of like decentralized governance process because of that now some people will argue well it's more of a technocracy because uh there's a bunch of core developers that have the final say but i don't actually think the core

developers have the final say they do have a lot of weight obviously because they know the protocol better than anyone else and if they don't if they refuse to build an eip well then it's not going to get built unless someone else kind of i guess steps up to the plate here so they do hold power in that regard but then blocking an eip is much different to them being able to get a a a a malicious eip into the network and they wouldn't be able to do this because um uh people would notice this and they'd push back on it which just happened before that we had proc power which the community basically said no we don't want this where some core developers are actually in favor of this and then eventually the court developers were like well there's actually not consensus here so we're not going to go

ahead with it there was also a few others like eip999 which was the the eip to unlock the frozen funds and due to the parity multi-sig kind of wallet hack um the community basically said no no way no no this isn't happening and then obviously there was the dow fork where which was incredibly controversial um the community was much smaller and i actually wouldn't i wouldn't say that it was anywhere near as decentralized as it is today but there was that dow fork where essentially uh the people who didn't want to uh i guess like um continue on with with the the forked ethereum chain stuck with ethereum classic which is the chain where the hacker retained all the funds that they stole from from the dow so there's that kind of like governance uh process there that goes into it but that's um that's another big aspect to

it the decentralized governance process um another aspect is that that kind of like relates to that is a social layer like how good is your social layout do you have people who actually care about the change you have people that um care enough to run a full node you have people that care enough to point out if something's going wrong with the chain if a direction that the developers are taking is wrong um you know do you have enough people to call out as i said like bad eips or erps that don't necessarily improve the network they're actually detrimental to it uh and do you have people to speak up and defend the the ecosystem and defend uh ethereum and can they do this in a decentralized way are they not you know are they independent are they not funded by uh you know the ethereum foundation

for example and i think ethereum has a lot of these people there are tons of um independent community members i mean obviously you know i'm i'm i'm one of them uh you know bankless uh there's there's kind of like uh i'm just going through the list of the media organization so you've got d5dad i mean you've got the defiant there's a there's i mean there's there's so many now uh and then you have all the individual community members as well uh you know as such as all of you guys you guys can either have a voice or not like even if your voice isn't on twitter and you don't have like a lot of followers you can have a voice within discord channels you can jump into the core dev discord channel and be like hey i thought you know this was this is a

bad thing for such and such reason or i think this is good and we should do it for such and such reason and anyone could submit an eip like you can just go submit it on github give your reasoning behind it and then you just have to rally support around it you can basically go to various community members and say hey i really think this erp would be cool to get into the network and then you know that person may think it's cool as well and then it'll spread from there and you'll get consensus on it and then you'll have like kind of i guess this um this erp going to the network eventually so there's there's the social life aspect tool which is which is a big part as well um and then i mean there's a lot of kind of like i guess cursory things

about it sorry like i guess things that that may not directly play into it but but bolster ethereum's decentralization so i think like how decentralized is the liquidity for ether as an asset like how many exchanges is each listed on well it's listed on every exchange it's not just controlled by one exchange um one exchange can't just de-list eith and then eth as an asset would like disappear tomorrow um that that can't happen so the uh the kind of like um the trading and the liquidity for eighth is very very distributed and even on chain as well and then you have um the token distribution how good is east toga distribution well i think it's one of the better ones in the ecosystem um eth originally had like an ico where they sold to the public without kyc they there was no kind of like insider

sales or anything like that everyone got the same terms and everyone could buy at that sale and it was done at a time where i guess like blockchain was very different or crypto was very different in 2014 like very very different to what it is now and then on top of that you've also had a period over like five years six years where miners have been kind of like mining new and distributing that to the network all while while a lot of people within the network have um realized a lot of different gains so if you bought in at the ico at 30 cents well you probably sold on the way up to a hundred dollars and then you probably sold on the way up to a thousand dollars and you know i'd be surprised if anyone that bought at the ico well i think most people who

bought at the ico probably have have sold a large chunk or at least some of what they've had um or if not all of it at this point so you had that kind of distribution go go there as well but on top of that you've also had the distribution from the various market cycles that ethan's been through so just off the top of my head eath started at 30 cents went to i think a dollar when it first opened for trading then went back to 40 cents went up to like 20 during 2016 um then went back to like seven dollars that went to uh 420 120 1400 80 dollars you know back to to kind of like uh uh 360 in 2019 then back to like 80 dollars in march 2020 and then now we're at what we're at right so there's

been a very very long distribution phase where uh is pretty well distributed and you know it's not it's unique efficient which measures kind of like distribution kind of like the wealth effect is not like amazing there is still kind of like centralization there but i think it's the best it's probably the best besides bitcoin in terms of distribution of these crypto networks and that's a very i guess especially for a proof of stake network that's very important for decentralization that not that one entity that doesn't own like a lot of the supply i i don't know how much like a single entity owns like i think the the largest kind of contract on ethereum that owns the most amount of eighth is definitely um the deposit contract right now which is obviously uh many many different people's eighth and then you've got the wrapped eighth contract which is the

same thing you have exchanges which are individual eighth individuals eat it's not the exchanges eat themselves uh so i i don't know i don't i mean maybe maybe there's someone who owns one percent of all ethos or something like that or a couple percent maybe joe lubin still has a nice stash like he was very obviously very early on 8th and stuff like that but even him like to fund consensus he sold e through the years so even he distributed a lot of eth that way as well so i think um that that plays a very big part in the overall decentralization of ethereum especially in the proof of stake world so yeah hopefully that kind of like answers your questions there fran around how i think about it as i said i read the blog post from bolaji called quantifying decentralization it's very uh it's a very good post it's very

important and then i would also read vitalik's blog post i think i can remember the exact title of it i think it was one about um credible neutrality and then kind of like something about the social layer as well so you can probably just google for those ones they're actually really good to read too all right on to the next questions here so one from you on the phone who says do you think the recent invention of interface into nfts represent the birth of metaverse primitives um interface nfts uh do not actually exactly sure what you mean by this question maybe i'm not understanding it correctly um interface nfts maybe hmm maybe he's talking about loot i think you know you might be talking about loot here hopefully i get this right so

loot it was basically this nft project that uh that kind of like um was was deployed by i think the co-founder of vine and essentially what it is it's basically a picture of a bunch of uh eight different kind of like uh rpg related items where essentially uh it was just text on on a kind of like on a jpeg where there was no art there was no kind of i guess like direction it was basically like this bottoms up approach to nfts where everyone could kind of latch onto this and build their own world around it it was just like it's kind of like uh you know you're throwing a bunch of kind of like ideas to people and seeing what they do with it essentially instead of kind of like saying well this is what you should you know this is what i'm

doing with it and then everyone can kind of follow me it's kind of like well this is what i i think is cool um you know here's a bunch of ideas go go kind of like do something with it so i think i mean i think i've talked about this on the refill before i think it's a cool idea i think bottoms up approach is really powerful i mean it's it's kind of like how a lot of things in ethereum just kind of like happen just naturally through the grassroots movement of ethereum but generally it gets very speculative too i mean the loot stuff was super speculative especially with like they had that a gold token and all the different loot derivatives uh and it's kind of like uh dangerous when you fall into that sort of stuff and trying to speculate on things you can either lose money through

the hype just like any project but i think the long term uh is is bright for these sorts of things especially if they're very grassroots and start from like a you know a non kind of like top down approach like a bottoms up approach there so hopefully that is a correct answer to your question uh you're on there if not feel free to kind of like ask it just stay in the discord channel all right i'm just gonna break here for a drink one sec guys all right next one comes from dom here who says what do you think is going to happen to all these projects on layer one for example let's say i have a significant amount of ether positive in

clattering are there and forget about it for five to ten years and by that time ethereum's l1 becomes a sentiment layer and all projects migrated to l2 is there any risk that rver on l1 would shut down and i lose access to my funds or will it always be possible to withdraw by virtual smart contracts existing immutably on the blockchain so it depends on what smart contract right like a lot of these d5 apps and smart contracts have multi-sigs attached to them so they're not actually like decentralized pretty much most of them work like this i would say the example of something that's totally decentralized and can't actually be be kind of like shut down so to speak at the uni swap smart contract so fun fact uni swap v1 smart contracts are still live on the network today so if you had liquidity in v1 um from years ago you

can go there and withdraw it right now if you want to same with v2 and the same will be true for v3 in any future versions that uni swap does so from that perspective you could withdraw it from that but a lot of the other ones don't have this and who knows if they're going to have it in the future or not but i think it's funny because a lot of these projects uh are just gonna i think a lot of these um new newer d5 projects especially newer versions of these d5 projects are gonna deploy to l2 only they're not gonna even deploy to l1 we've seen this happen actually quite a bit recently with various different projects one on top of my head is lyra that deploy just to optimism they've never deployed to layer one and they don't plan to either so i think we're just going to be in a

transition phase here where i don't necessarily think any of these protocols will choose to shut down on layer one even if the fees get really really high but i do think to play it defensively you probably shouldn't have your funds in something that has an admin key attached to it and you shouldn't keep your funds in anything for five to ten years like any smart contract uh just just generally because it's like obviously more bugs that can go on in there and and i don't know like what reason you would have to leave um money in unisop for five to ten years or money in kind of like avail make up for five to ten years unless you've taken like a super long term loan and you think that you can't get liquidated no matter what i don't know it just doesn't feel like something that a lot

of people will do and generally yeah i mean my cold storage is not a smart contract it's not a d5 contract it's it's kind of like um just like a normal kind of ethereum address that lives on my hardware wallet so from that perspective even if i guess like r1 doesn't get expensive and you know it gets cheaper or whatever it doesn't really matter i think just the principle of not keeping your funds in a smart contract for a very very long time is probably the the best way to go about it there but um yeah any of the ones that are like totally immutable and totally decentralized like the unisop ones uh you could you could potentially if you wanted to leave it in there for for a long time but you still you still deal with the risk of bugs of course like any

kind of like bugs that were not noticed for a very long time but suddenly they were noticed and someone exploits them you could stand to lose some funds there so hopefully that answers your question dom all right next one comes from jvr lux who says what about decentralized and based in ethereum smart contracts sports bet and gambling i saw many decentralized websites accepting ethan btc but that's not my interest it would be great to have bets based on smart contracts and articles like chain link uploading sports results or bets about the new name of the baby of the queen in australia if we have a queen queen of australia if we have this in l2 could be much cheaper in commissions for the issuer so more gains for the users than current centralized bet sites so the funny thing is about crypto betting is it has a bit of a colorful

