The Daily Gwei AMA Series #9 - 4th of September, 2021

Transcript

all right everyone let's kick it off so welcome to the ninth daily way ama series i do these every two weeks um thanks to coffee for setting up the calendar invite for this is the first time we had a calendar reminder out there so that should help people with getting scheduled for this i know everyone's obviously in different time zones around the world so that should help you you can find it in the calendar channel if you haven't seen that right at the top of the discord um the way this ama works is that if you want to ask a question you can feel free to raise your hand and i'll invite you up onto the stage if not you can ask it in the ama series channel and i'll answer those at the end of the ama because i'll be answering the ones that have already

been posted in there as we go through so i've got them on a sheet here uh this will of course be recorded and uploaded to youtube like all the other ones so if you come in late or have to leave early that's fine you'll be able to watch it on there with time stamps so let's get started with the first question from the ama series channel which comes from dumbgen.eth who says my question for this week is how the ethereum governance system works and what if something will change after the merge and going forward so the way ethereum does governance is it doesn't have an on-chain governance system right the eighth token does not give you any kind of rights to vote on system parameter changes or anything like that if you hold eth um you can you can stake it of course uh within the

beacon chain or you can do a number of other things with it but even staking it within the beacon chain doesn't give you voting rights there is no on-chain voting system so instead we have i guess kind of like a thing called rough consensus or an off-chain kind of i guess uh a governance system for ethereum where various different kind of entities within the ecosystem will basically have a say uh and then that say will kind of and then all those kind of things will get correlated by the um by the community and then eventually we will land on kind of like rough consensus about about an upgrade so i think probably the easiest example is eip1559 and run through kind of like how that went from an idea to to maine essentially and it took over two years so this was probably i think the longest

one um besides obviously the aip to upgrade ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake um or at least that whole effort just generally the e2 effort but essentially with eip1559 with eips in general they are basically the way ethereum upgrades itself so eip stands for ethereum improvement proposal anyone can propose one of these and it goes through various stages i don't know if i don't know the stages of the top my head but it goes through various stages from like draft to kind of like you know pending or kind of like complete and then you know merged and eventually you know obviously it goes to mainnet so just use ip1559 as an example what ended up happening is that now the authors of this eip posted it back in april of 2019 i believe it was and then

from there on the community kind of like discusses it over time there's research done into it there's development done there's testing the simulations you know depending on how complex it is different people kind of chime in over time and all the kind of like people that participate in the ethereum ecosystem can have a say whether that is uh you know eighth holders ethereum just general ethereum community members exchangers um obviously core developers you have infrastructure providers you have basically anyone who spends any amount of time in the ethereum ecosystem is allowed to kind of like you know speak their mind or whatever and kind of give their arguments for against a specific eip and then uh if there are kind of like an overwhelming majority that are in favor of it just like there was for eip1559 well then that signal kind of like feeds

its way up to the core developers and the core developers i guess they're not the ones who kind of like have the final say but they have some of i think that if i had to kind of like put a weight on on kind of like each person's voice within the community the core developers are definitely up there with the weightiest voice because they obviously know the network at the protocol level quite well so they can decide whether why not decide but they can basically say well you know this as eip as it currently is um is not kind of like up to scratch it hasn't gone through the proper process we don't believe that it would actually be safe to deploy this on mainnet and they can just give their opinions because at the end of the day you know the entire ethereum ecosystem

could um subvert the core developers if they wanted to build their own clients and run their own kind of clients with this new upgrade in it and if everyone agreed that that was the new ethereum chain because we obviously got a hard fork when we when we implement these eips then then that would be the new ethereum chain but uh if if kind of like the core developers kind of like say you know this isn't actually um you know good or whatever this needs to be revised then the community can go back and kind of like see what's wrong with it see what what they're actually pointing at issues with and if if there's actually no fundamental issues and it's just like they don't like the eip well then it just goes through discussions right it's like okay why don't you like it uh you

know what's wrong with it there was some kind of i guess core developers that didn't like aip1559 at the start but then they came around over time because there was more research and kind of like testing done and kind of like more simulations run on it so they came around so there has been instances of this happening before but that's not to say that core developers um control anything if i had to describe ethereum's kind of governance process i would say that it's a technocracy so the voice sorry the the weight of your voice is kind of like directly tied to i guess um your merit within the ecosystem uh and specifically on a technical level so obviously the core developers are the most technical uh or at least one one party of the most technical then you have like different researchers and developers throughout the ecosystem but

the community also has a very big voice within ethereum because the community was the one are the ones who championed different aips obviously 1559 probably wouldn't ever have got to main that if it wasn't for the massive community push that we saw because the community basically put their whole weight around it and their money as well and we're like you know we want one five five nine on main net we're willing to pay for anything that needs to be done to get this on there we think it's an improvement to the fee market and we also think that it's great that it burns eighth because it basically gives the value that's being generated on the ethereum network or at least most of the value that's being generated uh to ethers essentially which which i i you know i personally i'm a very big fan of of course so yeah and

it's funny because like i don't think the actual whole ethereum governance process is necessarily documented anywhere because it's it's it's a decentralized process right there is no kind of like um centralized repository that says it has to follow this but the eip process is pretty thoroughly documented you can find that on the ethereum github i believe where you know the process that an eip has to go through uh is basically there step by step but the aip process as i said is just one kind of like um one part of the entire governance process you have to go through all this rough consensus and things like that uh so yeah hopefully that kind of like explains how ethereum governance works at a higher level it definitely uh may sometimes feel like stuff just happens because there's a lot of eips that i

guess are very technical to the point where they're actually boring and they just like kind of like maintenance eips i guess you can call them or kind of like eips that improve something for developers for example or improve something for end users but the end users have no idea what it is because it's very technical uh so those sorts of things definitely don't really bubble up to the surface of the community but in general kind of like uh there are a lot of other people looking at this i'm talking about the general community there are a lot of other people looking at this sort of stuff and if anything was to kind of like try and sneak in it would you know almost certainly be caught i mean there's been eips that have been rejected before such as erp 999 which was the eip to uh unlock the

frozen funds and the parity multisig that got frozen back in 2017 i believe um and that got shot down straight away because people like no we're not going to do this this is this is goes against what ethereum is this is basically bailing out um this one contract then we have to do it for everyone and then it just kind of like uh is like a slippery slope from there and then there was um the eip for prog power which was basically changing ethereum's hashing algorithm in order to kick asic miners off the network but there was a lot of debate around that i'm not going to rehash that a whole debate but that eip also got kind of like killed off by the community because the community and you know some core developers are actually in favor of this so the community i believe has the most

weight here like the general community has the most weight when it comes to these sorts of things and just making your voice kind of like heard and known is the best way to kind of i guess participate in the governance process but as i said different parties have different weighting here you know a random person that got into ethereum last month is not going to have the same kind of weighting to their voice as a core developer for example right um and i mean as it should be right because you would expect the person who just discovered ethereum last month is not going to have the same kind of like knowledge and context around ethereum and what's best for ethereum uh over a court developer that has been working on the protocol for like six years or something like that so hopefully that answers your question uh

dungeon there so i'm going to keep moving through my list here if you do want to ask a question just raise your hand while you're up onto the stage and you know you can do that at any time so a question from short circuit here who says uh when is a token no longer an ico for those that live in the us or comparable what is the trigger that allows us to gain access to a token was interested in imx and epic but apparently i can't buy them or am i missing something so i think i guess what you're probably saying is when is a token no longer a security and this is kind of like a gray area right because the sec hasn't actually given kind of like any guidance on pretty much like all tokens uh they've kind of like said things here and there being like you

know all tokens look like securities but they haven't actually gone specifically after most of the tokens some of them they have and that's usually in the process of when they're kind of like charging a company of issuing like an unregistered security but most of these tokens that we see on ethereum today especially the ones that are part of the legitimate projects i haven't seen the sec kind of weigh in on that or any kind of like a security regulator around the world weigh in specifically on a lot of these projects so the teams that issue these tokens are taking the safe approach of being like well we know that the regulatory kind of like ecosystem in the us is really harsh on crypto and in certain other jurisdictions as well uh so we're just going to not service that area when we do a token sale um because just in case

we get in trouble for this later later on down the line so they can only control it from there but once the token's actually out into the ecosystem you can buy it from you know any decentralized exchange you want you can go to uni swap sushi swap whatever there's gonna be liquidity there for you uh and you can probably even end up buying it on an exchange later i mean um there's plenty of tokens that are on even coinbase and they weren't offered to like kind of u.s investors to buy into so it's just an unfortunate consequence of the us kind of like having such a weird regulatory regime around crypto i think every uh i guess regulatory body in the us is trying to vy for kind of like coverage over crypto the cftc the scc the doj they all want their slice of the pie because if they

get it they get more funding right and they kind of like can do more stuff and have more power and these organizations always want to get bigger especially in government so i think from that perspective it's just going to be a little while before we get clarity here so the teams are taking the safe approach of being like yeah we're just not going to service you the us people but where this becomes really damaging is the fact that now u.s people are being barred from getting air drops so this happened with dydx and it's happening with immutable x where i i think immutable x is doing um a good thing a bit of just air dropping eat instead of the imx tokens to people uh in an equivalent way to kind of get around this which is cool but diy dx isn't allowing us kind of

like traders even on their platform and that's why they're not allowing them to have the token because to uh get the token in an airdrop you actually need to need to trade on the platform and if they're borrowing you from trading well then you can't do that and obviously there's ways to get around this with like a vpn but apparently that's they've actually kind of like um have a system in place where even if you use a vpn it's quite hard to get around these block these blockers here so that's where it's become very kind of i guess controversial now where it's like well how is the sec or how is any regulatory body protecting investors if they're not allowed to get an air drop like this is just free money right this is not a lot of the time you don't have to do

anything for you just have to use the app i mean i know i said you have to use diy dx's app or perpetual exchange app on layer 2 to get the diy dx token but you really don't have to do much you just have to make a few trades and whatever to kind of get claim your allocation but you can make a couple of trades just instantly back and forth you don't have to speculate you just just make some dummy trades or whatever and still have a claim to these uh these tokens uh and then with imx i mean you just you you kind of just have to like buy some some guards on chain cards or kind of like do some stuff on the immutable x platform and you get the token as well so it's not like you're doing super speculative stuff where you have to be protected

from and i think the the i mean just generally i mean if you listen to the refuel you'll know that i just don't like most financial regulations maybe they are a necessary evil because of centralized uh because of the um the way they're centralized or traditional finance system works but i don't actually think that they're that a lot of them are needed within d5 because of the fact that i guess within dfi where we're making everything so transparent that these financial regulations which really just exist to make things uh or at least attempt to make things more transparent and to protect investors are kind of like being replaced with code at the end of the day but i guess that's a separate kind of discussion to this um so i mean to answer your original question when is it no longer considered i guess an ico or a security i mean

you can buy these tokens as soon as they're trading on like on a decentralized exchange from anywhere like uni swap isn't going to buy you you know uni swap labs their their website can can sense you and can stop you from accessing the website but you can tap into uniform smart contracts from anywhere you don't have to use their website to do so so you can very easily get um you know whatever token you want on there regardless of if it's security or not it doesn't matter because it's still going to be trading because it's all decentralized so yeah hopefully that answers your question there short circuit all right so one here from tct inc who says my question is where did you get that super cool digital frame you have for your nfts so the one i've got is called the netgear mural 2 you can just

google that and find a local retailer to buy that from um it's pretty good there's like a mobile app that you can download and upload all the photos to it and kind of like set the slideshow settings and things like that but there are plenty of others out there as well the one drawback of the one that i've got is that it's not square so it kind of like has to fill in uh the the blank space uh with just kind of like black borders around it um so there are ones you can get that are square or i mean there's ones you can get that are all kind of different kind of shapes and sizes but i think a square one really works well for nfts and that's probably one that i'm going to get next um and kind of like the one that i've currently

