The Daily Gwei Refuel #4 - Ethereum News and Updates - PlusToken, eth2, Yearn/YFI, Chainlink & more!

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 30th of november 2020. so for today's episode we'll be going through the events of the weekend and also the events from friday as well so let's get into it so as we can see over the i guess the weekend we had uh some really really positive kind of like price appreciation with ethan a bunch of other cryptos after that that brutal dump we saw last week right we eat touched about i think it was 490 probably lower than that yeah if we if we scroll out here you can see that eighth went down to about 480 dollars kind of bounced off that and then kind of retested the lows over here with 490

uh and then since then we've just kind of done you know this march back up and it's pretty cool to see because we we fell from about 620 dollars down to to to what it is here and we're almost back up there uh we've got 586 dollars at time of recording uh hopefully it's higher by the time you know you guys see this video but yeah i think this is really strong you know we you really only see these kind of bounces during a bull market you know if this was a classical thing where you know it was a bear market and then you had like this this kind of dump and then you had a bounce uh it wouldn't continue it would actually just like kind of like a pebble on on water it would just like keep going keep going down right and you just bleed

out over time to find a bottom and that's what bear markets usually these usually are but yeah we haven't seen that this time we're just seeing so much strength and you know obviously i mean it's pretty easy to say now that the bull market's back we're just in the early stages here so that's what's um you know that's what's being signaled to me from the markets as well uh and you know on top of that i think december is going to be a really healthy month for ethereum right uh we have eth2 going live tomorrow basically e2 phase zero the beacon chain genesis happening tomorrow um that's a huge catalyst right we've we've had more eighth flood into the deposit contract it's over eight hundred thousand the last time i checked you know we have d5 growing still we have such a strong narrative around

ethereum going into 2021 that i think yeah december's gonna be a big month and then during 2021 it's just going to be you know even even bigger i think uh you know and not just for ethereum i guess for crypto in general i mean we can't ignore the fact that that that bitcoin is quite bullish as well right i mean these charts are pretty similar right you can see it there bitcoin has you know as people like to say the macro narrative behind it which you know i agree with but i always say that you know once you're in crypto it's all about ethereum right everything you know interesting is happening on ethereum so you might buy a bitcoin and just hold it whatever but if you actually come into the ecosystem and see what's happening uh outside of bitcoin then you're gonna see what's happening

in ethereum and within d5 specifically you know and speaking of d5 we have the d5 pulse index here i think i need to adjust the chart here for a sec yeah i mean it's it also went to some lows i think this is like a bug in the chart here but you know it's it's bouncing as well i think d5 hasn't bounced as much because kind of is still moving so the way i look at it is that you know if each stops moving so much and goes kind of sideways for a little bit we'll probably see d5 recover from from that and and do and have some out performance too at the end of the day it's all cycles in these markets so i definitely think that we're currently in the the btc slash eve cycle with a um you know more more primed for like more dominance

uh and then it'll move to d5 uh and you know we also saw a bunch of the other kind of like large cap coins like ripple and stellar kind of pump last week but that's that's fleeting i think um you know i actually think it was like a bunch of traders and whales kind of front running and being like oh you know all this new retail is going to come in these retail investors are going to come in and what are they going to buy oh we think they're going to buy you know xrp and things like that so i think that's what we saw last week but yeah interesting to keep an eye on that so we spoke about the plus token kind of ponzi last week and how there was some news that came out around it basically that uh the government had the chinese

government had seized all this crypto you know it was about uh a huge amount of btc i think it was one percent of all btc it was about 0.7 of all eighth and things like that uh and then david david pull here he's an on-chain analyst um for bitcoin specifically he he basically has this thread here that says that the news is just um the news is about six months old and a lot of these selling and uh sorry a lot of the um the crypto that was seized has already been sold specifically the bitcoin has already been sold you know there's not gonna be this massive amount of bitcoin coming onto the market as was speculated last week uh so yeah he has this thread here i'll link it in the show notes and everything for you to go check it out