history it was very very very popular in the earlier days of crypto especially um in the earlier days of bitcoin where people would go and kind of like gamble on these things one of the most popular ones was satoshi dice that eric voorhees founded and sold for a few hundred thousand uh bitcoin not few hundred thousand dollars of bitcoin a few hundred thousand bitcoin because at the time they were worth very little um but he sold that and essentially since then there's been kind of like some here and there and there's been prediction markets as well like orga and poly market and stuff like that but generally it doesn't seem that gambling has taken off and i think it definitely has to do with the fees you can't really have um gambling where you say people well you can chuck 50 into uh kind of like uh this bet oh but it's

gonna cost you fifty dollars in fees to do that well no that's not gonna work so you definitely need layer two i know that poly market uses um uh polygon i i know that um there's a there's uh kind of like uh pull together which is focused it's not exactly a betting app it's more of a kind of like a lottery but like no lost lottery they're exploring doing um you know layer two cross chain stuff to lower fees for for people as well so yeah i definitely think it just comes down to a cost thing and i'm curious to see what the first kind of i guess runaway uh betting uh i guess like app on layer two is uh maybe we'll see it in the near future maybe we won't i think it's funny because at the moment it's probably more profitable just to do massive liquidity

mining or ponzi farms than it is to make a proper kind of like sports betting website uh sports betting app or just apps betting apps in general and it's probably less risky i think uh you know gambling and betting apps are very heavily regulated you know services are very heavily regulated um in the centralized world so if you're deploying one you probably have to do it anonymously and you have to be very careful about not kind of revealing your identity and stuff like that just in case regulators came after you it's a lot more risky than a d5 app that's for sure so uh yeah just those are kind of like i guess probably my thoughts on that jv i do think it definitely comes down a lot to the fact that the costs are just too high for most people at the end of the day uh there's

no way you can have people just doing small bets and uh you know when they have to pay fifty dollars worth of fees right so yeah all right on to the next one from your on the phone who asks about ultrasound.money uh when you click on openc in the burn leaderboard it takes you to a specific contract address on etherscan there's that specific address represented in ft i tried pasting the address into twitter but the search results were what looked like a bunch of spot spam posts containing the contract address in the tweet have you experienced this um that open c on ultrasound.money that that contract is basically the contract that all of the um the transactions go through all the sales go through that's how openc kind of like takes their cut that's how they handle listings and buys and sells so that's the contract that you're

seeing it's kind of like when you see uni swap on that leaderboard and that's the unisop smart contracts powering the whole decks and that's what everyone goes through just like everyone goes through the openc contracts when they're buying or selling using the openc website so yeah hopefully that answers your question there all right one here from lucas who asks maybe a bit technical but can an ethereum transaction start be stuck forever in the mempool i think on bitcoin it gets dropped after 14 days or so um i think i don't actually know the technical answer to this i think there may be a kind of like limit to this and there may be a point where the nodes will kind of like drop your transaction from from the mempool um before you know if it hasn't been mined in a certain amount of time so it's kind

of like how bitcoin does but i don't actually know the kind of like answer to that i don't believe it can actually be stuck forever i have seen you know some people some of my friends tried to get like super cheap transactions in kind of like and then those things get dropped but it depends i guess what node you're using because if you're using a third-party node they may have more aggressive kind of like uh settings in place to drop transactions um but i don't know if it's hard-coded into any of the clients it may just be kind of like a a flag that you have to do where you're like okay we'll drop this transaction if it hasn't processed in in a kind of like specific set of time maybe there's a defaulting geth or or kind of like any other clients i'm not

sure on that i'd have to check up on that for you uh and then like lucas your second question here um what's your value proposition for matic i can see they're good products but why should this make the token more valuable for me it looks like more like a money grab with the only difference that they market themselves as ethereum friendly so i should say i mean i can't really i'm not going to be able to go into too much details about why magic should be valuable why it shouldn't obviously because i'm an advisor at the polygon and i'm being compensated anymatic tokens so i don't want to kind of like be a shill here um but i will talk about i guess polygon more broadly and about their products and about why they are ethereum friendly and why the other kind of like l1 or some most of the other l1s

aren't considered ethereum friendly so with polygon they have a bunch of different solutions right they have the their most popular solution which is the pos chain which technically it's kind of like a hybrid it's i mean they have their own validator set it's not like a layer two um it's you know commonly referred to as like a side chain or a commit chain or something like that um but the funny thing about the polygon pos chain is that it actually can't exist without ethereum because all the staking logic lives on ethereum so if ethereum was to go offline the polygon pos chain goes offline but that doesn't make it a layer two it definitely isn't a layer two like like a roll up for example but it definitely isn't its own layer one it's kind of like a hybrid um between kind of like the two there

like a side i guess like a side chain or like a commit chain but even the side chain term is pretty loaded but anyway i don't want to get hung up on the on on that sort of stuff i want to kind of talk about the other solutions they have i mean i mentioned earlier how they now are doing like a roll up with with nightfall uh we start with ey called nightfall they also recently recently acquired hermes which is a zk rollup on ethereum that's live today they're committing a billion dollars to zk roll up sorry not zika rob zero knowledge research in general um they have a bunch of different products out there as well like the polygon sdk they have polygon avail which is going to be a data availability blockchain which is um you know going to be really great for all

apps as well so they've got a bunch of different products out there now in terms of like the value proposition for matic as a token well i mean without getting too kind of like in the weights here right now you need matic to pay for like transaction fees right so that's a demand driver for matic the token and then you also have if you want to become a validator you have to stake your medic so it's a staking token as well uh maybe in the future it becomes like a governance token maybe the community says well we want to use our matic tokens to govern the polygon uh kind of like ecosystem or whatever maybe that's what happens there um maybe they introduce a fee burn when they where they burn medic tokens so i mean there's lots of different things you can do to

drive value to a token at the end of the day i'm not you know privy to kind of like any kind of special information here i don't know what's going to happen there uh with that sort of stuff uh i do think that they should make a fee token option as well i would like to see that because just easier from a user standpoint but if they wanted to they could do either as a feed token and then just use that east to buy matic and burn it for example like they could still drive value back to matic even if eth became the fee token so there's that aspect and then finally you said like what makes them i guess you ask like what makes them ethereum friendly as opposed to these other kind of like uh ecosystems out there well the so the theorem friendly is like both on

technical and social level i think polygon on the social level have always signaled that they want to scale ethereum they started off as matic network which was originally uh you know plasma a layer 2 on ethereum and then plasma didn't really take off so they made this pos chain which is actually not a long term solution the pos chain is a short to medium term solution um as a kind of like release valve for the ethereum network to keep people within kind of like the ethereum ecosystem the ethereum family on the social level so that when we have the l2s ready they can kind of like use those l2s and then the pos chain may even become an l2 eventually but then you know polygons is going to be releasing more of their own l2s more of their own kind of like generalized roll-ups i mean hermes itself is going

to become a generalized evm compatible zk roll-up uh and they're working on something called the zk avm which from all the people that i've spoken to looks like magic it actually is really really cool tech so you have that aspect to it but the social signal signaling side is what i what i mean when i say they're ethereum friendly and it's a reason why i joined as an as an advisor i mean one of the reasons i mean the other reason is because they're working on layer 2 stuff as well and i think that's really cool i want to help them with that but the reason why the other networks aren't is because you can see that they want to compete or usurp ethereum right like solana is a new layer one where they basically say well we don't actually think the way the theorem is is

going is is long-term sustainable we think that it's stupid we want to scale uh you know everything at layer 1 we don't want to do the layered scaling approach then you have avalanche is another layer one that's kind of like been in the news lately they have their own architecture they have the c chains where each c chain can be something different um you know right now their popular c chain is the evm compatible one uh and then you have a bunch of other projects like i mean there's outright scams like tron there's uh cardano which is definitely very competitive with ethereum i mean charles himself probably wants to uh kind of like usurp ethereum just so that he can essentially uh you know be better than vitalik or whatever which i mean i know it sounds silly but this is like all on the social level

yeah this has got nothing to do with the technicals it's got to do with the with the social stuff when you look at that that kind of stuff uh and then other ones like polka dot which is just again a different design philosophy of how to build a blockchain again gavin wood one of the co-founders of ethereum did a lot of really great stuff for ethereum early on but then had a difference of opinion i think with um you know much of the team especially vitalik so he's like well i'm just gonna go build my own thing which is fine i think polkadot's a legit project even though i disagree with a lot of the the um kind of like things that they're doing and i don't actually think that their architecture is one that is is long-term sustainable or really great at the end of the day um but i don't want

to kind of like trash them or anything and then you have like terra for example which i actually don't think that terra is an ethereum killer or has positioned themselves as being an ethereum killer they're actually adding a lot of value to ethereum because they have a bridge that goes into ethereum and they're bringing a lot of liquidity in and i think terra's kind of like this ecosystem where they definitely focused more on i guess like i wouldn't say cfi side of things but more on kind of like the payments traditional finance side of things because they're very big in i think south korea uh with their payments infrastructure and then they're kind of like working as like a i guess a front door into into other parts of the ecosystem so i think terra is actually one that has never positioned themselves as being a killer or or the community's

kind of like being like toxic to ethereum or anything like that um in a large way i mean there are parts of communities that can be toxic to one another but i don't think it's ever been in a really large way from from what i've seen anyway um and then i'm just gonna go down the list i mean there's other ones here like i mean if you look at all the layer ones pretty much i think what most of them do is that they basically say ethereum's architecture is [ __ ] ethereum's technology is old and kind of like useless we're going to build a better system it really comes down to that and that bleeds into the social layout which which kind of like bleeds into the community which bleeds into twitter and then you see all these people saying like oh ethereum's dead because the