got works well for a lot of nfts that i have for sure but there are some that i'd like to display but just you know don't really fit that form factor there so yeah i mean you can just search like nft display or something on google and there's plenty of retailers now and more coming every day from what i've seen that'll kind of like uh you know have these products for you all right one here from dom who says uh would there be any tangible benefit to launching an l2 type smart contract on top of an existing uh layer two like say run arbitrary on top of arbitrary effectively a layer three platform kinda or is that just added complexity for no real benefits and then uh follow one question from dscript here who says um wouldn't a layer three that similar simultaneously writes to all layer twos

arbitrary polygon optimism work to unify chain activity if it ends up being fractured between the l2s so the limiting factor of layer twos in terms of scalability is the layer one that they're talking to so if if they're using a theorem for their security and ethereum to post their batches and proofs to they are limited by what's called core data on ethereum this is why when we have sharding layer 2s are going to be able to scale a lot more because they get access to more block space to be able to post more core data to to layer 1. so from that perspective you would probably from my understanding not get any benefit from running a layer 2 on top of a of a layer two like this uh and i mean you could settle the um these layer twos to different networks

that have more block space and get more scalability over layer twos but normally you would get less security right because usually when there's more block based on another blockchain it means the security is less because they've taken trade-offs with um by kind of like increasing the hardware requirements to run the chain uh because their block size is like much bigger or whatever or some other kind of like trade-offs around security and decentralization there so from my understanding it wouldn't uh really kind of do anything just stacking them on top of each other um but in saying that there is something called a zkzk roll-up which is essentially it's it's not really a scalability boost but it's basically bringing privacy to zk roll ups and aztec protocol is working on this so there are kind of different things you can do at these layer twos um

in terms of like stacking the technologies together but as far as i understand it it wouldn't give you a scalability boost because you're still limited by the layer one kind of space that you're allowed to post you know call data too at the end of the day so hopefully that answers your questions dom in description uh one here from matthew t who says um would you respond to some of raul paul's most provocative comments on his recent appearance on bankless so um just a bit of background there here this podcast i actually ended up finishing listening to it today it's about 90 minutes long i was a really great podcast with the bankless guys if you haven't listened to it yet i highly recommend doing so but he went through like a wide range of topics and had a wide range of opinions on here so i guess matthew wants me to

answer these which is which is listed out here so roll said on the podcast a chimp could get rich picking random crypto cryptocurrencies and the implication seems to be that fundamentals are irrelevant every coin token has price go up technology but isn't this just obviously wrong on so many levels so i think in bull markets this is like very true right like you can just throw money at basically anything i guess like there are some kind of like scams and rug pools and things like that but you can throw money at a lot of projects that may be stagnant or may not be doing anything and like that have just object objectively failed at what they're trying to do but they just still linger around because it's very hard to kill off any of this stuff and it's still profitable to just kind of perpetuate

the narrative that you're still working on stuff right you're still kind of like building things you're still going to kill ethereum whatever right like a lot of these layer 1 platforms do so i think that during a bull market he is right you know and and i think that it's not just the bull market it's also the adoption kind of life cycle that we're in right now where we're having kind of like this a lot a lot of new people kind of flooding in for various different reasons and um when you think about kind of how people enter this ecosystem they enter from zero they have no idea no context about anything they don't know the difference between ethereum and every other smart contract platform they don't know why bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts blah blah blah right they have to learn that on their own but

tent but but during bull markets and during kind of like from romania's people tend to learn later they'll just ate first and learn later right they'll buy the token because it keeps going up and then they'll kind of like if they if they want to dive deeper they will a lot of them unfortunately don't um but they'll kind of like go around and and kind of like learn but that takes a lot longer than just buying a token on an exchange right so that's why you see all these things kind of blow up in value is because misinformed investors are buying these things without having any idea what they are just because they're going up and it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy from there but this is the short to medium term i believe you know long term fundamentals definitely do play a role in how these things are kind

of weighted there are exceptions of course i mean for anyone who's been on twitter over the last hour you'll see me kind of like going at cardano pretty hard because i think cardano is like the quintessential example of something that has so much hype so much marketing so many moon boys as i like to call them and the tech that they have is just like either non-functional or really bad or kind of doesn't work as advertised and it's all just this massive kind of like marketing thing where all these people believe that it's going to be the best thing ever but in reality it's not but because these people don't actually dive deeper and do more research they just listen to what they're told from either charles or some other people within the the community they don't really care they're just buying ada on exchanges so

from that point of view there are definitely exceptions to the long-term thesis of fundamentals ruling over over not and cardero is not the only example there's plenty of examples out there of these things just existing as essentially bets on the the marketing prowess of the company behind these projects at the end of the day um because you you know you'll have noticed that uh the chains that don't have kind of like they centralized marketing kind of um i guess plays like bitcoin and ethereum like the ethereum foundation never really did any kind of like marketing or kind of like uh concerted marketing around ethereum it was like a bottom-up approach with the grassroots community forming and all that sort of stuff and then bitcoin was exactly the same thing right like probably even more grassroots because it started with at the beginning of this ecosystem and then

you have various other projects that do this and that's not to say that marketing isn't like uh sorry is necessarily a bad thing but i i feel like a lot of projects use it just to sugarcoat everything and make it so that that you can kind of like sell it to the ecosystem that you have no shortcomings just so you can kind of like pump up the token price and to be fair it works and it works really really well during bull markets because as i said you have so many new people coming into the ecosystem that just do not have the time to do the research because they're just fomo into things and they'll just buy before they kind of like um try so to speak so i think that's why you see uh uh you know that's why raoul says a chimp could get rich picking random

crypto but then you have to compare it to over the long term like if you buy something now isn't it going to perform is it going to outperform things with fundamentals over the long term like is it going to outperform eth is it going to outperform uh kind of like d5 is it going to outperform kind of like nft stuff you know it kind of like depending what your benchmark is and the perfect example if you want to see some examples of what happened last cycle there was all this hype around ethereum killers in 2017 as well such as like eos and neo and qtem and there's a bunch of others and they're all pumped pretty hard but if you go and look at their um them against eth on like trading view pretty much all of them have been destroyed against eight like they're

down like 90 or something like that something crazy even tron was like hyped is you know as as crazily but over the longer term they fund they lose their value to um two other kind of things with fun with actual fundamentals uh because people don't want to hold these things they're just speculating on it and a lot of the people who who kind of speculate on it well if it stops going up in price a lot of these retail investors are either just going to cut their losses or kind of like sell the bottom and then a lot of the smarter investors move into the things with fundamentals so i do think that they they play out over the longer term but unfortunately there are exceptions to the rule and it really does feel like the better your marketing and i guess the more deceiving your

marketing is the more you can pump up your token and i don't think that's going to change uh you know as i said i'm not really a big big fan of regulations in general i'm not a really big fan of regulatory bodies but really the only way to stop these things is to have regulators go after them and i i don't know if i want to invite regulators into this ecosystem in that kind of way because then they become the king makers of which projects get to kind of like i guess thrive and which projects get labeled as uh you know securities or scams or whatever so it's just like a thing we have to deal with at the end of the day it's super frustrating for me too the fact that i mean and it's not even just like these these projects that kind of like do deceiving

marketing either i mean if you look at something like doge for example like doge is not a scam it was it was kind of like started as a joke um and obviously it attracts a lot of kind of like newbie retail investors uh mainly because of i think the the price of it right the unit price but there's no centralized company pushing any marketing there's nothing like that there may be pockets of different kind of like people kind of saying stupid things about doge or whatever but generally people just buying it for the memes right for the fact that it has like a low unit price and they think it can go to the same price as bitcoin or whatever but from that perspective doge outperformed everything still like it outperformed bitcoin it outperformed ether outperformed everything with fundamentals so really at the end of the

day there are still going to always be exceptions to this and you shouldn't worry about it um it's not something you can control it's something that you're going to have to get lucky to pick i mean those outperformed everything but like there's a reason you didn't buy those right because you didn't believe those had any actual fundamentals so if you think it does have fundamentals now for whatever reason well you buy it now but are you buying it now you know there's always reasons why you aren't aren't buying and depending on how i guess like deep you are into this ecosystem you may not buy things and then they'll go up because you're just too deep and it's kind of like it's funny how that works like the more research you do the more kind of like ape opportunities you may miss out on because you don't you have all that

context around and like you're not just like fresh to this ecosystem following into things anymore so you know maybe you if you want to you can have like a yolo stash as i like to call it like a bunch of money that you have kind of set away that you don't mind losing that you just kind of play the low iq thing where you're just like oh well i'm going to act like one of these new people to the ecosystem who have absolutely no idea what they're doing i'm just gonna throw money at random things and see what sticks maybe you'll make money maybe you won't maybe you'll outperform eighth maybe you won't sort of thing so but but you know when you're doing that you obviously have to write off the money that you're doing that with you can't just do that with your whole stack and

expect and hope for the best and it's not just like buying and sitting on it as well a lot of people kind of like ten don't don't tend to do that especially the newer people they tend to like sell the the panic sell the bottoms and kind of like fermo by the tops so you know even from that perspective i i think just you know you can make money i'm just throwing money at anything during a bull market but it's it yeah it's there's a whole bunch of context around that so hopefully that addresses that point from we're all there um your next kind of thing here you say also what did you think about his claims regarding other layer ones um uh uh i think one and you went on to say one of the arguments i hear a lot about where the entire space is headed is that

some will be the metaphorical googles winner take most and others the metaphorical aols and yahoos eg ones that got big then died and were disrupted do you do you agree with that take and if so how would you apply it raul seems to think that there will be many many winners and this seems to disagree with the idea of a small number of winners take most uh uh thanks okay so i guess like the first part of the question is uh what did you think about these claims regarding layer ones and that for your feeds into the second part so i put out a tweet thread i think well today or yesterday or something where i said um i don't believe that this space is going to be kind of like uh basically have one winner right the smart contract space be one winner obviously it hasn't

been that and it will not be that like ethereum right now is where most of the action happens but there are still other ecosystems out there that have some traction and that is already proving that but i also said that it's going to follow what's called a power law distribution where a handful of these kind of like layer ones or even layer twos are going to have most of the activity 80 of the activity and then the long tail uh are going to have 20 of the activity and i still believe that i i do agree with role that there's going to be many winners of course but it depends how you define winners too because he gave examples saying you know if the total crypto market cap goes to 200 trillion dollars and even the shittiest platform uh was able to kind of like get

one percent of that value well that's two trillion dollar market cap if you think about it right so i'm talking about like the crappiest platform you can think of the one that really has hardly any use and maybe doesn't have smart contracts maybe just is like all hype and whatever if that can still capture one percent that's a two trillion dollar market cap so that's an incredible opportunity because i mean if you look at all of the companies in the world most of the companies aren't even worth two trillion dollars so if you really do think that it's it you know the the whole ecosystem is going to go to a 200 trillion dollar total market cap over the longer term then that's a that's a massive opportunity there but in saying that the opportunity for the winners is even bigger because the 200 trillion

dollars if the the handful of winners can capture 80 of that that is i mean i'm not going to be able to do the math in my head but that's like a hundred plus trillion dollars right it's like 150 160 trillion or something like that and whoever is like the biggest in in that has like tens of trillions of dollars of market cap which means that uh they uh their coins are worth a lot of money right they've made a lot of people money and it's and you you know you've made a massive return on investment if you were to buy it now sort of thing so from that perspective that's why you see so much speculation happening on the different layer ones because people are like well what are they going to be the big winners and a lot of people are saying well you know

obviously if ethereum is the winner right now but is it going to become as you say like the aol or the yahoo of of kind of like this movement and i mean i think there's like next to zero chance of that happening i think that you know barring some kind of i guess like fundamental problem where we figure out that ethereum you know layer twos don't actually work for whatever reason when they do work because they're live um we can't scale and then we just slowly bleed users over time i don't think ethereum is is going anywhere i think ethereum is always going to be the platform with the most usage on it um but there are going to be other layer ones that gain traction for sure for different use cases they're going to take different trade-offs there's going to be ones that i