but basically it runs through you know where these coins moved from uh you know a lot of them went to huabi the uh the korean-based exchange i think it's based in korea anyway one of the asian exchanges for sure um and the salof you know he he stipulates started in the middle of 2019 so you know how last week i told you that a lot of people thought that uh the reason why ethan btc ran up during 2019 at least like during q2 was because of this plus token ponzi and then of course it wasn't sustained buying or anything like that so when they started selling when they you know when the plus token ponzi kind of shut down and was and the the um the operators were caught the buying pressure kind of like evaporated and that's why we saw that pretty brutal drawdown after that

and everyone's kind of hopes were like shattered right it's like leading up to it everyone's like oh wow is the bull market back already and no that definitely wasn't the case at the time so yeah i'll link this thread in the show notes and the youtube description and you can go check it out and and read in some more detail here so andre put out this uh this sneak peek yes uh sorry a couple of days ago of uh the core lending money markets integrated into into yearn this is pretty interesting i think i mean you only had a couple more acquisitions slash mergers you know slash partnerships over the weekend happen as well they did one with with um cover protocol which is an insurance protocol uh they did it with cream which i spoke about obviously uh

last week uh and cream is a money market right so i think what they're doing is they're trying to get the talent from these projects uh to help them with what they want to do within the urine ecosystem which has basically become more than just yield farming right they want to do yield farming they want to do money markets they want to do insurance you know it seems like they want to do things with options as well so the urn ecosystem is definitely growing uh and i i'm a bit confused though like where the value is going to flow to because a lot of these projects that they're absorbing i still have their token right as i said last week you know cream starts it's token pickle stars it's token cover still has its token and of course yeon has its own token called uh wi-fi

or wifi or whatever you want to call it um so is the value gonna flow to that right are these other tokens just gonna bleed out because there's no love put on them because the urine ecosystem is basically all about that that wi-fi token i'm not sure don't know what's happening here actually andre put out a blog post that i don't have up here so if i go to his profile i might be able to find it here um unless he didn't share it on here there's a blog post on his medium about it when he goes through actually let me bring it up here so you guys can see um he basically i think you know he saw that people were confused about what the terms merger acquisition means uh so here it is basically so this blog post what it does is he

goes through and and defines the the nomenclature that he's been using um and he's like he asked the question like what what does this actually mean right so he defines them and then he goes on to to basically say what does this mean in the crypto context and he finishes the piece by saying that um he doesn't really have an answer for this uh and i mean i agree with that but at the same time if maybe if you don't have the answer don't call don't call them like a merger acquisition or partnership or whatever i think collaboration is is the better term here for what they've been doing because as i mentioned last week these projects still have their tokens so it's not an acquisition it's not really a merger it's not really a partnership right um it's like a collaboration between these

teams but you know on top of that these teams have actually been absorbed as well so you know maybe there's another term there you can use but i think it's very important to to define these things and i'm glad andre posted this because a lot of people were confused you know um these terms have very specific meanings right uh but when you when you kind of like put them in an open source world or in a crypto native world it kind of like blurs the lines right and you need to you need to define these things so yeah i'll include this in the show notes of course you can go give it a read there as well all right we had an e2 quick update from danny ryan over the weekend this was a super quick update basically just reminding people that the e2 genesis is happening on

december 1st be sure to set up your nodes i have my little guy right over here on my on this other on my other pc over here all ready to go uh it's exciting right we're finally here like tomorrow basically um we're gonna have uh the genesis uh go live um at 12 p.m utc i'm not sure what that is in whatever time zone you're in but i know what time it is in my time zone it's about 11 p.m uh australian time or eastern australian time so actually not bad for me usually i expect these things to go live during you know uh when i'm sleeping like 2 3 a.m but this time actually in the us i do know what time it is in pacific time it's i think it's 4am pacific time so in the in the us it's definitely screwing uh