the gas fees are really high um long term this is gonna this gonna collapse and whatever and they don't really care about learning about like how actual how ethereum is actually going to scale so from that point of view the polygon community is nothing like that the polygon community is the ethereum community it's the same community they're all aligned on scaling ethereum they're all aligned on kind of like being part of this ecosystem i'm sure all the matic holders hold ether as well it's not like it's one it's either all for them it's kind of um both it's kind of synergistic and symbiotic there and as i said polygons technology even though the pos chain some people consider to be a separate block chain to ethereum it doesn't matter because they're actually building layer twos on ethereum as well whereas these other competing blockchains like uh the ones i

just mentioned they're not building layer twos on ethereum they're not adding any value to a theorem they're actually trying to sap value from ethereum whether that be kind of like hopping on about the high gas phase or basically getting their community to go out into the wild and kind of fight ethereum in various different ways so that's kind of like what i think the major differences are between i guess polygon and every other i guess layer one out there and as i said like the post chain is very very very kind of like weird because it's definitely not a standalone layer one like these other chains are but it's definitely not a layer two so and then on top of that uh polygon is not just a py strain they've already got uh the sdk available they've already got uh avail on devnet they have they still

have the plasma chain live as well which it's not really it's not really used but it's live um as i said hermes is live so yeah at the end of the day i think polygon at this point has more than shown that they're very ethereum aligned and very ethereum friendly and want to add value to ethereum rather than extract value from it but again i'm an advisor to polygon so uh take you know you can take what i said as me being biased or not but i try to give an unbiased take and that's kind of like uh kind of like how i see it at the end of the day and i i i and you know you guys just kind of have to trust me that i'm not just saying it because i'm an advisor i mean i could say some negative things about

about polygon but um you know i think i mean i not negative but i think like what i didn't like was how some of their marketing was focused on calling the post-channel layer too i think that um you know was not something that that was really great i don't think they've done that that lately and i kind of like gave my feedback on that um but generally i don't think it was done out of malice or anything like that i think it was just done out of i guess kind of like uh maybe confusion i think for a long time people have kind of like confused side chains and layer twos and depending on like who you are like obviously the polygon founders aren't running the twitter account right so if it's just some kind of like uh the marketing department well for them layer

2 sidechain whatever it's all the same thing at the end of the day but not trying to excuse the to excuse what happened but i think that um you know that's kind of like something that i got a little bit upset about but at the end of the day the polygon ecosystem does include layer 2 as well but anyway i'm going to leave it at that for now moving on to some of these other questions in one sec just going to get a drink all right a couple here from dom so first one from dom you have mentioned in wednesday's newsletter so this would have been about a week ago now not a week ago uh sorry a few days ago now uh you have mentioned in wednesday's newsletter that when most activity

happens on layer two okay so for those of you who haven't seen this newsletter in one context around this this was the newsletter um on the daily way called the grand design where i talked about ethereum's uh kind of like long-term design with roll-ups and stuff like that so you can check that out for extra context but essentially what dom is asking what dom is saying here is that um you know when most activity happens on layer two proofs batches will use up layer one gas so much that it will out price all other layer one transactions even for wales but at the same time the beauty of rollups is that even if it goes offline you can recover your funds by the l1 bridge contract or wouldn't that constitute extremely expensive l1 transactions i.e if you had a five thousand dollars on a on a

roll-up that went offline but it cost twenty-five thousand dollars to recover it from the bridge and another twenty-five thousand dollars to bridge it to a different roll-up then your five thousand dollars is effectively lost forever how do you see a solution to this bonus point if it's a trustless and decentralized solution so there's a few different ways to tackle this i think the the first way is that um the same way as i was describing before hey you can have kind of like this public transportation system where you can kind of have like a pool of funds that gets deposited into i guess a layer two to reduce costs for everyone i think that could happen in the reverse way as well where it can be set up where everyone can kind of like withdraw to or get i guess like um submit a kind of message to withdraw to

a contract and then they can all split the costs over that and then it can get dispersed from there so that's one way to do it the second thing and maybe maybe i i i the more i think about this and people brought up this line a lot where i basically said that l1 would be too expensive for even whales to use i had a few people kind of like pinging me about this and kind of like asked do you really think this is going to happen and i've had more of a think about it since i published this newsletter and it's just really hard to tell actually i would actually say that i actually don't know what what it kind of is going to look like here because we don't know what it's going to look like with sharding like let's say with shading we add 64 more shards now

the thing is is these shards are just for data right they're just for layer twos to be to use the shards won't be for execution you won't be able to do on the shards what you can do on eth1 today but in saying that the fact that these rollups have many more places to put their their data and their and their kind of like um proofs on that means that the costs are going to come down considerably right because i mean the the costs the l1 fees may go down so much but only for l2s because the l2 is the only one who can post kind of like their data to these um and their proofs to these to these shards uh and then what ends up happening is that uh because uh your kind of like funds are still on on the layer one here you can still withdraw

them to your your uh your ethereum address for example and the cost is really really low because you're using the the um the shards to withdraw them so it's yeah i would say that i probably walk back this i'll probably remove that part from the newsletter if i if i um if i could at this point because the more i thought about it the more i thought about the fact that maybe we get to a point where sharding works so well that the aggregate transaction fees goes up but the individual transaction phase goes down because of the fact that the shards are being used for layer 2 kind of like uh roll ups instead and we can keep adding more of them without having to kind of like blow out the scaling and sacrifice decentralization and security so yeah hopefully that gives you a bit of extra

color there about i guess some extra thoughts i've had since i put that newsletter out there because yeah that line definitely struck a chord with a lot of a lot of different people for good reason as well it made me think a lot more about it too but i think at this point in time it's hard to tell exactly what the future is going to look like with regards to sharding but i think like all the research has been done it's just about like i mean the research has been done on data data sharding execution sharing i don't think will come in like a big form i think if execution does happen on the shot it'll probably just happen for the bridge contracts at the end of the day where you'll have each shard being able to kind of like be bridged in and bridged out of which will fix this

problem but i don't think it'll be the thing where you can basically do everything you can do on eth1 today on these shots because that just the complexity there um gets really really uh bad like from what i've read from a lot of italics posts is that doing execution charting just uh just completely um i guess sorry just makes things much more complex and it puts a much heavier load on the network as well like the beacon chain too which we don't want to be in chain to be working too hard because then it can lead to other problems such as chain instability um and security risks too so yeah hopefully that answers that question for you dom your second question where you said and this relates to your first one uh what about all the stakers getting rewards for example a 32 eighth solo validator

generating five eighth over time presumably staking depositing withdrawing happens on l1 so how would those five eighth rewards make their way into circulation into the l2 world if getting them there is probably expensive again same kind of like answer to layer one i actually think there might be a way to do this where you could have a i mean you could have the same kind of thing where you pull the funds together right where you kind of share the load of the cost to bridge in but maybe there's a way i don't know i'm just thinking out loud here maybe there would be a way to directly go from like your stake account to a layer two but i'm not sure that you could actually do that without extra trust assumptions um you know bypassing layer one altogether like maybe you could swap your eth um on

one of these kind of i guess um solutions such as hop or connects uh which is probably gonna be cheaper uh and you know directly from kind of like your staking account here to get on there but i think the the answer to the first question still applies about sharding potentially bringing down uh transaction costs for bridging in and out of uh these layer twos as well all right next one here comes from chief forever who says with the huge drop in l2 phase compared to l1 what do you see the impact being to capital flows uh once on l2 it would seem capital would be will be more mobile in search of a higher short-term returns since the fees are so much smaller will this lead to more short-term reward scenarios or rewards flattening out to avoid large inflows outflows so i guess this relates

to kind of like liquidity incentives i think while the fees are cheaper it just depends right because the liquidity incentives you know say you've got like one farm over here that's offering you 100 apy and then you have another farm over here that's offering you 200 apy yes the fees are cheap to jump between them but a lot of the time there's tax implications to this too and i know this depends on where you are in the world but if you're lping in a pool well every time you um lp in a new pool that's a taxable event cgt event at least it is in the u.s and in australia and every time you withdraw from that again taxable events cjt on the profit or loss uh so and then you know on top of that uh kind of continuously moving between

farms means that you know say you're moving to the 200 apy farm well what if that 200 only lasted for a couple days and then you have to move to that other farm and move back there but what if that kind of goes down as well it kind of just becomes this this thing where you're just hopping between different farms and yes the fees are cheap but you're incurring all these taxable events for starters you're um you're essentially just over complicating things for yourself and you're kind of like a dog chasing like a car right you just you don't know what you're going to do so the the way i kind of like view it is basically just like choosing a farm sticking to it even if there are higher rewards to be had elsewhere um you're probably better off sticking to the one that you're already in at the end of the

day unless it's like unless the difference is major and you think that you're going to be able to get like a lot of apy out of this other one um but generally i mean yeah to answer your your kind of like core question i do think we will see more outflows and influence from these projects due to the lower costs but i don't think it's going to be a problem i don't think that it's i think it's going to be interesting to see how teams and projects react to this as well like and i i mean my general thoughts on liquidity mining is a lot of it is really bad a lot of it is very short-term minded a lot of it destroys projects and i would rather just see projects focus more on a very i guess modest liquidity mining program but also just offering kind of like an actual

product that users want to use outside of earning some token rewards for it so yeah hopefully that answers your question there chief all right one here from unbank yourself who says hi anthony is it possible that one day selecting l1 or a specific rollup goes away and is handled on the back end for example i want to use ave i go to the app decide i want to deposit x asset this then triggers back in the back end to figure out what is the most cost effective way to do so as the end user i don't know what care how it gets executed and whether on l1 or one of the rollups i just know it's a transaction that was most uh optimally structured do you foresee something like that in a more mature state in the crypto space of course 100 this is i

mean the long-term goal of this ecosystem just generally should be to abstract away as much of these technical kind of like uh things as possible whether they be l2s whether that be just kind of like i guess um having to interact with even things like metamask and having to kind of i guess have aid for gas phase all this sort of stuff all that should be abstracted away and on the kind of like l2 front and a team that's working on this right now is argent so arjun has been teasing that they're going to be integrating directly with zk sync on the argent mobile wallet app so and their mobile wallet app already um kind of like abstracts a lot of this kind of a lot of this kind of stuff away from the end user and has a really great ux and and ui there so yeah i fully expect that