personally don't like because of those trade-offs but that doesn't matter and i think at the end of the day what really matters is who's using them and and for what so a lot of people are going to use other layer ones for different things a lot of people are going to use a theorem layer too so a lot of people are going to use side chains and stuff like that so from that perspective i do agree with roll there's going to be kind of like many winners but i don't think that there's going to be kind of like an equal distribution here that's just not how these things work and this is not how any technology works really um it's not really how life works there's a reason why um power laws are so common throughout i guess like just life in general like nate even nature it's just

it always kind of like follows that that kind of um thing there i mean even wealth in general follows a power law distribution at the end of the day so i think uh kind of when you look at that as a holistic approach there you can see that this ecosystem will always be multi-chain but it will be like a handful i don't know how many it's going to be it could be 10 it could be 20 different layer ones and layer twos that kind of like gain this 80 of the market share but it's going to be more than ethereum at the end of the day and ethereum is currently worth half a trillion dollars so people are speculating that these other smart contract platforms if they are the the other winners then they could reach half a trillion dollars in market cap too but

you could speculate on the layer twos and other scalability solutions and side chains as well and say okay well what if they go to a half a trillion dollar market cap or more well look at the return i could get from this so that's why you see all this speculation happening right now because the industry is so young there are no clear-cut kind of winners besides i think ethereum and i mean i've given my thoughts on bitcoin before i don't even know if bitcoin's gonna long-term be in that uh that kind of like um be at the top of that power law distribution i don't think it will maybe that's a controversial opinion to have i i do think it's gonna get pushed out by the different layer ones and layer twos because my bullish case for these kind of like things is that the more utility they

have the better that's why i've always been very bullish on ethereum um and some of these other layer ones will definitely uh gain traction over time they already are and and the layer twos will as well i mean arbitrary launch the other day and it's already doing it already has like 60 million dollars of tbl or something like that so really cool to see that as well um and you know side chains and different kind of things like the polygon post chain has got a lot of tbr and it's got a lot of activity happening on it so yeah if anyone kind of like says to you that just their their one favorite train is going to be the one that wins everything that's that's not true at all and it's already not true it hasn't been true since the first uh as i like to call it economically relevant

fork of bitcoin or called litecoin uh the cha this is the ecosystem will always be multi-chain there is no universe where it's just going to be a monoculture because that's just not how humans work at the end of the day right um so hopefully that kind of gives my kind of answer to that for you matthew and context around all of that so a few questions here from max invests now here question one a thousand social tokens going to play a large role in the future i'm worried a lot of them could end up being money grabs but i don't know so i mean i think a lot of anything in this ecosystem is going to end up being just a money grab at the end of the day because it's so easy to kind of create something or just create a token pump it up with some deceitful marketing

and kind of like make some money right we've seen plenty of this happen over the years this is not something new but i do think that dows and social tokens are going to play an absolutely massive role in the future and they already are playing a massive role i actually think that social tokens as a category can be just collapsed down to dows because at the end of the day a lot of these things are just dows with a token attached to them like the social tokens so i don't even think we have to separate them so i i just call them dows and i think dows are going to be absolutely massive i mean a lot of them are already really big but the thing is is that or the funny thing is about dows is that not all of them are created equal there are

some really shitty dows out there that have no direction no leadership they essentially are stuck in limbo they don't know what they're doing uh and you know there's very clear examples of this throughout the ecosystem i think you know recently unit swap has been a clear example here of a dow that doesn't seem to be running as well as it could be i think a couple of the other kind of like big default apps as well i think maker dao is actually really really well run i think there are a bunch of smaller ones as well that are doing really great work i mean i always reference index cop as one of the best dowels um that i've seen in this ecosystem so they're obviously not all going to be created equal and a lot of them are going to end up failing but i do think they're going to

play an absolutely massive role in this ecosystem going forward and the social token aspect to it um is just like a different type of dao where you can have a social token like friends with benefits which i think is the most well-known one which is basically like an a globally kind of distributed decentralized social club which i think i'm you know i'm personally pretty bullish on those sorts of things i hold some fwb tokens and things like that and then um you know there's other there's plenty of others out there i mean there's there's curation dows as well that kind of like a pleaser dao for example that kind of like buys up art and then fractionalizes them and puts it into their treasury and does stuff with it so definitely dao's are going to you know pretty much change everything about how we coordinate as humans but

just like real life where there's a lot of shitty human coordination that goes on it's going to be the same thing with with daos and but the ones that do succeed are going to go on to be really really big i believe so a second question uh can you explain rough consensus and how eath upgrades uh so max if you just go back to the first question from uh dungeon.i answered that there so i won't rehash it here i just went through the whole governance process at the start of the ama uh you can find that in the timestamps if you're listening to the recording all right so our third question have you seen the nft creativity on other chains like solana punks and cardano punks wow i think it's really creative and revolutionary idea amazed that those chains could come up with it to be

honest so yes there is a lot of cloning going on on these other chains of ethereum stuff because as i said it's very easy to just clone something or kind of like launch something and do some kind of like marketing around and get some hype and make some money it's just it's super easy to do that it's much harder to build something that actually has longer lasting value and that is a legitimate project so kind of i think there are kind of going to be uh nfts launching on other blockchains that are going to be unique and things like that but i still believe ethereum is going to be at the centerpiece of the entire crypto cultural movement and it's going to be like that for quite a while i know the high gas fees definitely price people out of nfts and stuff like that but

we're going to scale them via layer 2 and i think that generally ethereum just has such a stupidly strong network effect that even with the high fees people are willing to pay that to either buy these nfts to speculate on or to buy them because they really want to hold these nft from their favorite kind of artist or or kind of um or whoever so from that point of view i think a lot of that's going to stay in ethereum but there are going to be unique projects that spin up on other chains and i actually hope that there are because i really am sick of seeing these clones because they are so clearly just cash grabs they are not anything innovative they're not anything kind of like creative they're just there to extract money from people and i'm really just like generally um uh that's one of

the things i hate about this ecosystem is how much value extraction there is uh between kind of like newer investors who maybe don't understand what's going on and these kind of like grifters or i guess borderline scammers that are just cloning projects riding the hype to riches and kind of like being rewarded for it i mean it's hilarious to me i ranted about this in the refuel yesterday about how many of these people get away with this but the sec prioritizes going after defy apps uh like legitimate default apps like uni swap instead of going after the actual scammers it's just it's bizarre right um but yeah so hopefully that answers your questions there max thanks for those uh we got one here from ghostess ave who says hey anthony what kind of advice would you give a newcomer to the space especially one who isn't interested in

game theory or mechanic mechanism design or crypto economics would you advise them to leave that to the devs and just use ethereum and have fun like the rest of us so i mean everyone's going to be different here it depends what you want to do you can just have fun within ethereum and not have to dive deep into any of this sort of stuff you can kind of like throw money into tokens if you want you can buy nfts you can go ship posting discords you can do whatever you want right but if you want to add value and you're not interested in kind of like game theory mechanism design and crypto economics you can still add value in your own way you can i mean there's plenty of roles in teams for doing like marketing business development stuff that doesn't even touch any of the things that you kind of

like aren't interested in here um or you can just go into discords and add value here and they'll write blog posts or kind of um write tweet threads i mean there's so many different things you can do you don't have to focus on any one area you can just do what you want really um but it depends like do you want to turn it into a career do you want to get paid for it well then you might have to kind of like produce formal kind of stuff where you submit it um if it's a dial you submit it to the down and they pay you out for that or formally join a crypto based company and kind of um do the work for them and stuff like that but yeah i mean you can if you if you're happy with just sitting back and just

enjoying and riding the kind of like crypto wave then there's nothing wrong with that either um you can just have fun aping into random nfts and tokens or whatever and as long as you realize the risk with that i don't i don't think there's anything wrong with that i think that's the lifeblood of this ecosystem at the end of the day because um without the users i mean the developers aren't building for anyone really i mean i know that's an obvious thing to say but i think it's something that's definitely important to reiterate i'm just going to take a quick break here i'll be back in two seconds all right on to the next question from uh wilhelm towel who says well i would like to hear your thoughts about eth as

a unit of account and medium of exchange i feel like both you and i have underestimated the ability of aether to fulfill this role i'm not saying that i expect eath to replace the role of the dollar but i feel like the nft market has proved that eth can possess these qualities to a greater extent than we initially thought possible so hmm it's funny because i've been thinking a lot about this recently and i think that the major reason why the nft economy has persistedly being priced in eth is twofold one it's easier for people because they need to pay for gas fees so it's easier for them just to have one token where they can pay for the gas fees and buy the nft but two the nft market 99 of it is like pure speculation so if you're speculating you don't

really care if you're using ether or stablecoin at the end of the day right and the fact that like everything is just already priced in eighth has a network effect to it so you're just gonna buy it with eth so if you can kind of like return and because everything's priced in eighth you're obviously measuring that return in each so if you can make more eath uh by speculating on these nfts net of gas fees of course then you're doing well for yourself right um but i don't think that eth as a currency or as a ua a unit of account or medium exchange can work too well for non-speculative things because it's too volatile long term you know we we expect it to be very very deflationary uh once the merge happens and we expect the the east price to go much higher than where it is today

so from that point of view i just don't think it works uh for things that are non-speculative in nature for example if you want to price like groceries in eighth i mean one week your groceries can cost you double what it costs another week if the eighth price was to kind of like uh what was the kind of like increase in the price of those assets they're the same you'd have to constantly be kind of like changing the prices of prices of groceries to kind of match the eth price and it wouldn't really work right so i think from that perspective you just kind of like have to split it out into speculative and not speculative use cases and i think that is a major reason why ether has remained the unit of account and medium exchange of choice for nfts for now um but i

think gas phase is another one now in saying that could there be like an nft marketplace on layer 2 that says hey we're going to do stable coins now they're also going to do ether we're going to do stable coins and you can pay the the fees of the network in stable coins as well would people just prefer to use that instead of eith maybe they would maybe the network effect is really the only thing kind of like holding people to this and if you start up a new network effect on a layer 2 from scratch maybe you'll see that that people's behavior changes from there uh but yeah i'm not actually i have a definitive answer to this i don't know what's gonna happen in the future but i do feel pretty strongly that i don't think eth can fulfill the role as a unit of

account and medium of exchange uh for like most things over the long term just because of the fact that it's way too volatile it's deflationary i think that we're going to be able to create things backed by ether stable i mean there's obviously uh stable coin projects like rye um or or kind of like a fae and things like that that are trying to do this but that's still a long ways out before they kind of like get adoption and things like that uh but maybe i'm completely wrong here maybe eth does become the ua the unit of accountability of exchange of everything crypto uh into the future and everyone's fine with the volatility maybe that happens but i don't know i don't think that can i don't think that can work if people are kind of doing stuff that's non-speculative because when it's speculative you kind of already kind of

resign to the fact that okay well you know this eighth is going to go up or down in value but if i trade for something else and then i outperform eighth with that i'm able to stack more eighth well then that's fine you know you buy an nft for one eighth it you get two eighth back but say the eighth price kind of like halved since then well maybe you don't care as much because you were just trying to stack more even in the in the first place because you're long-term bullish on eighth going up uh but when you change that to say well you know you put a thousand dollars into into an nft and you're measuring it against kind of like eth but then each doubles well you can only buy half of the eighth that you were able to kind of like buy uh before if the nft price

doesn't go up to match eight or if it goes up slower so it's you know it gets a little bit funny when you start pricing things in all different types of assets so i think that's another reason why so we're gonna have to see how that evolves over time i hope i'm i'm wrong because i would love to see eth actually be used as a as a unit of account and medium of exchange for everything within the ecosystem and for people to kind of get used to just pricing things in eth but i really don't believe that's going to be true for non-speculative things just for the reasons i've outlined all right a question here from dom who says as the layer two ecosystem matures do you predict people projects tokens dapps and dapps will gravitate towards a specific layer too and ditch the others