screwing some people there but uh that's that's the time that it's going live and honestly you know waking up at you know in the middle of the night or staying up to witness this kind of historic event is so worth it i mean even if it was 2am 3am for me i would have definitely stayed up for it so yeah if you haven't done it yet i implore you to and you have like ethan the deposit contract please please please set up your validate like now we should you know the earlier the better because you don't want to get you know run into problems and then have to try and ask people when the when uh you know all this craziness is happening uh especially leading up to the launch and you know immediately after the launch so definitely go set it up now that's why i did mine

earlier of course um you know i think the biggest risk is that the eth2 beacon chain doesn't start because not enough people have booted up their validators i don't think that's gonna happen um you know because you'll lose money if you if you don't do it it's not like the test nets where there was nothing at stake so i think that uh we'll definitely launch at the at the time that we we're gonna we've set for genesis uh but yeah always good as a staker to be prepared for this stuff all right so there was a post here from from dan craig feist i think i said his name right right here um about your your validator so keeping your validators uh or sorry your node's time while in sync

is is critical here so for those who who may be aware on the medala testnet or the modasha testnet there was a critical bug in the prism client where the clocks weren't in sync so the network just basically you know the validate like a mass uh kind of um a lot of validators dropped off the network i think it was like 70 of the network dropped off because they were they were all running prism so you really want to make sure that your time is synced correctly and he goes through here about like attack vectors and things like that this is all the technical stuff but in general uh make sure that your time on your kind of like the hardware that you're running this stuff on is is correct so it's in sync um i you know i think there's a there's a few

kind of like things here if you're running ubuntu and like how to do it and how to set it and everything with windows i'm i'm fairly certain you can just go to the calendar and time settings and kind of set it there so yeah just one thing to keep in mind if you're running a validator all right so i put this tweet out over the weekend i was looking at my one of my favorite dashboards from doing analytics here uh decentralized exchange dashboard basically you know it shows you you the health of decentralized exchanges over the last kind of like 24 hours 7 days 30 days and even further than that if you scroll down here now what this chart shows is basically the growth of decentralized exchanges uh per each month since january 2019 uh and as you can see or for those of

you listening in and not watching the i mean the explosion happened in in 2020 basically around d5 summer so we had it was kind of kind of flat uh for 2019 it was it was it was growing but it was it was kind of flat right and then we had this kind of explosion when the compound liquidity mining launched because then we went into d5 summer uh and we've and we've just been you know we grew a lot we peaked and then we it's been coming down a bit but the volume is still much higher than it was before that right so for november it was about 15 billion dollars and then if we actually do a do a calculation we can say that there's been almost 90 billion dollars worth of trading volume has happened across the centralized exchanges on

ethereum over the last 12 months just the last 12 months so not the beginning of this chart or anything and most of it happened during d5 summer of course but that's that's crazy right 90 billion dollars on on on ethereum under centralized exchanges with the majority happening on uni swap uh and curve the stable coin exchange uh and and sushi swaps there as well as as a big player too so uh and there's a bunch of others here like uh colors are i guess they're a bit hard to see um but yeah i mean unisop dominates right as you can see for those who can't say unicorns but basically half of the half of the volume if not more here so yeah i mean that's that's insane and we all saw the reports of unisop doing more volume some days than like coinbase

for example and you know it's always good to to take stock here as well and to think about the fact that you know ethereum is still expensive to use at layer one and still kind of like doesn't scale very well and yet this volume is this kind of is kind of happening within d5 so it so it just shows the the intense kind of like um uh usage of these protocols regardless of cost or speed or whatever people want to do this people want to play in d5 they want to trade on decentralized exchanges you know even if it costs a little bit more because you get all the other benefits right no kyc no aml you get you don't have to you know you can be you can remain pseudo-anonymous um you can also not have to deal with centralized exchange