um selecting a different i guess like l1 or l2 will just be completely in the background and coinbase has already announced that they're going to be adding support for various ethereum scaling solutions like the polygon pos chain optimism arbitrary starkware i'm sure all the other ones will be will be there as well so yeah it's uh it's definitely gonna get obstructed away so hopefully that kind of like gives you a bit of a bit of color around that all right uh i got four questions here from patrick uh so first one you mentioned a couple of times that you're playing around with ui dx what do you like dislike about them and what do you think they need to improve on so the number one thing i like about dydx is it feels like i'm using a centralized exchange without using a centralized exchange right because it's

a decentralized exchange as a layer two on ethereum and what i mean by that is that every time i do a trade i don't have to sign a transaction or meta mask it just happens because that's just the way the the layer two is constructed where once you're signed in with your metamask address and you've generated your keys uh for that layer two account you deposit your usdc in from layer one and then you can trade to your heart's content with leverage uh on you know this kind of like auto book based exchange uh and it's really really fast it there's no gas fees or anything like that um and and uh you kind of don't have to sign a transaction every time you do anytime you do anything uh only when you like deposit uh start only with when you want to withdraw from dydx and stuff

like that as well so um that's what i like most about it i think the ui and the user ux in general is is really awesome uh one of the better ones i've seen in the ecosystem um probably one of the top ones i've seen in the ecosystem i like that i'm earning dydx token rewards for trading on there right now of course kind of like a little bit of uh i guess you can call it yield farming at the end of the day um i like that uh uh because it's i guess like in layer two i retained kind of like full custody of my funds because of the the way the layer twos work i mean we all know i know this by now so and i guess like what do i think that they could improve on i don't know i think they're

they're doing really well i mean they have a lot of liquidity which is obviously a pain point a lot of the time but the liquidity right now is amazing like it's it's incredible because of the tokum awards they've been able to attract a lot of market makers to come into a kind of like ecosystem here so i think maybe what i'd i'd like to see them improve on is maybe hmm i don't actually know i haven't had any issues myself with with uidx to be honest uh maybe allowing me to deposit uh not just usdc but like eighth as well because at the moment they only let you deposit usdc i'm sure there's a technical reason for that but i would love to deposit at least eighth as well into it because um a lot of the time i don't just have usdc lying around but i

have eighth lying around so i'm happy to deposit my eighth in there but i can't and because of that what ends up happening is that i have to either sell some eighth for usdc and then just trade it back to eighth on dydx which is silly because i incur taxable events by doing that so i would just love to see them do i guess more deposit options i'm not sure if it's technically possible for them to do so i'm sure they've built the system in such a way where they've done it with ustc because it just simplifies everything but i'd love to see them support ethan maybe some other tokens other stable coins as well like die all right second question you mentioned also a couple of times that you like to play online games especially world of warcraft uh do your wow friends talk

about crypto if so what are they interested in um i don't really play too much with friends these days when i was playing it like a long time ago i had like a guild and we all played together i knew a lot of different people on there but these days i'll sometimes play with with one of my friends um who's actually been into crypto since 2015 2017 like i have he actually listens to my refuel and everything like that but um he's more like a brother than a friend to me i mean we've been friends for a very long time but um i i wouldn't say like anyone else that kind of my friends in kind of like real life that i used to play well with or into crypto at all uh they just never really kind of like dive down that path and to be honest i don't really talk to

any many of them much anymore it's just i don't really have the time and you know as you grow older you lose contact with a lot of friends so uh yeah like the funny thing is is that i actually play world of warcraft solo most of the time even though it's an online game i just like kind of like just leveling up my character and listening to a podcast it's kind of like therapy for me um and and yeah i just when i do play with my friend the only friend that i play with is someone who definitely isn't the crypto and you know he's been holding eve since 2017 as well i still hold he hasn't he hasn't sold any i'm very proud of him for that but um uh yeah so hopefully that answers that question patrick your third one um uh you have no interest in go in going deep

into another ecosystem like solana right why is that um so i would actually argue that i've pretty much gone as deep as i wanted to at this point in solana where i've investigated the technology decided that i don't actually think it's long-term sustainable i don't think it's anywhere near decentralized enough or secure enough i don't like the ecosystem that they have right now their community isn't my people so to speak it's definitely a different set of community members um so that would be why i don't really kind of like want to go deeper into it uh but like secondly um i guess like not just solana but other ecosystems it's pretty much the same thing where uh i don't have enough time to keep up with all these ecosystems at the end of the day i barely have enough time to keep up with ethereum and i cover it

every every day in a newsletter and a video um so it's just it's what i want to allocate my time to and ethereum is kind of like my whole life it's what i'm all about it's what i know most about it's where i have all my friends and community in it's what i believe is actually the most long-term sustainable solution in terms of like a smart contract blockchain so yeah time plays plays a big factor into it but in saying that if i saw an ecosystem that wasn't ethereum that was actually interesting i would spend more time within it i would try and make time for it i would actually carve out maybe even like a couple hours a week to spend time in there uh if i really really wanted to um but i just don't see that in any other chains right now uh

at least um i i just at least i haven't seen enough to want to to convince me to kind of like take time away from from focusing on ethereum to focus on that sort of stuff all right your fourth question uh do you know if it's possible to let a swap just sit there and wait um for example uh bass v50 where you want to swap one token a for two token b you enter a slippage of one percent and you enter a base fee of 39 grey now you wait finally base figures to 39 grey unfortunately one take token a is now worth one token b will the transaction fail and the user has to pay the whole transaction cost will it succeed the transaction will fail yes because it will revert and say uh well i guess unishop will give you an error message

saying that basically that the price has deviated too much from the original order and it can't complete the order now if you had set your slippage to basically 100 well it'll complete the order but i don't recommend doing that because you can get sandwich attacked like that but your slippage being one percent definitely means that uni swap or any kind of like amm will reject your transaction if the price has deviated too much or it's deviated more than what kind of like one percent it's basically going to say yeah we can't match this order because it's invalid now essentially so yeah that's that's kind of the fail scenario for that all right a question here from unbank yourself again who says a question on security housekeeping in the past you mentioned how it's good to monitor any contracts you signed with unlimited

value permissions or unlimited token i guess approval permissions wondering if you have any other good rules and practices to share to ensure most optimal security of our funds some others that come to mind are using a physical wallet like ledger not interacting with any edge with miscellaneous tokens like ak swap anything you could share behind beyond these items also on a related note if i sign into a website with my ledger but use the sign function and not submitting any actual transactions can that be exploited so to answer your first question i think you already covered a lot of um i guess i guess yeah you covered a lot of uh a lot of things i was going to say like a hardware wallet definitely everyone with any kind of material mounting crypto should be storing it in a hardware wallet you shouldn't be storing it in a hot wallet like metamask

or kind of like any other hot wallet um they should you know you can use metamask and hot wallets you can use them as kind of like pass-throughs as well like you can connect your ledger to metamask of course but it's definitely that i would say that um another reason why it's not that metamask is insecure it's the fact that like your pc can get infected with malware that targets metamask and and stuff like that so that's like a very big security risk there another big risk is writing your seed phrase when you kind of like create a new hardware wallet or create a new metamask account on your computer you should never do that because you don't know if there's a key logger on your computer you don't know if one day this malware gets installed and then you have like a text file with

your seed phrase in it they steal that and then even if there's a password on it they crack the password eventually and they have access to all your funds all that sorts of stuff so i would definitely not store it on your computer um but even if you physically write down your seed phrase or secret phase on a piece of paper you need to make sure that no one ever gets access to that piece of paper so the the things that i like to like to do when i kind of like write these down on physical pieces of paper is that or not those not just me but like what while the people i know that are doing they tend to split up the key into like two or three pieces or split up the the phrase into two or three pieces sorry about that uh where they basically

um uh kind of like uh uh get like i guess if there's 24 words they'll have like uh uh well i mean if they split in the open up into three it's like eight words each and they'll give it to like trusted family members for example but again that's that's a bit risky because if that family member loses a part of it you'll never be able to get access to your funds again um people buy safes they store them in there people do some some fancy things like essentially like um ciphers or where they kind of like highlight a bunch of words within a book and that's like like their seed phrase so there's a bunch of like things you can do like like that but for most people i would suggest just like making sure you have a hardware wallet making sure your backup phrase is stored safely

somewhere in like you know either in your own house or kind of like off-site in kind of like a in like a family member's house that you trust or whatever um or in like a safe or anything like that uh and then i would never write that kind of like seed phrase on your on your computer like i would always just write it physically down on a piece of paper and and yeah as i said use a hybrid wallet such as ledger or the lattice one as well uh and then kind of like your other kind of uh i guess um a note here was about miscellaneous tokens that get airdropped to you like ak swap you should never ever ever ever pay attention to these tokens or do anything with them don't try to trade them on uni swap don't give them permission to to

kind of be traded don't approve them for anything don't go to the website that they're advertising don't do any of that it is not it is like 9.9 times out of 10 a scam and you will lose your money if you do this so just like a a warning label there big kind of like warning label there because um you know if you give like this token approval uh to guess interact with your your wallet there could be something going on in that smart contract that allows it to withdraw other funds from your account as well and if you go to the website they may ask you hey you should put in your private key and you'll get access to these tokens uh i've seen that happen plenty of times they're not private the private key or seed phrase and i've seen that happen before not

good not good at all so definitely you want to avoid those and then you said your last thing here if i sign into a website with my ledger but i use the sign function and not submitting any actual transactions can that be exploited so i guess it depends what you're signing because when you're signed something you're signing a message essentially so you know when you sign into places you're basically saying hey like uh i want to i want to connect my wallet to this website i'm going to sign it kind of like transaction saying i'm connecting to to this uh and there's a bunch of other messages you can sign i mean i'm sure if you've done any voting on like uh snapshot for example you sign a transaction saying hey i'm gonna vote on this sort of thing um i i'm not 100 sure on this but i think

there are ways that you can get get signing something accidentally and that can be used against you i have to check up on that actually i i remember reading something about it but i just can't remember off my head but definitely you want to check what you're signing at the end of the day no matter what depending uh you know whether it's just like kind of like something that looks innocent whether it's an actual uh kind of like some actual transaction on chain and stuff like that as well all right next question comes from jay dubs who asks who says sorry i'm not a software engineer or lawyer i was curious your opinion whether mergers acquisitions in in crypto uh for example polygon acquiring hermes network are easier to implement than in the traditional world in regards to adding new code handling legal framework do you