or will things like arbitrary optimism coexist peacefully so i think they're all going to co-exist peacefully as i said this goes back to the power law that i was talking about before i think that the layer twos can exist in a parallel distribution as well where there'll be like a handful of winners and then there'll be like a long tale of of kind of like a layer two platforms that don't have much activity on them but it's still kind of considered winners right they've still kind of got some activity on them um but it's funny because like then you can talk about the underlying technology of these sorts of things some people are kind of uh say that optimistic roll-ups are old technology already and that long-term zk roll-ups are going to eat everything and i actually do agree that long-term zk roll-ups are going to eat

the world and i'm talking like in three four five years sort of thing i don't think the technology is ready yet for zk roll ups to do everything we want them to do in theory they're an amazing technology um just zero knowledge in general like starks and snarks are absolutely amazing technology but the uh provide the um the infrastructure and the kind of like computation uh computational speed you need to kind of process these sorts of things just isn't there yet but they probably will be there in the next kind of like three or so years so the way i view these sorts of things is that if optimistic roll-ups are indeed not the long-term best solution they are still a solution that's ready now and they're one that people can kind of like use now and we can keep people uh on these layouts within the ethereum

ecosystem instead of bleeding users to other chains we can give them low fee experiences and then if the zika rollups do end up fulfilling the promise and kind of like eating the world then we can just kind of change these optimistic rollout platforms to a zika roll-up for example there's no reason why that cannot happen i'm simplifying it of course it's not going to be a super easy process or anything like that but there's no reason why they can't be changed a technology evolves over time if you just stay in place and don't do anything you end up like bitcoin and you just stagnate and then you end up getting flipped by eth right but essentially um i'm just really bullish on kind of like the the layer twos that i generalized of course i think the the that specific ones uh are cool and i think they're actually gonna

work but i don't think that it's gonna work for most projects i don't think you know there's a lot of projects that require that composability right you know yearn for example probably couldn't exist or it's on its own app specific layer two because it needs access to uh the rest of the ecosystem it needs access to curve uh you know a curve needs access uh sorry curve only really works if it's got like a busting ecosystem built up around it because people are going to have to trade stable coins in and out between different exchanges so it needs you know people to have like um stable coins maybe on uni swap and on sushi or whatever so there are a lot of apps that require this composability and to be close to other apps but then there are ones like dydx for example who are on their own layer

two that's built by starkware um that will be able to communicate to other layer twos don't get me wrong it's not like they're siloed and they can't talk to them at all but they don't require the compressibility with other apps because they're just like a perpetual exchange that it's pretty much all synthetic you deposit usdc um you trade different assets and whatever and you can trade them from your own wallet in a decentralized way and secured by ethereum of course and and from that perspective you you don't have to talk to any of these kind of like other apps and stuff like that so there are definitely going to be a world where our specific layer twos exist and and grow and thrive i mean dex i think right now is the biggest layer 2 app like and it's just a single app um but these

generalized platforms are going to be the ones that i'm kind of like most excited and most bullish on long term as a whole and the ones that i think are going to get the most activity on over the over the long term now there's four i think main ones uh oh no sorry i guess that you could call it five um i forgot about stark where's starking it there for a sec um there's optimism uh with the optimistic ethereum there's arbitrary with arbitrary one and other arbitrary instances of course there is zk sync 2.0 they're calling it there is stark net which is essentially uh bringing all of star wars technology together for these generalized kind of like um our platform and then there's uh polygons uh plans as well with hermes and kind of like other zk roll up stuff that they want to do so there's definitely going

to be i think like these five as like the center the center point but there are going to be other ones coming too and who knows maybe those other ones just blow the one house out of the out of the water and kind of like take over from there but i think those are like the five front runners right now and it's kind of an open question of which one will dominate the most obviously polygon has had a lot of success with their pos chain but that's not like a true layer two but uh it's gonna be interesting to see what they do with hermes and like these one billion dollars have put towards zk roll ups but starcraft's had a lot of success with their app specific deployments so far i mean it's not just um dydx it's immutable it's uh it's diversify it's a

few others um and then optimism and arbitrary way earlier i mean arbitrary has only been live for a few days optimism is slowly onboarding more and more apps but they're they're they've got they've got tvl in there they've got volumes they've got users um and they're kind of like fulfilling their promise of lowering the fees so it's kind of yeah it's totally up in the air about which one is gonna be the long-term winner of these layer twos but i think those five probably will be the winners for like a long time they'll they'll have like the lion's share of the the kind of like market share there so hopefully that answers your question there dom all right so six questions here from patrick um so first one let's imagine you provide unlimited spend usdc to a smart contract can the smart contract

drain all of the usdc out of your wallet without the need for your confirmation yes it can this is why you should always review which contracts you have approved tokens to especially the ones that you randomly ape into because if that contract has a function that allows it to be called by an admin to withdraw the funds out of it um the ones that you've approved if you've done an unlimited approve then yes you'll you they can kind of like withdraw your funds and this has happened before um in a few contracts out there so definitely any contracts that you don't trust or are not part of reputable projects and you just used one time because you're aping into some random defrag project go check them etherscan has a tool for this there's a bunch of other tools out there um which allow you to just revoke the

permissions and this is why a lot of apps actually offer you the opportunity to not do an unlimited approve and only approve the amount that you're using for a trade or for like a deposit or whatever to protect you from this the downside being you have to um kind of approve the token every single time that you go to do this and that's an extra gas fee for you every single time you do something like that but i think you know just approving things for something like uni swap as an unlimited approve is fine because unisop's obviously um trusted and decentralized and they're not trying to rug anyone um but if you want to be extra careful you can just do single approves for everything if you want at the end of the day so yeah definitely you want to uh be careful of this especially with the

untrusted newer contracts out there and it's not just if that if the contract has this function that already built into it um it can be added if there's an admin um if they're centralized if it's an upgradable contract they can add in this function and then drain all of your funds at least that's how i understand it so definitely want to review that um and i think your second question was a follow on from your first one where you kind of gave an example where you said let's imagine you approve 100 usdc spend and you spend 98 usdc what's the amount of usd that the smart contract can spend um two uh explanation 100 minus 98 100 as often as it wants so basically limited or something else it's a good question actually i don't know the definitive answer to this but i would assume that it would only be able

to spend the remaining two there if you've already spent 98. i don't think it kind of like resets every time sort of thing but um i would have to check that if someone wants to kind of like uh give some clarity in the ama series channel on that one maybe someone uh there's a smart contract developer listening in right now but i would assume that it could only kind of like take the two and you would have to reapprove another 100 but i'm not totally sure on that so your third question you often say all protocols will have a token that leads me to question how do you play the launch of arbitrary in order to position yourself for the case that they launch a token i mean just the same thing you would play every app uh you just use it right or like every kind of like

every app or every layer to everything just use it in any kind of like way shape or form but also maybe get involved on the arbitrary discord for example uh maybe they're gonna give out rewards to early supporters people who provide um you know work not work but people who kind of put together different kind of things that provide value like educational materials you know be an early supporter of arbitrary early promoter of it make videos uh write blog posts whatever um maybe they'll support people for that uh but yeah just generally you want to use all of the apps all the different kind of apps and you want to use and you want to use them maybe heavily because you don't know because obviously the union top airdrop only the uni airdrop i should say only required you to interact with their smart contracts once and you could even

interact with it and have a failed transaction and still get uni but since then airdrops have changed as i mentioned before dydx requires you to use the platform knowing that you have tokens coming um that was kind of like gifted to you for retroactive kind of usage so i would imagine maybe arbitrarium does that or something like that where it's like yeah you've used the platform but you need to use it some more to unlock your tokens but i've got no idea i don't even know if app is going to have a have a token or not or anything like that i don't have any special knowledge there um so but like yeah i mean my number one rule is that all these kind of things will have a token eventually so you definitely want to position yourself the best way you can in case they do a

community distribution which i think actually if if things don't do a community distribution these days they will get a lot of flack for doing that and it's a really really bad um marketing pr move so they're all going to do it if they do have a token which i believe most of them will um and there's no deadly gray token for people who are going to inevitably answer that again there's not going to be a delegate token um i i do say that everything's going to have a token eventually but that's one thing that worried there are exceptions to the rules guys um but yeah that's kind of like how you can position yourself best for something like an arbitrary token all right so your fourth question let's imagine someone asks you hey sasha i would like to build up my brand my goal is to get into a position like you being

a well-known figure in the ethereum ecosystem getting access to early stage investment deals and to people that would otherwise be super hard to connect with what would you advise them to do build a time machine and go back to 2018 and do exactly what i did for years without any recognition no no that's a joke that's a joke um but there's a bit of truth to it so it may seem like sometimes when you see people that have like a big following that it kind of happened overnight but from my point my perspective it definitely didn't it was a long a very long journey and a very hard journey through a very brutal bear market to get to where i am today so just to give a little bit of a story i guess of how i got to where i am today and the path that you can also follow

but i think it's a lot harder to do this these days but what ended up happening was that i got into a theorem in early 2017 i bought my first each you know i kind of learned all about it rode the wave up uh i was very quiet i i didn't even post much on reddit i hardly posted on twitter i probably had like hardly any followers on twitter or whatever like that i was unknown within the ecosystem i had no friends within ethereum nothing i knew no one no one knew me i'd never been to a conference absolutely nothing i was starting from legitimate zero um and then i wrote the wave up obviously of the bull market but then the bear market hit early 2018 and i was like okay what am i going to do i'm going to stick around because i

actually and i had been into bitcoin in 2013 rode that wave up and decided oh well um you know it's come after mount gox happened it crashed and i was like oh well bitcoin's dead i'm going to leave this ecosystem who cares about crypto anymore which is the dumbest mistake of my life but i did that and didn't discover ethereum until early 2017. so this time around in 2018 i was like okay well last time i left the ecosystem was really bad um let's stick around this time and do stuff so i stuck around i held on to my my eighth and everything like that uh and i started a newsletter called the block by block newsletter and i created a website called block by block.io which is still live that has a bunch of collec uh resources um uh uh about re like kind

of different research and and development resources uh for for crypto generally mostly focused on ethereum and some of the stuff there most of the stars probably outdated at this point because i haven't updated it in a long time but that's there um and you know i built that website on my own it's not anything flashy but like i built i kind of like built that out and then had my newsletter going and i started using twitter a bit more from here i started posting stuff that i thought you know maybe could get me some attention about ethereum and kind of posting interesting things about ethereum to get people's attention and it worked i got a couple of people's attention from there uh so i got uh there's i remember two people specifically who had already had big followings within the ecosystem that paid attention to me and were pretty

pivotal i guess in in not i wouldn't say that that they were critical and they were the only reasons why i was able to grow but like they were definitely the first ones to notice me and and kind of like inform how i would go about continuing on with this ecosystem um so they were linda shea from scalar capital she's been around for a very long time you probably know who she is and ari paul um he runs block tower capital i believe and the way they noticed me is through my newsletter linda was a very very early subscriber to my newsletter um one of the i think first 100 and um the newsletter at the time only had a couple hundred subscribers for a long time uh and you know she gave shout outs to my newsletter she really kind of like um helped me along there and so did ahri

and i think they retweeted a few of my my twitter my educational twitter threads and stuff like that and i started getting more followers because of that so i kept doing that through 2018 i kept building my connections up i kept meeting new people i kept talking to people within the ethereum ecosystem and i tried really really hard to make my presence known and it was a lot easier because there wasn't much people around in 2018. if you do that these days it's harder you have to try you have to try harder because there's a lot of noise um and you have and there's there's kind of a lot of relationships already built out so to kind of like i guess push yourself into being like i guess my position it just takes uh i mean it's a lot harder to do but it's also