risk in general uh self-custody of assets there's so many benefits right and it's just this chart to me shows that um and and it shows as well that uh the incentive mechanisms that teams are using like liquidity mining work very well so it remains to be seen you know in the future how this growth continues um but it's also worth keeping in mind this this only tracks uh i think this only tracks layer one i mean it's got loop ring there so i'm not sure if it tracks layer two as well but i think going over the next year as we get more layer two protocols live we're gonna see more of an explosion there as well uh speaking of metrics within d5 token terminal released their new uh the new version of of token terminal

this this this week uh i really like this site so what what token terminal is trying to do is it's trying to bring kind of traditional metrics from the real world into d5 right so things like pe so uh peps volume up to market cap you know and then obviously the crypto native things like tbl um but then they're trying to generate things like revenue for those listening and i'm just showing it on the screen here on on on the token terminal website so um if you want to check it out it's at terminal.tokenterminal.com but this yeah this is super cool there's so many metrics here that you can look at i mean you can actually base your investment decisions on this right if you have a project that you're interested in let's say 0x click here and then you can see all of

xerox's metrics over time and how healthy they are so you can see here kind of like the the market cap and and and and kind of like the default average and how it's performing against d5 uh you can see kind of like uh the price to sales ratio here if that's growing or not uh the revenue as calculated by token terminal here so you know if you see that going up right maybe you know you want to buy the token to get exposure to this so and it's not just d5 either they've also got like some other chains here they have like decred and i think bitcoin litecoin ethereum of course here uh and then they have like an insight section too where you can basically subscribe to their newsletter which i highly

recommend you do because they basically uh run through how to read these things right and how to interpret them so really cool from token terminal i um i i mean i personally use it i i think as more of the traditional players come into this ecosystem from traditional finance they're gonna want these things to evaluate these tokens be you know they're not just like like us that like quote unquote um ape into things right they uh they definitely take their time to to research and do things so i think that's what we should move towards i don't think we should just be you know blind speculating on these things because that's how you end up with you know 90 drawdowns on these tokens a quick update from yam over the weekend as well

so yam's a project that i think i mean it's gotten a lot of hate but they've they've just been been building like crazy still right um you know last week they they came out with um the a new project called the umbrella protocol which is basically like an insurance kind of coverage project um similar to nexus mutual and cover and things like that uh and then you know apart from that they've been building a bunch of other different things so this this roadmap update gives it gives kind of an update on what they've been up to so on the protocol level they've been doing some some i guess like with the treasury they've been basically acquiring assets for the treasury so you can see here that they purchased uh 250 000 worth of eighth and 250 thousand dollars with

the d5 pulse index um to to farm the index token with it so for those who don't know you can actually farm the index token which is part of the index co-op by providing liquidity on unisport to the 8th dpi pair and that's what they did with their treasury which is really cool because the yam token holders got to vote on whether they wanted to do this or not they've also been doing a bit of sushi things as well a bit of sushi farming on the product side they um they've got umbrella protocol nearing the testing phase as i mentioned before a few governance updates you know and and uh i think there's a lot the kind of like i mean in progress kind of like proposals for yam as well

so yeah go give sorry go give this a a read i'll link it in the show notes of course and yeah i just think that what yami's doing is really really cool in general i mean i don't hold any yam tokens or anything like that and it is a very risky token to hold because it's a rebase token and what that means is that it's extremely reflexive up and down so it can go up really high and then it can go down really high um you know depending on how many people are buying in or selling of course but it's it's more pronounced than a typical token i won't go into it now but for those who know what rebase tokens are you'll be familiar with that too so uh yeah i definitely suggest like you don't have to buy the token to be involved with this project i think what

they're doing is really cool you know they're giving their treasury funds to bitcoin as well um to to to to donate to grants and things like that so uh i just think of vm as like a neat little ethereum aligned ecosystem rather than something to speculate on and that's not to say that you can't if you if you want to you know the treasury comes from the speculation so for those who don't know the treasury the the money that goes into the treasury comes from a portion of the rebase so uh you know without people speculating on the token there wouldn't really be much of a treasury but in saying that what they're doing with the treasury is they're trying to increase the value of it uh without that as well so that's what they're doing with the with the index farming too right