see future acquisitions in the block blockchain industry to become more common or most smaller projects will strive to remain independent so from what i understand with the polygon hermes merger they did a basic token swap where they took a snapshot and said hey if you own hermes tokens then we took a snapshot at this date and then uh they've got like a tool now where you can trade your hermes tokens for matic tokens so that was all handled by the polygon and hermes teams where essentially polygon said well we've got these magic tokens in the treasury we're going to use them to buy the hermes kind of like team or acquire the team but we're also going to buy out all the token holders which means they're going to essentially acquire and merge the network so that's kind of like how it happened there i'm

not sure the on the legal paperwork side i'm sure there was a bunch of like legal documents and stuff in the background um between the hermes team and the polygon team but in terms of like the on-chain stuff there was no you know users didn't have to sign anything legally binding they didn't have to do anything like that i don't even think they had to kyc it was just a straight token top from the hermes token to the matic token um so yeah and i don't believe there's any like legal frameworks around this or anything yet uh just because it's so early in this sort of stuff but i think yeah i mean we're going to see plenty more acquisitions like this happening there's already been some of these in like the d5 space like uh a bunch of projects kind of i guess not getting

i mean not getting acquired in the traditional sense but getting kind of like brought under other projects like you saw with the yarn ecosystem they brought a bunch of different projects under their umbrella it's kind of like an incubator um where those projects stayed there had their own token and stuff like that so yeah there are various examples of this but i'm not aware of any legal framework for this yet it's it's just too early for that sort of stuff i think all right a couple of questions here from max invests first question uh any tips on running a youtube channel mine is nowhere near as successful as yours and it's difficult to gain a following sometimes i also want to get want to get involved in as involved as possible but this feels difficult you have talked about how it's almost more difficult to

come in now than it was a few years ago um so i you know the funny thing is is that growing a youtube channel is not something that i've necessarily focused on because if i was focusing on actually growing my channel as much as possible i would do clickbait titles i would do clickbait thumbnails i would talk about price a lot more i would just make more videos than i do now um you know i would do i would do more frequent kind of like crappy videos i would lower the quality of the channel um and that's what i've seen from a lot of the big kind of like crypto youtubers um you know i i would say like uh my my channels they're doing modest for kind of like what i've done with it and i've done that on purpose because i wanted to attract a certain

type of people to the community i didn't want to attract the extreme speculators i wanted to attract people who actually care about ethereum like like i do um but in terms of like tips it depends what you want out of it right if you want to be kind of like like me that you want to attract a certain type of person or you optimize for that if you want to grow your channel as much as possible then you have to do the click bait stuff at the end of the day that's that's a surefire way to be able to grow yourself and you have to kind of like just talk a lot about price as well uh it's funny because there are some successful channels out there that i know of that don't talk about price too often they do a lot of educational stuff but they do

the click bait and they do you know the thumbnail clickbait thumbnail clickbait title so that seems to be a requirement i don't think you can actually get around that and i don't think it's wrong or anything like that i think it's just the way youtube is set up at the end of the day and it's just really the way human psychology works i mean everyone clicks on clickbait once in a while you know i mean we all click on things that look more interesting on the surface especially the thumbnail then something that looks uninteresting it's just a way to kind of like hook the the person in so i wouldn't consider that to be i kind of like a detriment but it depends on what kind of person you want to attract to your community if you're trying to build one and then your second

point here is like i mentioned you know i personally mentioned before that it's harder to get involved now than it was back a few years ago but that's just kind of like relative because i think that you know the more the ecosystem grows the harder and harder it becomes to get involved of course but i started basically when the ecosystem was was i mean in 2018 and 2019 ethereum wasn't like young it was what four five three four years old at that point in terms of like from idea to to where it was uh and you know the price had already gone ballistic and there's there was kind of like a decent amount of community members there wasn't that many but it was a much easier because there because uh you know everyone was still growing as kind of like an ecosystem ethereum was still growing ethereum as i

said was very small whereas these days ethereum is much bigger so relative to a few you know a couple years ago it is much harder to to build yourself up as a complete newbie but it's going to be even harder in a couple of years so the best time to start was you know yesterday the second best time is today as the old saying goes so i would say that don't let it kind of like dissuade you from starting something and adding value i know i have a friend um in in real life who actually has been doing this uh since since kind of like just july like they're really new to the ecosystem they've been learning for a few months but since july they've been getting involved with different ecosystems they started a newsletter and he just landed himself a job at a at an

early stage kind of like um dao which uh as a kind of like a community manager which is awesome right like that's that's so cool that that that's kind of like happened from there and uh you know he came in like you know relatively late and late as in relative to what it was in the past um so yeah just like take that in strides take it as an opportunity you know there's a there's a much bigger pool of people to tap into now as well so that's the positive so if you do want to start something new focus on adding value if you're starting a youtube channel focus on adding as much value as you can on the education side because i think that's a really great way to grow but at the same time um also uh you need to kind of like grow your other avenues

too like twitter and stuff like that i mean i saw your tweet thread today max that i retweeted that was really great keep doing more of that i'm happy to retweet good content on on twitter and get eyeballs on it and kind of like use my following to to bring other people up but you need to put in the work at the end of the day you need to do it you need to be consistent with it i'm always talking about consistency because that's what i did for so long is that i was very very consistent with everything that i did from you know ethub to twitter activity to talking to people getting to know people and that's how i ended up in the position that i am in today so yeah just start keep those things in mind and i think that doesn't matter how

kind of like i guess late you feel in this ecosystem or how noisy you think it is there is plenty of opportunity to to kind of like grow yourself to to being someone in this ecosystem all right and your second question was around uh loot and a gold and you're basically asking any thoughts around that after the hype is uh has uh died down you recently said that you didn't like the derivative system on top of it why is that i think it expands the ludicrous system further and the original 8k should more or less hold value so i would think that um now that the hype has died down i wouldn't say that i'm bearish on the project but i would say that i'm very cautious on it and i'm watching it kind of like not closely but i'm looking to see if it can

actually form a community because you know i gave the example earlier about sushi swap where they had all that initial hype and then it completely died off and they had uh maki come in and kind of i guess like work with a small team of people to keep sushi swap going is loot gonna have that i mean i'm seeing that there is still a very passionate community but will that last long term will they be able to kind of like get people interested again will they be able to grow the ecosystem who knows uh we'll see what happens there so i wouldn't say i'm bearish on it i would say that i'm just cautious about uh kind of like getting too caught up in it and just wanting to watch it kind of like play out and see how long the term how it kind of evolves

from there and then you know you ask like uh yeah you said you know you recently said that you don't like the derivative system on top of it why is that um i guess maybe maybe i was maybe too too quick to say this i do agree with you that a derivative system built on top of it broadens the kind of like player base and broadens the amount of people that can kind of like yes uh come into the ecosystem for when i said that i kind of lament it as kind of like a a bullish or bearish bearish thing for like the original 8 000 loot bags i don't know if the original is going to hold their value or not i don't know if it's going to be kind of like prestige and holding the original loot bag so that's kind of like what i meant by that

but yeah i agree with you it kind of like um expands the the amount of people that can kind of get access to this so yeah i wouldn't say that um i'm kind of like i don't like the derivatives i more say i guess again i'm just cautious about how they affect the rest of the loot ecosystem all right on to a couple of questions here from blitzio uh one can you share your journey in becoming an angel investor to many prominent blockchain projects and can you share any tips on as to how one can start is it mostly related to connections and being part of part of insider groups how do outsiders like us find opportunities to invest in such rounds um so this is a bit of a hard question to answer because i i can give you like the answer that

you might want to hear and the answer you don't want to hear the answer you don't want to hear is that these opportunities are very hard to come by because of the fact that you need to kind of like build yourself up within the ecosystem over a long period of time now i've spoken about this before on both i guess like the refuel and in the ama series but the only reason i am in the position that i am in now where i get access to these deals is because i was extremely consistent and extremely involved in the community from earlier on so for example 2017 2018 2019 and the first half of 2020 nothing really happened uh in terms of i guess like massive growth for me it was it was incremental slow growth it was it was kind of like grinding it out

every day it was not exponential and then the bear mar the bear market the bull market really hit its stride in mid 2020 especially when um d5 summer started and then you know since then we've had like obviously a massive kind of inflow of people and capital into this ecosystem i didn't start angel investing until like i guess august or september of 2020 um and my net worth was like tiny up until that point as well uh it's funny because um in in march of 2020 when the the covert crash happened i basically didn't have much money at all in crypto even though i had been stacking eighth over the years um because eight went back to basically ninety dollars or a hundred dollars it wiped out a lot of my portfolio value and then from there obviously it went up

a lot more and then d5 happened and i you know i i made some decent money there so i was able to get like a bunch of capital to to be able to invest into uh into the kind of like angel deals that i got access to but uh i mean do i to the point to the point i'm trying to make here is that the they may have seen like it happened overnight for a lot of people but it's been a lot of grinding it's been making a name for myself building myself up within the ecosystem to get to that point where i'm actually brought on as an angel because angel investors aren't brought on for their money at the end of the day the money can come from the funds they're brought on for their kind of i guess like um position within the community

for their kind of like strategic alignment if they can help with things in the background for example i help a lot of teams with hiring with um community related stuff with marketing um with getting like eyeballs on their project because i have such a large reach and things like that um and kind of like if they want to just ping me about anything or to do with with the ecosystem i help them that way too uh whereas if it's if you're just kind of like someone who um doesn't have any of that kind of like value to add you're just like a a passive investor within the ecosystem you may you know be kind of like just on your own doing solo things learning on your own well you know not to sound like a dick but like the the projects aren't going to want

you on board because like you're not really offering any value to them right you're not offering um the value that someone else can offer and they usually have like limited spots for these sorts of things so that's kind of like how it formed for me is where like i i obviously i hate shooting my own horn but like just to make the point i'm obviously like probably the most most well-known if not one of the most well-known people in the ethereum ecosystem so obviously you know the projects that approach me are kind of like approaching me because they're like well we want anthony on board because he's really well known he you know he knows what he's talking about he's got connections he's got a massive network and that can help our project succeed sort of thing so if you want to get to that point i would say you have to do