going to take a long time to do so as well um so yeah i mean through 2018 that's what i did and then as i got to know more people within the ecosystem i got to talking with someone called eric connor who's my co-founder of ethub who a lot of you probably know um and we started ether in technically late 2018 where we started building it out we started the podcast and i changed the block by block newsletter to the ether weekly newsletter which i still publish every week uh to this day and from there it really snowballed because there was no ethereum media media back then there was no bank list there was no defined there was nothing ether was it right i think there were like a couple other crypto kind of like media outlets like epicenter and stuff like that but it wasn't ethereum focused whereas we

were ethereum focused and from there we kept building up our our names over time we were very active on twitter we kept doing educational stuff um we got very involved with the ecosystem we went to conferences we we started working in crypto eric got a job at gnosis i got a job at set in mid 2019 and we just kept building ourselves up from there uh and you know i'm just kind of like speed running through all this now but come 2020 when the bull market kind of like really returned when eth went back to all-time high and everything like that when a flood of new people came into the ecosystem our years of work from uh like our two our kind of like two years of hard work during the bear market to i guess grow our brand grow our connections become the most

well-known people within the ethereum ecosystem and the reason why we're referencing us is wheeze because eric and i basically grew together and not just us a lot of other ethereum people that you may know of like uh david hoffman ryan shawn adams dc investor all these people that you know we all grew together and we all leveraged each other for that growth as well we all helped each other out we retweeted each other we kind of like made sure that people saw other content that each of us were putting out and we really supported each other through the bear so that in the bull market we got the spoils essentially right so at the end of kind of like uh uh in the end of 2020 so really it was i guess like pretty much three years that we had been doing it uh by the end of 2020 we were perfectly

positioned to ride the bull market up and write all that new attention up and get kind of like all these new kind of people um yeah listening uh sorry following us and listening to us and having act and then we know we get access to all these kind of early stage investment deals because we're very well known we're basically what people like to call thought leaders and all that good stuff there um and it's funny because like in mid 2020 i started the delegate newsletter and then late 2020 i started the the youtube channel and that was me basically wanting to do more for the ecosystem because i was like okay well you know i'm doing ether that's well and good but now there's other media outlets out there so ethub um it you know used to be more critical than it is today because

uh we eric and i started ether because there was nothing we were and because the even the ethereum.org website was like pretty bad it's really good now but it was really bad back then and we filled that hole for a while but then all these other kind of outlets came in and ether was just a passion project for eric and i it was not a full-time thing so we were still doing we're still doing the podcast we still do the newsletter but then for me i was just kind of like well i want to do a bit more stuff here but i want to do it kind of like under my own brand which is the daily gray and that's why i started doing the newsletter as well to kind of like keep people educated on ethereum and then doing the youtube channel to keep

people updated but also to keep my br like keep myself relevant within the ecosystem because my number one greatest fear is that all the work that i've put in over the years would be for nothing because i just become irrelevant over time which i would if i stopped doing stuff right if i just kind of like went off twitter if i stopped doing these ama stopped doing the daily way stuff in general i would be forgotten about eventually um if it was took long enough and i don't want that to happen because i worked so hard to get here so from that point of view um yeah that's why i do that's a major reason why i do all i do because i really want to kind of like keep that position that i've worked myself up to because that was a goal like my goal in 2018 early 2018 was that

i want to work my ass off i want to get to a position where i'm one of the most well-known people in the ethereum community and i want to stay there so that's kind of like where i am today um so i hope that kind of like answers that question for you patrick that that's the journey i took to get there and there is no shortcut here there is really no quick way to do this you need to put in the hard yards you need to kind of put in months years of work to get to this position and as i said it's harder now because there's a lot more people in the ecosystem now fighting to do this like back then it was just a few of us now it's a lot more it's like probably hundreds if not thousands of people trying to do this

probably more than that whereas back then i would say there was probably less than 100 people trying to do what what um myself eric and a bunch of the other people that i mentioned were doing um in terms of like the ethereum ecosystem so it's not to say that it's impossible but just be prepared if you want to get to this position you need to put in the work for it and and nothing comes easy there's no such thing as an overnight success it definitely ha you know it and it's funny because sometimes people point to um internet celebrities and say oh well you know this celebrity got uh got kind of like um a famous overnight because their meme went viral or something i think that's true to an extent and those are exceptions to the rule i mean there's always exceptions to the rule

but the rule really is that you can work your ass off for 10 years and get nowhere and then one day you know you can just something can just happen and you can take off as well right you can just go viral or something and you can get like in a in a good position or kind of like um level up sort of thing but for me i don't think personally that happened for me i think what ended up happening was just that i put myself in the position to to kind of like be i guess like one of the most well-known people in the ethereum community and i kept producing work throughout like i mean i haven't stopped i never i never missed the newsletter day i'd never i've never missed a refuel um and you know by doing that i've been able to kind of

like get to where i am and stay where i am but uh it definitely becomes harder to fight through the noise there's a lot more kind of like people around there's a lot more people doing a lot a lot of different things which is good but um yeah to get to my kind of like position um it's gonna take like hard work at the end of the day and yeah it's it you know it's funny it feels a lot longer than it does because this was done during the brutal bear market as well where there the theorem community was so small i don't think people that probably joined in 2020 or even 2021 realize just how small the ethereum community was in 2018 and 2019 um there was only a bunch of kind of like um i guess like hardcore builders maybe i wouldn't even say there was a thousand

not even close to a thousand like kind of like hardcore builders or anything like that um but the the builders that were around were building these revolutionary products and really believed in the mission uh and then in terms of community members there wasn't that many at all maybe a few thousand in terms of active community members and then from there uh you know it obviously has exploded now like absolutely exploded beyond my even my wildest dreams from back then um and kind of like uh i've just ridden that wave up it's it seeps and i i didn't even expect it to get this big but you know i would say that i'm pretty proud of of what i've been able to do here but uh at the end of the day it takes hard work it takes a long time um and sometimes you got to be a bit lucky as

well like luck being that someone finds you just like linda and ari kind of found me in early 2018 and started me on my journey by kind of like shouting me out and retweeting things and getting me some initial followers you kind of like sometimes need that and i'm always happy to help people um if you have like something that you do i'm always happy to retweet it and things like that and shout out good work that people do um i definitely want to give back after everything that i've kind of like been through but generally yeah uh just from that kind of like perspective i think uh everything that i've just said that's kind of like what you have to do unfortunate unfortunately unfortunately there's just there's just no quick path here um so hopefully that answers that i'm rambling a little bit now um so you

have another question here so you are where a gamer what do you think about the play to earn model do you think that games like x infinity can survive a bear market how would you go about investing in the play to earn niche if you want to optimize for invest into things that will most likely survive a bear market i don't know because play to earn has never gone through a bear market um i would i would think that a lot of it is pretty much speculative so i would i would assume that it would kind of like collapse during a bear market because a lot of the speculative activity goes away um i do find it very interesting the actual model itself i do think that it can work if done correctly because you're kind of like writing this fine line of speculation and gameplay like are people only

playing the game because they're getting paid to do it well i mean that's true right for a lot of people they're just playing it because they're paid to do it technically um they're being paid by the rewards that they earn or are they playing it because they enjoy it so you have to kind of strike this balance of an enjoyable game that people can play to earn money and it's it's kind of like a balanced thing but in saying that it can it be ever be balanced like is it always going to be the the the kind of like one side biased um to another like is the fact that people can make money from it just gonna end up in everyone using bots and kind of like optimizing the best strategy that they have to to maximize the amount of profits that they make

maybe i mean who knows like i don't know what the long term kind of like model looks like for play to earn i don't know if it's going to be a massive success or a massive failure over the long term i do think that it's it's just interesting and i do think that during bear markets it'll be hit just like pretty much everything else because at the moment at least it's it's mostly speculative and obviously drink bear market speculation speculative stuff tends to collapse all right so your last question who would you ask listen to if you would like to learn more about how to invest into the play to earn model for the long term um i mean i i'm not that close to kind of like this ecosystem but i would say that you'd probably want to look at who's most active within the axi infinity space and

talk to them if you can because they would probably have a lot more context around this sort of stuff than i do um maybe you wouldn't be able to kind of get in contact with the uh the founders of axiomfinity or like the core team members or whatever maybe you will about this sort of stuff maybe that maybe they won't even tell you but if you kind of like i guess um kind of like want to learn or kind of want to ask those questions i would say yeah maybe just jump into the actual infinity disc discord or some of the other ones out there kind of ask the open question there um uh but yeah so hopefully that those answers your your questions patrick there's six there so thanks for those i'm gonna take a quick break here just give me two seconds guys

all right on to the next question from conn322 who says do you know of any doubt or platform for launching an nft collection which allows for random selection so rather than a user viewing a collection and buying their favorites it's a lucky dip type system so the nfts will be minted randomly and then can be traded on places like openc as normal i'd like an example uh i'd link to an example but i don't want to be a shill that's okay you could link to an example that's that's fine but um i mean i don't know specifically i haven't really followed this too closely uh but this is definitely possible i think when you're when you're talking about randomness you have to have a source of randomness that can't be biased right you have to have something that people can't just like run a bot and be able to kind of decode

this and essentially uh kill the randomization i know that chain link has vrf which is verifiable uh oh sorry or vdf maybe verified verifiable delay functions i think they call it vrf um or something that does randomization i can't remember the exact name here so maybe they have been teamed up with a platform that allows for this to happen but i'm not sure of which maybe you can ask in the nft's channel in the discord and someone will know the answer to that uh but sorry i'm not sure of any specific platforms because i just haven't looked into it or done it myself yet all right a question here from yon theforn who says is it possible to see in the open ui or some other ui someone else's nft collection by simply entering their wallet address yes it is you can just type openc dot io forward slash the

ethereum address and it should show you their collection i've done it many times and it's worked um some of the accounts have usernames attached to them as well so if you kind of like search by username or kind of like enter the username in the url url you'll be able to kind of um go and see their collection there as well all right next question from you on the thorn who says it's clear to me that eath price is going to in the next few years rise to a level such that 99 of people will not be able to afford purchasing even one eth what are the implications of this when it comes to the pricing of goods in this ecosystem in order for everyone to participate prices dominated in eighth will have to look something like point six zeros one eth which is difficult for a person to

reason about do you think we'll eventually redenominate ethan a new unit that makes it easier to trans transact with so i don't know if we're ever actually gonna read and nominate ether the base layer where we do like uh i guess for lack of a better word like a stock split or i mean a token split or something where essentially um kind of like a change goes into the protocol which says okay well if you own one eighth um now you own like 10 000 each but it's the same value right you don't actually own more tokens we've just inflated the token supply um and it's i guess like a reverse stock split i should say sorry uh where we're essentially kind of oh no sorry no no it's a stock split not a reverse stock split what am i thinking um where essentially you would have like

uh one eighth you know it's worth four thousand dollars and then ten thousand eighth would be worth uh four five four forty cents or something like that if i'm doing my math correctly there um and then you know obviously it'd be easier to kind of like reason about that and easier to kind of dominate than that but i don't think that's something that's gonna happen on the protocol level at all to be honest it's much harder to get changes into the protocol and something like this would be a very very hot topic it will probably not be something that everyone agreed upon on what to do i just don't think it's going to happen but in saying that i think that the different kind of like wallet user interfaces or different interfaces in general can probably agree on a standard for redenomination here right where

essentially the different interfaces can say okay well we're going to display eth in um in kind of like its lowest unit uh or like gray or something like that or we're gonna display eth as if it was like as if it did a ten thousand stock split uh sorry ten thousand x kind of like stock split there um and stuff like that but that's again a coordination problem that might may or may not happen so i don't know if this is like a long-term issue for the ecosystem i think that being able to kind of divide eighth into kind of 18 decimal places right now is really obviously really positive but generally i would like to see maybe the uis kind of like have an issue have a kind of fix for this but it requires coordination between them and i haven't really seen that happen yet maybe it will in the