what i was just saying uh that to max invest and what i was just um answering max invest question about you have to build yourself up to this position and it takes a while it's grinding um over time it's doing it pretty much every day um it's doing things like being active within the community on discord on twitter being uh kind of like putting out kind of like i guess like educational materials is always good and stuff like that so and there's also unfortunately a wealth requirement to this as well so um for a lot of these deal from pretty much all of them um there's a credit in accredited investor laws where you have to have a net worth of at least a million dollars or you have to have a income of two hundred thousand dollars i think twenty thousand dollars 250 000

um for for at least two years or a joint income of i think three hundred thousand dollars with your spouse for at least two years um to even access these deals because it's there these are these are laws that have that have been put in place in various countries around the world called accredited investor laws which i think are total crap i think having a wealth requirement for this sort of stuff is really unfair to people um but that is also another massive uh hurdle i think for a lot of people as well because even if you have a name within this ecosystem you may not have the money you may not have the wealth requirement for a bunch of different reasons out there so that's the kind of like i guess shitty part of it so hopefully that answers answers your your question there blitzer about

this i'm sorry that i can't give you like uh i guess not not a a a good answer in terms of like saying oh well it's like do do this this and this and you'll get to the point of where i am today it's really not like straight a straightforward thing it requires some luck of course but it definitely requires a lot of hard work and a lot of kind of like consistency and and a lot of kind of like um making sure that you build yourself up in the right ways because there's a wrong way to build yourself up and there's a right way a lot of these teams they don't want um you know the total shields on board like the good teams they don't want people who have a large audience but are just like total kind of like shills and and

look like scammers they want like legitimate people who are actually adding a lot of value to the wider ecosystem and will not tarnish their kind of project with their with their brand and name at the end of the day so yeah hopefully that answers uh you'll answer your question there uh your second question what are bet what are the best practices in keeping your ethereum l1 and l2 wallet transactions private or anonymous i've heard of tornado cache how does it work and other viable options so tornado caches is a great option very viable option for just kind of like washing your funds through to different addresses if you want to do that but generally i mean the easiest way to keep yourself uh private or anonymous or pseudonymous um is to just kind of like have different ethereum addresses for different kind of

things that you're doing i have my public address and then i have like a lot of other addresses that i use for various different things i create a new address for uh uh kind of like a lot of different um things that i do like if i'm doing a new kind of like angel investment i'll create a new uh a new address for that if i i need to pay someone and i don't want anyone to just kind of like see that i'll create a new address for that i mean there's a bunch of different reasons for doing so but that's like the most obvious one but tornado cash is good for for just washing funds through if you if you if you want to do it that way um you can go through centralized exchanges as well which is not like very private but still better than um better

than nothing where you can basically wash your funds through them because they have like a hot wallet where the funds go into that that is a shared wallet so you can just kind of like deposit in and then withdraw from that wallet and it will just look like a normal transaction but you have to be careful because if you deposit 108 into the exchange and then you withdraw 1080 out of the exchange um from the hot water then people can kind of like map that if they if they wanted to they it's it's kind of like uh and they can use heuristics and they can kind of say okay well how long did this this transaction kind of like take to come through and and you know it's not very anonymous from there so just generally using new addresses and finding them from centralized exchanges keeps you

i guess like anonymous from everyone except the centralized exchange but if you want to be totally anonymous where uh not even the centralized exchange can find you then uh tornado cash is a good option there there's also aztec protocol but a lot of their tech's not live yet and what they have is kind of like different to a tornadic tornado cache um but yeah so hopefully that answers your questions so have a quick drink break all right moving on to one from yon the fawn i don't think i'm going to be able

to answer this question i read it before yawn and it's it's it's probably beyond what i've actually looked into but i'll ask the question anyway just so people know what i'm talking about um you asked how about randomness on ethereum one of the special qualities of blockchain software is that each machine is running transaction code in a deterministic fashion to update the global state in a way that is identical between nodes so that everyone is eventually in full agreement about the current canonical state but if an ethereum transaction invokes a smart contract containing a function with randomizing properties wouldn't this break the determinism and result in different states between the different nodes i don't think so i don't i mean this is why i'm saying like i don't know if i can answer this but i don't think so i don't think this is how how it

necessarily works i think um you know you actually can't get true randomness from uh from the theorem itself you have to like use outside sources to do this uh but i guess like maybe that's just a side note to this question but essentially um i still think that the um that the the uh the uh the agreement would hold right the deterministic fashion would hold because by calling that function it is still a deterministic thing where the mempool will have you calling that function in it and then whatever it returns after it's done is the randomized the randomized property and that returns it within the within the kind of like block and then it gets included in the block anyway so i think that's the correct answer i mean as i said i don't know for sure i'm going to have to look into that but i

think that's the the kind of like correct answer to that and if it wasn't i mean we probably would have already seen um nodes falling out of sync and and stuff like that if it wasn't the case so i think i'm pretty sure that's the case there all right uh three questions here from brian peace first one the drama at openc combined with the random spam tokens i sometimes discover in my wallets has me rendering about about this hypothetical scenario let's imagine i'm an early employee at a startup which has become very successful i have stock options that will eventually make me a very influential shareholder i'm good at my job but not irreplaceable i just happen to be in the right place at the right time let's also imagine that there is some hypothetical entity that would be a benefit from not having to pay me my significant stock

based compensation package lastly let's imagine this entity did some crafty shenanigans on chain and then sent those ill-gotten gains to my public quality address in an attempt to discredit me how could i defend myself from those accusations ah this is this is a pretty good thought experiment here this definitely it definitely could happen right um hmm i guess like you yeah i mean maybe um i'm just thinking out like i'm just thinking out loud here with this quantum one because you can defend your actions at the social layer right where you can basically be like well i didn't do this this wasn't me um these kind of like transactions came randomly from these other wallets that i don't actually own uh blah blah blah and

it just depends if people are going to believe you or not on that kind of front there on the technical front it's quite hard because yeah there's no real way to kind of like prove that these other addresses aren't yours because people can because i mean because if people ask you oh well prove these things aren't yours like well you can't because like you can prove that they are yours if you own the private keys to them you can sign a message but if they're not yours you can't you can't kind of like uh prove that and then why would you prove that they kind of like are yours if you're trying to defend yourself against that yeah this is this question's got me a little bit a little bit stumped here i think it really does rely on the the social layer stuff here and and

basically uh convincing people that uh you didn't do this and and you weren't responsible for this at the end of the day but i also think that it's funny because if you're referencing kind of i guess like the open seat drama here and thinking about what happened with with nate i think it's pretty obvious that he was doing it because uh uh uh because of the timing and and some of his comments on twitter that's that kind of like got him i think thrown under the bus but also internal investigations would um would unveil this if the company has monitoring on the the kind of like what the employees are doing um on the company network then they could probably i guess um put two and two together here but it really would be the social layer at the end of the day and the way you

would defend yourself if you were at the company well the company would have to come out and defend you and say well we we know this happened he's telling the truth and then i guess it's up to the community to believe you or not so yeah a little a little bit of a scary thing here i guess maybe you don't maybe if you want to defend yourself against this um from the very beginning just don't have a public ethereum address which is kind of a shitty thing to to to give us advice here because obviously you do want to have one for various reasons but if you if you're worried about this sort of stuff then yeah definitely not having one would probably be the best way to go about it there all right your second question when i bridge to a roll-up my funds are locked in the bridge contract

and secured by ethereum so even if the roll-up goes down i can still exit my funds to ethereum but how does this work if i'm bridging between roll-ups if i bridge from ethereum to roll up a and then bridge from roll-up a to roller b and then roll up b goes down can i still retrieve my funds on ethereum the chain of custody seems complicated so if you're talking about bridging using one of these solutions like hop or connext as i mentioned before these solutions are cross-chain um uh exchanges they are not bridges in the sense that uh or in the same kind of like sense that uh the the bridge that lives on layer one ethereum for these kind of roll-ups are because it's funny it's called a bridge contract but really it's more of a kind of i guess it does more than just bridging the arbitrary

contract uh actually allows you to um submit transactions on on kind of like layer one as long as the validators are still online um you could do this when the sequencer went offline the other day just because the sequencer went offline doesn't mean you couldn't submit things to layer one um because the validators were still online it just means that it would incur layer one gas cost instead of getting the benefit of of the sequencer cost which which brings the cost down so so the chain of custody here is basically wherever those funds in the kind of like br uh the the bridge sits uh for that kind of like uh for hop or connects at the end of the day so if you had kind of like hopped between uh i guess uh uh you know uh arbitrary optimism the funds on optimism if you

want to withdraw them to layer one you would uh kind of like uh withdraw them and then that because those funds are allocated to you they're owned by your 3m address on optimism then the corresponding funds on in the bridge would belong to you you know just because you've you you've kind of like hopped between these these two different things doesn't mean that the that you don't own them just because someone else bridged in the funds just like if for example maybe i'll give an obvious example here maybe i'm confusing people with this say you bridged in eth into optimism and then you trade that eth for usdc on optimism then you withdraw usdc well you never brought usdc to optimism right like someone else did so what ends up happening is that you've essentially swapped your your kind of like uh

um tokens on layer two and then the bridge knows that you don't actually uh uh sorry not the bridge the um the layer two knows that you don't own that um that eighth anymore they've submitted the batch to layer one so now the layer one uh bridge contract which i'm as i said it's more than a bridge contract but now that contract knows that you no longer own that eighth because of the batch transactions um that have hit layer one now and so that you can't withdraw that ease to layer one anymore you can only withdraw the usdc and even if the layer two goes down you will only be able to withdraw the usdc from the smart contract because it knows that you traded your eighth for usdc on the layer two same principle applies between hopping between these different kind of chains it knows that uh you now

have eighth on layer two um on on kind of sorry it knows you now have lethal optim eth on optimism and not ethon arbitram because that state change was was updated on layer one and then the contract can see that and then you can withdraw from there so it's all got to do with just basically your ethereum while at the end of the day uh it doesn't have to do with the fact that uh you know just because someone else bridged in those funds doesn't mean that you can't withdraw them yourself uh so hopefully that kind of like clears it up for you interesting question uh definitely i think i got that right but definitely something that i think it needs more clarity on maybe maybe there should be a post in the daily grain newsletter about that eventually all right uh third question polygons