future uh so yeah hopefully that answers that question your next one in regards to spotting nft trends earlier you mentioned on bankless one trick is to pay attention to gas spikes which are indicative of an early aping session into an nft drop my question is what gray alert level would you recommend setting for average such that if the grade price rises above that you check on ultrasound money to see what was causing it um so it depends because the average grade price has been 100 lately when they're like in terms of like just uh average over the week it could go to 200 who knows but usually what i look at is if the gas is going is over 200 and it usually happens instantly then i know that an nft drop is going on uh because uh it's not that's not the average right

even if it spikes to like 150 i still kind of get a little bit sussed about it where i'm just like okay well is there an nft drop going on so i would definitely set an alert for anything over 200 but then i'd adjust that alert if um if the gas price ends up going to 200 grey as like an average which obviously a lot of us don't want to happen because that would mean the gas prices are very very expensive even more expensive than they are now but it could happen right um so i would say 200 way and then you know you just kind of like adjust it from there based on on the average and there's um there's a bunch of tools and dashboards that will show you the average and stuff like that but generally what i do is i just have my um

gas price extensions like the block native one and if i see that go to 200 like it's not like i'm looking at it it's not like i have alerts set up for it but if i see it go to 200 or maybe i see someone on twitter commenting about the gas prices i'll know that uh there's an nft drop going on so i'll go to ultrasound.money i'll go to the one hour gas burner kind of um table and i'll see the contract that's burning it i'll put that uh i'll kind of go to that on etherscan i'll put the the name of that contract into twitter see who's tweeting about it see the official account on there and sometimes into google as well and then go check out the nft this process can be done in less than a minute by the way um and you

know then i may or may not ape but generally i mean it's kind of like super risky super speculative uh there's a lot of other ways to kind of like get in early on nft trends you can just uh be you know follow projects um and kind of like follow them early on before they actually have their mint so you know when it's going to go live that's probably the better way to do it but again it's harder to do that there are some services that do this for you i think there's like an nft drops website that reminds me of ico drops but um yeah that's kind of like my strategy there all right your last ques oh third question i should say occasionally you and bankless both reference the eip1559 wallet provider adoption chart which i think is is now at around 50 i'm

confused because my understanding was that any transaction going through the network necessarily goes to the new eip1559 system i all transactions are backwards compatible given that this is this is the case what does it mean when we say 50 of wallet providers haven't adopted one five five nine so there are two transaction types on ethereum now there are the legacy transactions or type zero and then there are one five five nine transactions which are type two so you're correct in saying that all transactions are now going through the eip1559 system like not the system like the mechanism i should say that was put in place but the major difference between or at least i think i think the only difference between the legacy transactions and the five nine transactions is that you don't get a refund if you overspend if you do a

legacy transaction because you know with one five five nine style transactions you can set the max fee in type zero transactions or legacy ones you don't do that and then if you just like overpay because you you've paid more than you needed to you don't actually get a refund on that and that's just gone like it's just become a fee that you paid whereas with one five five nine star transactions you do get that refund and that's what we're referring to on the adoption side the types of transactions so type 0 going down type 2 going up is what we want to see but type 0 transactions still have to follow the same mechanisms put in place they just don't get the refund so hopefully that answers your question there all right so your fourth question could you please explain to me what it means

for a set of colluding nodes on a proof of work blockchain to attack the network my understanding of private public cryptography is that there is no way you could forge a transaction unless you had a user's private key so if we talk about network attacks and we're not talking about competing blocks with four transactions then we're just talking about competing blocks with different transaction orderings so there's a bunch of different things you can do if you were able to get 51 of the the network right you can essentially so this is this is funny because if you how do i put this blockchains are funny because if you were to be able to get 50 of the network hash rate and you were kind of like this this entity that was um that was in control of that you essentially or technically or i guess

like objectively from the view of the chain are the longest chain so you are bitcoin for example right and if you keep continuing on like that um and no one else kind of like forks off of the chain and you out of it well then you're kind of like still bitcoin and now the reason why under bitcoin the reason why you can't actually fork out an attacker is because well you technically can but it's it's a lot harder too is because what ends up happening is that say you have one attacker that has 51 or not an attacker just say you have one entity that has 51 of them the hash power and they're kind of like just going along on the network and everyone comes together and says well this is a risk we should get rid of this guy we should fork bitcoin and just get rid of this

guy's hashing pass rate and continue on as normal well how do you do that right you can't do that because to do that you have to change the hashing algorithm of bitcoin but if you did that you brick all of the other miners as well because the other miners uh the other asic miners on bitcoin are set only to mine that that hashing algorithm and this is what vitalik likes to call a spawn camp attack because if you fork off then you're not really off because then the attacker will just kind of go off the other chain and go to this new chain and just do the same thing on this new chain and then you know add infinitum right keep doing it um so uh that that's kind of like why you can't get rid of this attacker so um given that context if someone wants to

get 51 what can they do well they can basically override old blocks if they wanted to they could go back and kind of like redo the the um the kind of like proof of work there and kind of like override what happens in those blocks from my understanding um they can as you said like do different kind of transaction orderings they can censor people um and things like that i mean they could already technically mining pools can already censor people because they can drop transactions and stuff like that that's why it's only called censorship resistant it's not called um uh uh it's not it's not said that that that you're the censorship proof um so yeah from that perspective there's a there's a lot you can do and and the spawn camp thing is actually the most scary thing because if you can't fork the attacker off the network you

can't get rid of them without hurting the good guys as well and that's like one of the i guess like major drawbacks here but what the attacker can do is they can basically double spend as well so they can essentially spend bitcoin that um or at least i i'm pretty sure this they can do this they can double spend they can basically spend uh btc that that only exists once twice um which is really really bad obviously they can essentially um make it so that uh they reverse transactions or kind of like uh reel the blockchain obviously and kind of like that reverses the transactions um there's yeah it gets very ugly because if i was to give specific examples imagine this is why by the way this is why exchanges have um i think for bitcoin they have two two block

confirmations or probably more than that where two blocks have to be mined before they'll accept your your deposit is settled on and it's kind of like deposited into the exchange because imagine this imagine an attacker sits in weight they don't kind of like do anything but uh they're basically building on a kind of like a chain in the background or a new chain in the background and they come along and say okay well i'm gonna put this chain on top of bitcoin and i'm gonna be the real bitcoin now and their chain doesn't have all the transactions of the canonical chain um which means that uh where from wherever they started mining from they technically would reverse all the transactions that happened or replace them with their blocks right they're basically if they mind a thousand blocks they're and then they they come onto the network with

those thousand blocks that they mind um uh using their kind of like hash power there then they can replace the uh the blocks that were part of the canonical chain and replace all those transactions and screw everyone because that would mean that 1 000 blocks worth of transactions were essentially deleted or removed from existence as and from the point of view of the blockchain which means that all the exchange deposits um were kind of deleted in ethereum it becomes much worse all the dex trades were were kind of like reversed or deleted from the system all of the default activity all the nfts everything so this is why it's really really bad if someone wants to get 51 and this is actually why um it's really really bad um if they were to do this and they can spawn camp attack as well where you can't you can't off the

attacker without forking off the um the honest people as well this is why proof of stake is is so neat is because if you do want to do a social fork and fork out the attacker that was able to get say 51 of the stake or 33 of the stake you can essentially delete their coins um or or slash them as um as we know it within ethereum and and then essentially just continue on so they don't have that power anymore where it's basically essentially like burning all their miners um or burning their asic miners or whatever and continuing on as normal so that's a benefit of proof-of-stake but there are other trade-offs there i'm not going to go through them all here now but um yeah hopefully that gives a bit of context around that and what people can do if they 51 attack and stuff like that um i

don't believe that they can actually steal people's bitcoin from their wallet but they can do much worse than that i would argue like if you had moved your kind of like coins um to an exchange and then you kind of like i guess sold them um and then the blockchain kind of like gets uh gets kind of like overridden so to speak then technically the exchange that kind of like um doesn't have that bitcoin anymore and they basically gave you free money so to speak so hopefully that answers that there's a lot more to it than that i believe but um that's just like my kind of my on the spot reply to that one um all right your last question here are you on the phone you say regarding proof of work versus proof of stake it's clear to me that in proof of work using the

cost of processing power combined with the assumption of an honest majority leads to a consensus by following the longest chain but in proof of stake it seems like a different sequence of events we now randomly select one validator to bundle the next block given giving them guard mode to bundle the transactions wherever they see fit and then every node on the network accepts that as canon and this new design i'm not understanding how a conflicting block scenario could emerge it could even emerge given the rules and what's an example of something malicious this validator could do such that we have a slashing disincentive um this is a big question i'm not sure i'd be the probably the best person to answer exactly how this kind of works from a technical level but essentially slashing is the disincentive here right i don't on the technical level i don't

know exactly how this how this how this kind of like works i would assume that the network would be able to see kind of like a conflicting kind of um conflicting kind of state here of the network conflicting kind of block and there are these things these software programs that validators can run called slashes and they can submit this i believe it's a fraud proof to be able to kind of like slash an entity that does something wrong but essentially what this validator can do that's malicious well the thing they can do that's actually hard to detect or harder to detect is they can censor people so they can drop transactions or they can stop people transactions from going through for whatever reason that's a that's a massive thing they can do that they only need 33 of the the power to do this they

can halt the chain as well i believe and things like that as well so um i mean holding the chain is even harder i mean you can do in i mean there's inactivity leaks and there's slashing and it's yeah i mean and and they could do the same things as what i described with proof of work in terms of 51 attack they can kind of i guess like um uh i mentioned sensor transactions they can kind of like replace uh blocks and stuff like that and kind of like make themselves kind of like the god of the chain and do whatever they want and re-org stuff but the there's a massive disincentive to reorg because proof of stake has what's called finality which is the other part of this where essentially after two epics or 12 minutes uh the chain becomes finalized uh and what that means is that there is

two thirds of the stake saying this is the canonical chain if someone tries to change this we're gonna burn two thirds of the eighth or whatever it is um two thirds of the stake so it's a massive disincentive and it's a massive incentive for the validators to actually behave appropriately uh but there's a bunch of different really great explanations about this on on various mediums i can't remember exactly where it is but i think even if you just google it or maybe just ask me on the discord and i'll i'll see if i can dig some stuff up for you where it basically explains how this all works and there's even an annotated ether2 spec that basically runs through the entire spec of of um ether at least the beacon chain i should say and kind of describes how it works and and from under the hood and like a

easy to read kind of uh kind of like explain not an explanation five but like a high level overview so yeah hopefully that answers your questions for you there all right one here from log mag who says hi anthony quick question do you know why there is a fee difference between optimism and arbitrary swap on uni is 50 cents on optimism versus five dollars on arbitram um they use different architectures so different architectures being that arbitrary users uh their their operating system called rbos i believe and optimism uses optimistic ethereum is what they call it um even though they're using optimistic rollups they have different kind of approaches here but also arbitrary is newer than optimism which means that there's not as many users yet on there which means there's not as many users um sharing the load of

the on-chain uh the layer one fees which means that the individual fees are higher but as we get more users on there the benefit of layer twos is that they actually um gonna benefit from economies of scale where say there's a thousand users um and the fees to post something to the main chain is like 500 well those thousand users are splitting that 500 between them whereas if there was only 100 users then those 100 users were splitting the 500 uh fee between them and then it would be obviously the individual fees would be higher so definitely uh that that's a major reason but also the difference in architecture as well which um you can read a few different posts about this i think derebit insights have posted a few blog posts and you can read the documentation for optimism and arbitrary

to seeing how they work but essentially it comes down to those two major things i believe um one uh three here from sp who says which projects do you think have relatively good tokenomic mechanisms or design uniforms criticize uh but because it's too centralized so that power might be abused however fair launched projects might not be capable of holding enough funds along the way to drive growth sufficiently also what aspects would you suggest projects should consider when conducting token design so the best tokenomic mechanisms or designs i think this is like very subjective i don't actually think there's a best one i think there's a lot of experiments being run right right now and we're trying to find what works and what doesn't i think that honestly eth