roadmap to implement a zk roll up is very exciting i'm a big fan of polygon but at present why is polygon's current network considered to be more aligned with ethereum than other evm compatible l1s like phantom or avalanche uh so uh brian i actually answered this uh where did i answer this i just before there's there'll be a time stamp on the on the youtube um recap if you want to kind of check that but i answered this up here i'm just scrolling through the questions um who who asked this i think it was uh yeah lucas so if you go to the question asked by lucas um you'll be able to see that i answered that there uh so i won't just rehash it here and you know i answered why uh polygon is considered more ethereum friendly there all right a few more questions left here

so one from jan how will mev look like in a roll-up world will this still ha will this still happen as today on layer one will it somehow move to layer two or something hybrid um mav is well and truly uh alive on layer two it's just that we can do different things with mev on layer two so there's a couple of different approaches that have been put forward one of them is this approach called meva or mav auctions which was put for by the optimism team quite a while ago where essentially they would auction off the rights to uh to people to do um there's a bit of controversy around that they people think that it's not really an elegant solution they don't think it's something that's actually fair they think it uh it definitely just biases the people with the most money so

basically i guess like a rich get richer thing and the auction funds would basically um go to public goods funding as well it wouldn't be funds that went to the optimism team for example but i think more generally with uh uh with i guess like um uh what should i say sorry i got discord notifications coming up here more generally with uh with mav there's just much there's the same ways that we're mitigating it and that we're kind of like working around it on layer one apply to layer two but i mean you've got the meva on layer two you've also got right now where essentially because optimism and arbitrary run their own sequences and no one else can run a sequencer they are the only ones that can do mev right now um

uh uh and that they're sorry no they're not the only ones who can do mav but they can do it if they wanted to they could make it so that no one else could do mev and they could front run transactions as well uh so there's that problem too but once that decentralizes out it will change um but i think yeah mavs is a wide open top it doesn't matter if it's on layer one or layer two wherever the um sequences or validators or miners whatever control transactions or control the ordering of transactions i should say there's going to be mev and there's good and bad mev good mavs arbitraging between different liquidity pools so i would charging a uh between like a unisop and sushi swap liquidity it's good mev um bad mov is stuff like front running uh sandwich attacks sandwich attacks a really bad

mev uh that sort of stuff so that's what we're kind of like working on to try and mitigate um there's a lot of bleeding edge research happening here a lot of stuff on each research firm if you want to check that out uh but yeah hopefully that answers your question jan so one here from nick underscore bk who says hi anthony i've read two of your delegate newsletters regarding stable coins and i would like to get an update on your overall view of the landscape and specifically your thoughts on terra usd ust is the ticker your newsletter outlines the three key properties to satisfy the holy grail of stable coins stability scalability and decentralization scalability we've recently seen exchanges such as coinbase and kraken list usd ust and it is currently the fifth ranked stable coin in crypto in terms of market cap uh stability a coin gecko screenshot was

posted by dokwan two weeks ago the day of the flash crash which showed that ust it was the only stable coin that that held its peg at least momentarily the screenshot showed uh diet 94 cents usdc at 95 cents usdt at 94 cents and ust at a dollar decentralization would like to know your thoughts although the terra usd is rooted outside of the ethereum ecosystem i would like to think that we ethereums can root for great innovation that benefits the overall crypto space and welcome a multi-chain future as we are not narrow-minded maxis such as pomp okay um so i want to clarify one thing when i say scalability about uh i guess like um these stable coins i definitely do mean kind of like market cap and being able to kind of grow over time but i also mean kind of like scalability in

the sense that the more kind of i guess scalable it kind of becomes uh sorry if it is it can scale while still remaining decentralized and stable so these three things have to work in tandem they can't just be a thing where okay well you have like this stable coin that um scales a lot but is not not decentralized um like the centralized stable coins uh but it's it's it can be stable right uh where or you have one that's stable but it's not um it's not decentralized um and it's not scalable like there's all these kind of different things you can chop and change that's why i call it like the holy grail having all three of these i i don't know enough about ust to comment on its decentralization i know enough about it to comment on its um scalability and stability so from what i

know with usdt is ust is that it's backed by the lunar token and that to mint ust you burn luna to redeem you sorry to to burn ust you get luna back for burning it uh so i know that's how it works um you can correct me if i'm wrong in the discord channel if i got that wrong there but um that that's kind of like what i know about it and now this lends itself to i guess like reflect being reflexive in both ways if the lunar market cap goes up you can mint you more ust but if it goes down you have less ust so it's basically a stable coin that scales with the price of luna which i don't know like how i guess um defensible that is or how much that can scale it's kind of

like make a make a dao's original with single collateral die where they had just eighth backing it up and they said well we can't scale with just eighth because there's not enough bandwidth here we need to add other assets in i'm not actually convinced that that's the right approach i actually think that if maybe may one day be worth enough to just be something that fully backs a um a kind of like stable coin um on its own and maybe maybe luna gets to that point i'm not sure i'm not sure how far they can grow i did mention before that i think the terra ecosystem is interesting and i don't think they're hostile towards ethereum at all or anything like that but that's one thing i would say about scalability stability i mean stability comes in many kind of different shapes here i think ust had a massive pegging

event during the flash crash of may when the lunar price fell dramatically because of the fact that luna is the only token backing up ust as far as i know at this point maybe i'm wrong there but i think that's the case um which means that you kind of like how to run on the bank so to speak uh that obviously goes down over time as the um uh the volatility of the lunar token goes down over time but still definitely a little bit of a concern there when that sort of stuff happens um but in general stability also means that there's very liquid markets for the stablecoin so that when these kind of high volatile environments happen the stablecoin can can stay stable during them because there's various arbitrage opportunities there's various kind of like bots keeping it stable and all that sorts of

stuff so yeah there's a lot of stuff that goes into that as well um and then decentralization i don't know enough about the terror ecosystem to comment on this what i do know is that i i think terra is a depos system um and because of the fact that the ust most of it i think is on or a lot of it at least is on ethereum um it has to bridge into ethereum and those bridges always have centralized points of failure or always less trustless than just being on the chain itself so there's definitely a decentralization trade off there and the terra ecosystem i mean is probably not as decentralized as ethereum so there's also that risk as well but hopefully that gives you a bit of color about how i'm thinking about that sort of stuff not to say that ust

is bad or anything like that i think it's great but there's a lot of different issues that need to be worked through over time which i'm sure they will be but yeah hopefully that gives you a bit of extra color there take a drink break for a sec all right uh three last questions here then i'll move on to some of the questions that i think have been asked in the ama series channel so one here from log mag who says hi anthony warning fighting coming i recently learned that all the l2s have admin keys that give devs total control over the tvl considering the massive amount of money flowing to l2s it seems that there are not enough disclaimers to highlight the circumstance what in your opinion are the risks of l2s in these

early days and maybe some ideas to overcome these issues so i i frequently mention this on the on the refuel in that things like arbitrary optimism do ha are completely centralized in terms of like the layout to network itself but in saying that they don't have unilateral control over the tvr on the chain um because of the fact that like you can withdraw your funds from layer one but what they can do is that with the centralized sequencer they can sense the transactions they can front run transactions they can they can basically do things that may not um you know they can basically do things with their sequencer uh that and that may not be um that that's what i'm looking for here that may lead to to uh

uh things where where users lose funds and all that sort of stuff um and the l2b website does a really great job of highlighting this where they go through all the kind of like trade-offs what can happen what's the worst case scenario all that sorts of stuff so i definitely recommend going and checking out that um but yeah maybe there should be more disclaimers from i guess like arbitrary on their bridge page or optimism on their bridge page that basically says hey you know right now the network has a bunch of guard rails in place there's transaction limits there's centralized points of failure please be aware of this maybe they already have that in there and maybe i just didn't pay attention to it but um yeah that'd be cool to see on there as well so uh but yeah if you want to know

kind of like the full risk breakdown go to l2beat.com they have an amazing resource on this they have like risks on every l2 out there right now so definitely go check that out all right one here from lloyd banksy what are your thoughts on the theory that a deflationary eighth tracks from the monetary premium narrative as some level of inflation is good because it disincentivizes hoarding and leads to more distributed ownership so i answered uh i think i answered part of this question earlier on when i spoke about east distribution and how i consider each distribution to be very decentralized right now and very good but i mean you have a point going forward where much of the world hasn't bought ether it hasn't onboarded into eth yet and so does that deflationary eat detract from being able to i guess distribute these funds to a wider set of people well the

funny thing is is that eth is um so so 8 is not deflationary uh uh at the protocol level i mean eth is potentially deflationary depending on the fee burn um right now the ethereum network issues 4.5 uh a year of i've got new eth um to secure the network to miners now that is new brand new that's going into the to the ecosystem then you have the other side of the equation which is eip1559 that is burning like 70ish percent of the fees or all the feed revenue generated then once the merge happens and we go into a proof of stake world there is still new eth being issued there is it's not like um we've we've dropped issuance to zero and then we're just surviving on fees there is new eth being issued by

the network two stakers who will eventually sell that um for to cover taxes that's that's for selling or to take profits or whatever other reason so that eighth will it will enter circulation and that right now is that about 0.6 percent i think new issuance each year there and that that goes up as more ethics stakes remember we get to one percent new issuance and the reason why it can be deflationary in that scenario still is because we're going to be burning the eighth um that that kind of like it's um uh the the transaction fee ether and i mean we are burning it we're going to be obviously burning it um once the merch happens as well so you know is one percent enough uh that that's maybe a question that you would ask like is one percent enough to an inflation to to

basically um you know get into the hands of a lot of different people uh i think it's funny because i think it's actually um not not that that's probably not the ques the question that should be asked it's more about the question of like how like can people get access to eighth how divisible is it well it's divisible up to 18 decimal places okay well you know can they buy eight is worth a hundred thousand dollars well yes you can buy like a fraction of an eight you can buy a thousand dollars worth of an eighth and you can use that like the by the time it's a hundred thousand dollars the later two ecosystem will be so mature that i don't even think end users will have to pay fees at all at that point um so at that point you'll be able to do like these very small kind of like

um micro transactions and all that sort of stuff on ethereum um and i don't think that should take away from from the fact that like ethereum is it can be net inflationary where people don't necessarily hoard because people still need to use either pay transaction fees uh people still need to use eth to do things like uh you know within d5 the the new eighth is still gonna be sold for like tax reasons and for taking profits uh and stuff like that so yeah i don't know i don't i don't see it being a long-term issue but it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out over i guess like the coming years all right last question uh not last question but last question on my sheet from sponge can you give an overview of star x what trade-offs do zk stocks have compared to zk snarks um on

the technical level i can't this stuff is very technical i would encourage reading um starkware's documentation all these sorts of stuff i haven't dived into it because it's very heavy on the cryptography um but basically from a very high level starkex is um from what i can tell stock a stockwears generalized kind of like roll-up ecosystem where they're going to have a system where all their different kind of like roll-ups can talk to each other and they can kind of like play with each other they can have composability and all that sorts of stuff with each other on the star x kind of i guess network um so there's a lot of information about this through the different starkware kind of like documentation websites and their blog posts and stuff like that so definitely go check that out and there's there's technical documentation as well

so um but yeah i haven't dived into the technical stuff myself just yet all right that's it from the sheet i think there's going to be more in yeah there's more in the ama series channel here so i'm going to go through these quickly and then we'll finish up as this has gone for a long time now uh so one here from con la mor eliminoid uh li money sorry i i know i've written that wrong uh if we get to an ultimate boss in-game of stable coins being regulated as securities and eth other mainstream coins being taxed with wash rules etc that to me is ultimate win that is why crypto is going up with the new bills going through congress on the same it means that it's not going to be outlawed agree i think yeah i mean i think that there is some kind of like um

merit to people saying like regulations are bullish because what regulations do especially for institutions and other kind of players like that they deregulate sorry they risked the industry for these players and it brings a lot more clarity for people as well so you go from there being like a new regulation flood every week but saying oh the sec is going to ban stable coins oh this thing's going to be a security too okay well the sec has said that this stable coin is is a security or this one isn't they've given a definitive answer here so that uncertainty kind of like disappears from the ecosystem which is bullish so yeah i mean i i definitely agree that the more clarity we get on the regulation side the better it is but at the end of the day if the regulation is bad it's it's still going to be a net

negative and people are still going to leave the um you know wherever that kind of regulation happens and go somewhere else and still do that do their thing so yeah all right one here from hillbilly chess who says do you think having an improved gini coefficient for eighth would be helpful for growth how do you think about that ratio and sustainability of a project long term i think i've talked about the distribution of eth enough already on the ama so hillbilly you can go back and and kind of like see my answers for that sort of stuff um i just gave one actually uh but i guess like the junior coefficient should improve over time for eth especially as we go through different market cycles and stuff like that i'm not sure how much it's going to improve from here there's definitely a lot of people who are going

to hold their eighth forever i mean i am personally going to hoard my eighth forever i said multiple times that i never planned to sell my eighth um and i think that's just what the asset is like it's definitely going to lend itself to that but at the end of the day there's still going to be a new eth being issued as i mentioned just before so i think yeah i don't think it's going to be an issue but we're going to have to see how it plays out and i i'm going to see how the you know the unique coefficient trends over time uh so one here from crypto bunker can you could you speak on owning 8th tokens versing owning all eth uh i recently converted everything to ethan would like to motivation thesis behind it so i can stick with that allocation also what

other chances the opencv moves fully to layer two um i can't really give you an answer to the first question uh uh in terms of like what you should kind of like do with your money i i can't give investment advice there but what i can say is that i'm very heavy eat i don't really have any other tokens out there i think in eip1559 world it's going to be very very hard for um other tokens on each especially the ones that already worth billions of dollars to outperform eth over the long term in saying that there are other things that you can probably um buy and not buy i guess but like there are other kind of like things that uh that you can kind of i guess uh uh what's what i'm looking for here there are the other kind of things you

can speculate on that are much more risky than eighth because uh they they kind of like earlier on in their life cycle as a project they're much more volatile um but the potential for outperforming eighth is there for sure but that's you know it's very very hard and i can't tell you which ones are going to perform well and which ones aren't i definitely have some some kind of like bets that that i that i've made personally um all the one i mean they're all pretty public and i disclose them all the time um but generally yeah it's just it's very in my mind it's going to be very hard over the long term to outperform eth for a lot of these tokens uh and what are the changes that opencv movies flew to layer 2 well they're already on the polygon pos chain which obviously technically is in a

layer 2 but if you're looking for a more scalable uh open c it's on there and you can bring your nfts from there to layer one ethereum and they've already committed to building on immutable x which is an nft focused zk roll up or not technically a zeke roll up i should say validium um so yeah i don't know when that's coming should be soon hopefully but but yeah uh professor rhino this might be a very redundant question but how do i position myself to get air drops i feel like i'm clearly doing something very wrong as i keep missing out the best way to position yourself for air drops my friend is go check out the airdrop hunting channel in the discord we um kind of like created this channel the other day and there's been a lot of people sharing alpha in there so

definitely go check that out ask your questions in there follow along with what people are sharing that is your best source of alpha i think for airdrops right now all right one here from lloyd banksy who says can you please talk a little bit about the uh the kinds of perks benefits that you have seen for social clubs built around tokens or nft such as friends with benefits or crypto punks um i think the benefits uh it depends it depends on what you consider a benefit for something like crypto punk the benefit is that you get a bit of like social cred right and a bit of like social reputation you get a really cool profile picture that you can you can set for yourself that you can basically signal to everyone hey like i own a crypto punk and you know um you know i

uh you know then this looks like me and you kind of get some social credo out of that in terms of like uh the the social clubs thing i think when you join these sorts of things that it's like any social club right where you have uh you can kind of curate the group of people that you that you interact with and you can and you can kind of like i guess um curate it in such a way where you don't have people that are just like uh you know for a trolling or like full of crap or whatever you actually have people working towards something um uh in terms of i guess like um adding value to the ecosystem but i would also say uh on on that note when you think about these social tokens i actually think about them more like daos and if you

look at all the dows out there just look at what daos are doing in general like what like one of my favorite dows right now is the bankless dell because it's like a media doubt it's very different to what we've seen in the past but essentially um since they launched the bank token the bankless community has grown so much they're doing a lot more stuff now they're doing a lot more products they're doing merch and things like that they're trying to grow themselves so those are kind of like the perks that you have it's where it's where it's like a coordination mechanism where the token acts as a way of coordinating an awesome community around it and and the community is kind of aligned on increasing the value of that token over time and then you know perks come with owning a you know part part of the token

depending on what club it is uh and you can kind of feel part of the community as well so uh and then yeah maybe you get like exclusive access to different things like maybe um maybe you get an airdrop because you held a specific token or something like that at a specific set a specific time and stuff like that so hopefully that answers your questions there lloyd one here from a latin girl who says i would trim and optimism are using eve to pay gas fees while the l2 using starkware tech a gas free i don't understand how they do adx diversify get this gas free could you please help to explain it's not gas free they're subsidizing it so the way to think about gas on l2 uh just one sec so i'm gonna get a drink sorry so so the way the thing about a gas fees

on l2 is that they're split into two different parts the gas fee is one part is the l1 fees that every layer two has to pay whether they're a roll up or a validium or a volition and that's the fee to put the batches on chain the data on chain the proofs on chain all that sort of stuff that is unavoidable that is the layer one fee that has to be paid no matter what has to be paid by someone they they're the platform platforms offering free uh fees there are subsidizing this and then there's the second part of it which is the uh the the kind of like fee for using the l2 itself now the reason why it's more expensive on optimism and arbitrary is because right now they have transaction throughput limits where um over time as they as those limits go

uh go up the individual costs come down uh to a certain point and uh they kind of spread out across like all the people on that on that system and the same is true for for zk roll ups but then you have constructions like validium and volitions which are much much cheaper than uh than a roll-up because whatever lydium does is it basically takes the data off chain and stores it on a off chain data availability committee where it's still but it still posts the proofs to layer one ethereum which are much cheaper to post than the data so um but this comes with the trade-off that if the data availability committee which is basically just a set of nodes goes offline you can potentially lose your funds because you don't have the data to withdraw your funds uh from from from kind of like layer one

there so from that perspective you just kind of like have a trade-off and as far as i know dy dx and diversify are both uh i think they're both uh zk rollups right now i think on the l2 beat website it says that i'm just quickly checking it right now so uh dydex is a zk roll up and diversify is availability i'm sorry so that's why diversify can do it um but dydx may just be subsidizing it the costs are probably quite high for them right now considering they're a zk roller but maybe they're using kind of like a hybrid approach here um i actually saw someone question the other day is dydx really a zk roll up and i haven't really dug too deep into that but if they are then they're definitely subsidizing a lot of costs right now because they still have to pay those hefty layer one

fees to store their data on layer one whereas diversifiers are validium so they get away with with that but as i said there's a trade-off there so yeah hopefully that helps you understand that they're latin girl all right one here from mark underscore oh i think this is going to be it for today so i wanted to ask about your thoughts on the insurance acronyfi this is this something the average retail dfi user should be considering or is this something for protocols that rely on other protocols to seriously consider should the rule of thumb be to ensure when locking large amounts of collateral a big percentage of a portfolio in a protocol to mitigate smart contract risk yes i think sorry if you're looking up large amounts you should definitely check out insurance on it um but i think that it's on the protocols to embed this directly into

them they're kind of like front ends or to their protocol themselves you can imagine for example going to make a dao and maker having like uh like oasis which is like a portal into maker and and on that portal having like a button or a checkbox that you can click that says yes i want insurance on this and then it says insurance powered by nexus mutual or insurance powered by some other insurance protocol and then it's just built into i guess kind of like um the transaction and you pay it you pay the premium and then you get cover like that so yeah i definitely think that if you're dealing with large amounts of money you should especially if you're putting it into maybe newer protocols um uh but yeah so hopefully that kind of like answers your question there and i think that's gonna be it for today

because uh it's been what two and a half hours now so longest ama ever but a lot of good questions so yeah unless anyone else has any questions from the audience i'm gonna wrap it up um i'll give another kind of like 10 seconds then i'll wrap it up all right doesn't seem like it cool all right well thanks everyone for attending the 10th ama another one will happen in two weeks but this ama has been recorded so if you came in late then you can definitely check out the recording on youtube tomorrow within 24 hours um but i'll catch you all in the discord channel thanks everyone see you later