probably has the best tokenomics if i'm like 1559 is amazing um it's use as uh kind of a staking asset is amazing east east uses trusts collateral is amazing so if i had to pick a best it would be eighth but you probably didn't didn't mean eighth you probably meant like defy tokens and stuff like that i don't think there's a best one yet i actually am a very big fan of curves token token economics i think they've done quite a good job of kind of like balancing supply demand but the market doesn't seem to be rewarding them for that right now i mean the price is quite stagnant um and and things like that but i still think their token mechanism or token design is is pretty good uh and but i would say that their token distribution probably could have been better uh that's probably my only knock

on them but that's not unique to curve i think most token distributions could have been better um than they have been and i think that if i was to name one that's been the best it probably is eth again because if you think about eighth and how they how that that was distributed the beautiful thing is that there was obviously the 70 percent that was i mean bitcoin maximus like the call was a pre-mine but the 70 that was like issued at the start most of that was sold in the ico and then there was um maybe i shouldn't say 70 it was like 60 million tokens or something like that or 70 million tokens i can't remember exactly of the total supply at the time um most of it was sold in the ico uh some of it was given to the foundation some of it was given to um kind of like

the i guess you can call them insiders or founders or team or whatever um and then uh you know most of it was given away in the ico but then you have like a long proof of work phase where all the mining all the kind of like tokens were distributed via proof of work or up until today i mean most of them are still being distributed by proof of work uh and then you also have like uh various different market cycles since 2015 where eth has changed hands a number of times and has kind of like distributed out quite well so i would say the key to making a good token is to distribute it and the thing is sorry to distribute it fairly but the thing is i think the only way you can distribute a token fairly is by that token going through multiple market

cycles and changing hands frequently because you can't just be like okay well we're going to give kind of like 30 of these tokens to ourselves or like to the team and the in and and kind of like another 20 to the investors and then we're going to leave 50 of the community but really we're gonna like do the 50 to the community as liquidity mining or put it in a treasury and then the community can work out what to do from there it's just it's just weird right like it's just it's a very bad token distribution and i think that teams haven't really figured out the ideal distribution just yet but again i would say that eighth probably has the best distribution out of any kind of coin or token on ethereum um but in terms of d5 i don't know if i would say

anyone's kind of like worked it out or kind of had a long term sustainable model just yet all right your second question what would be your comments on recent sec uh on the recent sec announcement that they're investigating the uni uh uni swap labs and you knew and and and uh and do you think uni swap intends to be fully regulated um i gave my comments on the refuel i think yesterday about this what the sec is doing right now is just an information gathering exercise whether which is which is shitty but but it's not as bad as like the sec actually coming to uni swap labs and being kind of like hey you know we're going to criminally charge you with kind of like criminal offense they're basically saying we want to learn more about what you are what your company does please provide us with the documentation uh

which is because they i mean unicef already has a lawyer but now they have to kind of like spend more money on legal fees and kind of go through this whole song and dance with the sec and the ssc may not even bring criminal charges against them and probably won't to be honest so it's just like it's all it's all kind of like a racket it's just to be honest like it's i really don't like what they've done what they're doing here but i won't go into that uh but you knew swap the contracts are unaffected the smart contracts cannot be altered uh they're decentralized the unisop labs team has no control over it but it's still kind of like a shitty precedent because it means that teams are just going to be even more scared now regulators and more scared of doing something wrong that

they may need to just go aim on or they may need to just uh essentially kind of like not be in the u.s and be something kind of in another jurisdiction maybe maybe one that's not even allied with the us because if they're allied with the us they could kind of like extradite them or kind of um you know seek their own kind of like regulators on them so from that point of view yeah it's kind of shitty uh the next follow-up question you had here was will defy one day be fully fully regulated um and is just unavoidable i i mean no i don't think so i think that they're gonna try to do it i think they're gonna go after the weakest points like centralized stable coins and on-ramps and stuff like that but i think that true d5 can't be regulated right

that's the whole point of what we're building if it's truly decentralized then um these kind of like centralized bodies can't regulate it they can't alter it they can't change it they would have to gain control of the entire ethereum network to even have a chance of doing that and to do that it's just like a whole nother kind of thing it's it's near impossible um to gain control of the ethereum network as it currently stands and in proof of stake it's even it's even more sorry it's even harder so yeah i do think it's going to be um unavoidable that we're going to see tons of regulatory action taken i do think that some some of the um centralized points are going to be choked like stable coins and uh the crypto on amps like centralized exchanges and stuff like that but true d5 can't be regulated um

or or at least shouldn't be able to be regulated um your next question what would be the pros and cons if d5 is gradually evolved in the regulatory complexities and gets regulated in the end um i think that there's going to be parts of i guess what you can call d5 that's not going to be decentralized but there's going to be regulated and we're already seeing this play out with are there launching the rba pro market for institutions um maker is onboarding collateral that requires kyc to kind of use within their system um you know different collateral types and there's also i think a few other things like compounds treasury product as well just for institutions so there's definitely going to be products that sit there but they're not i mean d5 is like a catch-all term but they're not actually decentralized finance right they're just like on-chain finance for

lack of a better term there so from that point of view i do think that there's going to be a lot of regular regulated on-chain stuff but it's not going to impact true defy i i i don't think so anyway um your last question any suggestions on how to maximize crypto income for australia-based residents considering tax treatment for crypto assets rules by the ato wondering what would be optimized what would be the optimized arrangement to minimize tax if if this is even possible uh consult your tax professional for this i'm not going to give tax advice sorry i have my own professional that i talk to we sometimes talk about it in the discord channel um about like the general laws and stuff like that uh there's a lot of information available on the ato website but your own personal you know your own personal position may

differ or probably does differ heavily from mine i have a very weird position that i find myself in but essentially yeah just talk to your own kind of accountant or the ato themselves and get advice for your own situation um at the end of the day because you can get advice online from people but you as i said your situation is unique to you and you may miss things when you may kind of misinterpret things which could lead to kind of like maybe a an audit later on and that's definitely what you don't want all right a question here from yeti who says interested to hear general reflections on arbitrage ones first few days i think it's really cool to see how quickly they've been able to get tvl with minimal liquidity mining i mean as far as i know sushi swap is the only

major platform that's live that has liquidity mining with some sushi rewards on there and i don't think it's very heavy liquidity mining either and there's no albert in one token or anything like that um the launch seems to have gone through very smoothly they fixed up the portal website so it doesn't look janky anymore they added some nice css to it which is nice um they seem to be gaining traction because they have over 60 million dollars of tbl the users unique users people bridging in um stuff like that so yeah i mean i'm pretty happy with the first few days of arbitram i expect this growth to just continue over time i expect more and more exchanges to offer kind of like uh sorry centralized exchange just offer on-ramps into arbitrary one but yeah i mean i didn't really expect it to be a kind of thing

where it was like hey we're gonna offer a billion dollars worth of incentives or something for you to get onto arbitrarium i think the main incentive right now is just to escape the high gas fees and there's more and more liquidity going into the different defy apps so you'll be able to trade um all your kind of favorite tokens on there i tried trading on arbitrary like on the first day and the slippage was really bad for eighth against usdc then on the second day it was like infinitely better and you know i i was planning to do some more stuff on there this weekend so i'm sure it's gonna be even better now so yeah i'm i'm really happy with the first few days of arbitrary ones launch all right question here from brian peace who says in honor of the launch of arbitrary question about fraud proofs

what constitutes fraud especially with zk proofs i think there must be some mathematical definition of fraud for example would a flashlight exploit count or is it operating within the parameters of the system and just exploiting oversights and contracts implementation it's neither of those things i think a flashlight exploit is not a fraud thing it's not it's not fraud right it's just following the rules of the system and a smart contract being exploited again is following rules of the smart contract because the smart contract had a bug in it got exploited uh whether that was through a flashlight or not so that no that is not fraud fraud the way i understand it in the in the um in the context of optimistic roll-ups is that a regular state transitions or stuff that shouldn't have happened and that went against the rules because if you

think about it if someone exploits a smart contract because of a bug well that was actually totally uh part of the rule set like that was actually fine because they followed the rules they just exploited something that was already there but doing something that is is fraud from the context of optimistic roll-ups is doing something that shouldn't be possible as part of the rules of the system so you shouldn't be able to do in a regular state transition which is essentially changing something um say you want to change the balance of a of a user's account or say you want to kind of like liquidate a user when they shouldn't have been liquidated for example that's kind of like the fraud that um that they're kind of talking about there and from my understanding anyway it's definitely not actual like fraud i guess like fraud in the in literal sense of of

um you know someone defrauding someone else sort of thing so yeah but i i guess like just to pre just to kind of like end that by saying i'm not like an expert on that and i'm not like an expert on the exact scenarios where this where this kind of plays out but i can say with like pretty much uh pretty pretty certainly that it does not apply to um exploits or bugs or anything like that it just applies to things that shouldn't be happening in the context of the rules of the system uh your next question here brian was on the august 26 episode of the daily great refuel you mentioned stock where executed a transaction for 1600 gas that would cost 21 000 gas on mainnet since gas pays for computational resources does this mean starque has figured out how to do computation more efficiently

is there is a different approach compared to other scaling solutions i mean this is the whole kind of like advantage of roll ups where they take the computation off chain and they only post the proof of that computation to the uh to layer one to kind of like prove that they ran that and by doing so they can essentially compress the transactions so instead of having to pay 21 000 gas for an eth transaction you can pay a lot less than that by compressing it because you've processed that transaction on this kind of on this roll up and just posted the proof that that was run to the to layer one now if you want to verify that you can actually run the transaction yourself by downloading this proof and running it locally on your machine if you want to if you're kind of like running a full

node and stuff like that but you would be running the computation yourself to prove that yes okay this actually happened and this is all legit and everything like that so it's basically just a very nice compression technique that is possible thanks to our fancy cryptography for like a better term i don't understand how the cryptography works under the hood but um yeah definitely very very fancy so a question here from ste who says which zk roll up in your eyes could you see being the first deployed uh on or first to gain traction could it be hermes loopering or something like that would love to know who's going to win the scaling race um i mean the one that's gotten traction right now is the uidx i think they've got the most traction out of any of them um but if you're talking about like a generalized

solution uh it's up in the air right now because stock net zk sync um hermes and whatever alex polygon is working on they're probably all going to come out at around the same kind of time um and it's just going to be kind of like the open question of where are apps going to go right like which ones are they going to go to are they going to do incentives on one not the other which ones are going to have a token like stack are going to have their token when they do stock net is zkc gonna have their token from day one is uh i mean obviously matic already has sorry probably already has a token are they gonna put incentives on these kind of like roll-ups and uh on their roll-ups and stuff like that it's open question so i don't actually know but i would say that right now i

mean doa dx is doing an incredible amount of trading volume incredible amount of fee take for them an incredible amount of traction for just uh our specific roll-up so yeah really really cool to see their kind of traction there so last one here from tai and then i'll go into the ama series channel and see if anyone else asks me questions there uh tai says uh i'm working on a crypto project that seeks to do some social good in melbourne and beyond for volunteers and clubs are you still doing advisory calls i'd love to slide into your dms about it um i guess you can dm me uh i don't know if i'll reply straight away i've got like a million people asking me the same question you are so if you want to dm me i can add it to kind of like my to-do list i'm happy

to help if i can um but uh yeah i'm happy to do like a call if i find some time to do that there for you all right so there are a bunch of questions in the ama series channel i'll get to now so one from grak attack who says given recent findings about ada's issues on the test net do you think they'll have time to sort it out i'm sorry i don't oh god i don't i don't so just a bit of context here cardano has launched the test net for their smart contracts about nine days before they plan to go live on main net with their smart contracts i don't think i have to say anything more than that you can't just have nine days of a test net to and i don't know if they think that their

peer review is so good that they don't have to actually test these things in the wild before it goes live um i don't think they're gonna have time to sort it out if they do delay their launch then i'm not even gonna be surprised but from what i've seen their smart contracts aren't even like good i mean i don't know if you saw my tweet earlier but essentially they can't do concurrent transaction processing which and they're using the a modified version of the us utxo model and it basically means that they can't do more than kind of like one transaction per block from what i understand which is just absolutely insane like if i understand that correctly that is absolutely insane that means they can't do defy and apparently d5 is easy according to charles but like yes i don't know i don't yeah that's kind of my answer to

that question um uh and then winwam wimwam says related what is your prediction for the the ada community and network in lieu of issues uh i don't know like i don't know if it's actually gonna do anything to the price i you know this this is crypto so the price is probably just gonna keep pumping so who knows right um but i think that the cardinal community is so detached from reality that they actually probably won't even realize what's going on and they'll just keep buying it i have so many of my bloody friends parents asking me about cardano because i just see it on the news and they see their other friends talking about it and it's just insane they have absolutely no idea what it is they they go they don't know if it's they don't know about anything got to do with smart contracts they don't

know what ethereum is i don't know what crypto is they're just hearing about this thing and their friends are telling them to buy it because it's going up so they buy it so if you're wondering what the the kind of like i guess um normal or i guess um uh casual aider investor is this is them the people who just know nothing about crypto but buy this thing because their friends told them to buy it it's just insane and to be fair that's not exclusive to cardano but i mean i have a kind of like place in my head of kawakadano that i just it's just a dark place um so another question you said many people are priced out of minting and buying the most legitimate nfts considering the gas costs on l1 where would you say the second most legitimate place for creating and sharing nfts to be it would

be layer 2 on ethereum of course because layer 2's on ethereum inherit the security from ethereum so stuff like the ones that are focusing on nfts right now i think a loop ring zk sync and immutable x so those would probably be the the second most legitimate places i i would i would suspect um uh uh rvd uh added to wim wham's first kind of like question um just add on to this are the issues they are running into a design flow of the platform mutex or is there a working implementation somewhere it is a design floor of the platform from what i can tell um i i'm actually in disbelief that they've done all this research and they've been preaching that they're going to kill ethereum and that you know d5 is easy and whatever and they've done this implementation and it doesn't work

i'm i i'm actually trying to do more research into this to see if this is actually the case because if it is then i i don't even know what to say really because this is such an absolutely insane oversight and the fact that they would do this i yeah i don't even know what to say from there i'm just going to leave at that i'm going to do more research if it is like this my head's going to explode um one here from gorby who says why have the fees started ramping up when blocks are 50 full like last time i looked most blocks never got even close to being full now what if the target would say 50 i mean it just feels like half of the total capacity is laying it most of the time so this is exactly how one 509 is

supposed to function because it has elastic blocks you'll see that sometimes blocks are like 10 full sometimes they're like 70 percent full but the target is 50 under 1.59 so on average the blocks are still going to be 50 uh full and still target that 15 million gas limit but in time and the way 1559 works is that it spreads out the demand through different blocks to smoothen out the transaction fees so the capacity isn't actually sitting idle it's being used but it's just being used in a more distributed way than all centralized in one block right and that's why you see kind of like the gas prices spike but then go down really quickly because there's this self-adjusting mechanism that 1559 uses to essentially get us back to the normal base feed price because you've got that

tip that's a secondary price there um it gets us back to the normal base feed price much quicker thanks to the way one five five nine works if you want a better explanation of this or a more detailed one you can check out my piece that i did in the daily way called this is one five five nine or this is eip1559 that explains it for you there um max8 asks i wanted to know your thoughts on the doge nft fractionalization um and dog token um i thought this was interesting i think it's insane the valuation that it's at i think it has like what a 500 million market cap and for those who don't know what this is this was basically plisa dao um fractionalizing their original doge nft and allowing people to kind of like buy it and people really ate this thing

so it's worth like 500 million dollars this dog coin or this dog token and this basically gives you i guess exposure to this nft my general thoughts are outside of the kind of like price is that it's just a really cool kind of like i guess proof of concept of what what what can happen here where this can go it could be a really cool funding mechanism for dows that may have acquired nfts and they just want to kind of like sell them off without selling them off as like a one as like a one-of-one they can just like fractionalize it um and it's cool that we can fractionalize nfts in general and use maybe that in a kind of like lending market or on a amm or whatever right to kind of like increase the utility of this nft so yeah those are my general

kind of like thoughts on that so a question here from uh olly who says what's your take on the current state of l2 or cross chain bridges do you think the full potential of these bridges will be realized if mo wallets like metamask incorporate some sort of bridge feature my current uh i guess my take on the current state is that they're still fairly new they're a lot further along than where i thought they would be i think hop and conex are seeing some really great usage the seller seabridge is seeing good good usage i haven't checked by economy's hyphen yet but i think they are as well there's a few others out there they're definitely a lot further along than i thought they would be and i do believe that um the full potential yes does need to be realized when metamask incorporates them

when centralized exchanges start using them as bridges into these layer twos um i think that uh definitely um uh we need more liquidity in them and more liquid kind of like different kind of liquidity pairs because people want to bounce around all these different tokens and stuff like that so yeah still early days very optimistic on the future of them and i do believe yeah more integration is always more positive all right so i think there's a bit of discussion in the ama channel about that approved usdc question that i kind of put out there so uh yes that's i'll just skip over those uh uh jen's uh i think i don't know if this is a question this is just something jan said which i think was important uh some people think seem to think that getting uh um early deals is guaranteed to make

money you can still invest in the wrong thing and then you invested for a very long time the opportunities you get on the public market aren't really that far off this is correct this is actually a really good point all of the opportunities that i have uh and that i invest in they're all vested like i don't think i have any that aren't vested and yes some of them are vested over a very long period of time at least most of them are for example the one that i've been in for the longest amount of time that was my first seed investment was m stable i invested in i think i was technically their pre-seed in january of 2019 and that only started vesting out on july of 2020 and there's three year vesting on that so by the time i'm fully vested out of

my um my tokens with mstable it will have been four years uh pretty much or like i probably i think maybe maybe over four years yeah four and a half years or something from when i first invested to getting all of my tokens uh so yeah i mean it is a very long time and during that time you know maybe i could have put that money into something else and and whatever but i mean uh yeah it's not guaranteed to make money and also the opportunities on public markets are there and can make money a lot faster than you can from the private markets i mean just the nft market in general if you catch the right nft or whatever you can make a lot of money from that and you know same with d5 even just with like eighth like the funny thing is

is that if i go back and look at what eth was in january of 2019 i think it was like 150 dollars if i'd put that ten thousand dollars into eighth back then i haven't actually done the math yeah would i have been better off than than putting it into m stable i don't know for sure but i still would have made like a lot of money putting it in there and and if even if i didn't have access to this deal and i actually think that that ten thousand dollars that i put into to m stable then um would have actually uh if i think about it now i probably would have put that into eighth instead of that but that was like my first like pre-state investment i was like really excited about it it was a melbourne-based team and i like still

involved with the project as an advisor as well now and obviously still an investor but um yeah i i think that uh you're definitely right there jen um i think that there's a one here from rj rj ignapp hopefully hopefully i said that right sorry if i didn't um been following your stuff since march last year big fan thanks for the great communication you provide to the 8th community what do you think about all the innovations happening around nfts profile pictures are an artwork first then all the derivatives 10k copycats and things like nouns they are surprise subdrive seem to really be pushing the envelope in what an nft can be what do you think about the future of nfts can be so i think there's still a lot of innovation left to happen here i mean we just saw what happened with the loop

project right and how that kind of like played out over the last i guess um few few days how it's kind of like turned the nft ecosystem upside down kind of shown different ways to do it so i think just looking at that as an example of the fact that there's going to be so much more innovation happening here um and into the future i think i've only really scratched the surface of what nfts can be and and this i mean i'm sick of the profile picture stuff at this point i i think a lot of people are i think there's just like cash grabs speculative mania stuff i think there are some that are going to last long term punks board apes probably penguins and stuff like that but i don't know how much they're going to hold their value i have no idea about that sort of stuff

but i think that uh definitely excited to see more and more innovation pop up throughout the nft ecosystem uh and definitely more stuff around i guess like what loot project's doing or at least stuff that takes us from uh kind of like what everyone was used to to something that like everyone was like oh wow what the hell happened here like how did this come from sort of thing so yeah i'm looking forward to all that sort of stuff all right i got one here from deca who says what do you think is the best way for l2s to incentivize growth with regards to token distribution you have mentioned before that a lot of yields farming liquidity mining is wasted on transitory capital and people will dump and move on to the next thing um okay there's two questions here so the to answer your first question i

think it's it's you got to strike a balance just like any liquidity mining program or any kind of incentive program and i think the way you strike a balance is by constantly re-evaluating how much you're paying out and for what capital this is what the index co-op does with the liquidity mining for the default pulse index where they basically re-evaluate it every month and say okay well are we paying too much or we're paying too little and then they kind of look at what's unincentivized versus incentivized in terms of tvl and they go from there i think that's that's one aspect to it but i also think that you don't have to just do liquidity mining for token distribution you can do air airdrops you can distribute tokens to contributors um you can maybe even do a sale if you want like an open kind of like ico and stuff

like that so there yeah i think those kind of things are definitely what these layer twos are going to have to look into um but generally it's hard to avoid that transitory capital it's always going to be there but i think um you can kind of like fight it off by by doing a constantly i guess like reiterating and redesigning over time or at least revisiting your liquidity mining and not just doing kind of like um something at the start doing it for a few months and then saying oh well you know it's over now all the capital can leave sort of thing uh and then your next question can you comment on how the alcx farming distributions has worked so far i mean i think it's worked okay but like the alcx price fell pretty hard with the rest of kind of like the market and

hasn't doesn't seem to have recovered quite well yet i don't know if that's kind of like alchemic specific though i think what ended up happening is that d5 just fell out of favor generally um and it just hasn't kind of like bounced back just yet i think it will need layer twos probably to bounce back because of the fact that um the scalability is kind of like limiting d5's growth on layer one um so from that perspective i wouldn't kind of like say that alchemix has done anything bad but i don't think their token distribution is is bad or poor or maybe maybe it's not even the best one out there i think that they've they had they had like a pool too right and they had like a few pool ones and stuff like that i think they've done fine um and i don't really know i don't

really kind of like have any kind of like price predictions or anything like that for the alcx token i own some or whatever but um yeah i think just d5 generally has uh uh has kind of like gone through this i guess trail of disillusionment where they're essentially stuck in this pit where they're like we have to build themselves out of it and i think to build themselves out of that they have to essentially um uh deploy to layer two and grow on layer two there and i guess uh i should kind of like answer eleanor's question because it follows on from deckers then i'll move on to beatles.f so eleanor asks when d5 bull market hard mode don't say l2 um okay if it's not for l2 i would say that d5 coins will probably run if we get to like a really speculative mania and

eighth goes to like 10k and the in the last phase of the bull market is playing out maybe maybe i don't know but like you gave me hard mode i actually think l2 is gonna what's gonna what's gonna spur the next kind of like growth of d5 um but you know i'm allowed to say that but anyway um the next question from biddles.ethe who says do you think that as the space matures we will see more projects merging with other ones uh be that with hostile takeovers of acquisitions i believe so um there's a lot of projects out there that are basically zombies that are only existing because either they have a community that they're trying to appease because there's token holders or they have a large treasury and the project just isn't succeeding i do think that there's gonna be um i don't know about hostile takeovers

but like more acquisitions and the acquisition acquisitions are probably going to just look like talent acquisitions where the team gets acquired and maybe there's a token swap or something like that and then kind of gets absorbed into the the kind of like acquirer so yeah definitely expect to see more of that happening over the coming i guess months and years all right i think that's everything unless anyone had a question from the audience i think that's going to be it for today so i'll just give it a few more seconds if not i'm going to wrap it up all right then well thank you everyone for attending this ama as i mentioned at the start this happens every two weeks uh so yeah i'll see you guys in two weeks on the next one i've recorded this one and i'll be uploading it to youtube

with timestamps within 24 hours so yeah you can watch it there if you came late or left early thanks everyone i'll see you in the discord channel