um and then sushi farming and things like that which i think is really cool so active treasury management is definitely something that i would look at going forward especially into 2021 i think a lot more projects going to be doing this because they need to set up dallas for this sort of stuff to you know one to avoid regulatory kind of scrutiny and two to let their token holders vote on this right and to encourage people to to hold the token as well all right we i mentioned this last week as well but uh last week uh the the total ethereum nodes hadn't flipped the total bitcoin nodes yet but this week they have so total ethereum nodes is over over eleven thousand total bitcoin nodes is about eleven thousand uh and this is i think one of the first

times this has happened um i don't know i don't know if it's happened in the past but i don't remember in recent in recent kind of history it happening but this is huge right and as i mentioned last week this is obviously due to people having to set up an eth one node uh without having to but being encouraged to set up an eth one node uh when they're doing their e3 staking so that's why i've seen an explosion here i think of just a few weeks ago it was 8 000 nodes or something so we've had over 3 000 nodes joined which makes sense and i mean if you look at unique depositors it's at about 3 000. you know it's not a one-to-one mapping there because some unique depositors are actually not unique uh but it's always good to see more ethereum nodes coming online if you're

in full nodes uh we need to stop relying so much on inferior and things like that we need people to run their own nodes and be self-sovereign uh you know my eth2 validate is connected to my open ethereum node you know as i discussed last week you want to make sure that you're running a a minority eth1 node as well so like open ethereum nevermind bay su not gif um not nothing against geth as a client but you know you want to support the decentralization of the clients as well so yeah cool really cool to see this start a little bit of drama uh that i kind of like tweeted about i think i i should give some context around this tweet people that saw it so i basically said belittling six years worth of work by arguing over semantics is a new low for

ct for crypto twitter and you know this this stemmed from i was scrolling i woke up this morning and i was scrolling through my twitter feed and i'm like why are people arguing about is eth2 launching or not like what is this and it goes back to eth2 you know phase zero the beacon chain launching tomorrow is not the fully too sweet right it is a staking chain it isn't it there's no sharding there's no smart contracts there's none of that you can't even you know move your eth right you can't do any anything like that and people have taken this and been like oh well if you can't do anything with it then is eth2 really launching and it's just like such a a silly thing to argue about and it's so semantic based that i i don't even want to entertain this argument but for the sake

of kind of educating everyone listening in or watching watching this this this recap here basically i don't think it's right to say that eth2 isn't launching tomorrow right you know it's not the full ether too sweet and anyone in ethereum knows that and it's very easy to to google you know eth2roadmap and see that the ethereum.org website does not state that what's going live on december 1st is the full tooth too sweet no one in ethereum will state that right um you know there might be some people out there saying e2 is going live and and people might look at that and be like well no technically it's not e2 going live it's phase zero and beacon chain and all that but semantics right i just i just i don't like these semantic arguments they are

they are such a distraction and as i said they also belittle the work that the teams have put in over the years six years worth of work from the researchers and the client implementers to get to this point where we finally launched this thing a novel proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that uh if it works will be the most decentralized consensus mechanism on the planet basically and you know in kind of like the terminal state will be more decentralized than bitcoin um then bitcoin's proof of work uh consensus mechanism so uh that is a huge achievement in of itself and i think that it's fine to say eth2 is launching on december 1st uh as long as you know if you're talking to maybe a new person to ethereum you

caveat it with saying you know it's the first phase of eth2 um but that doesn't make mean it it's kind of like belittled it's a huge milestone um you know it's it's as big as as each i mean each milestone is huge right getting phase one in with sharding and then doing the merger and things like that so it's not right to say that it's just you know this proof of stake chain doesn't really mean anything that just is not right uh and you know i'll fight back against that as much as i can but in general i don't want to entertain these arguments too much you know i'll just put out like a snide comment here and there uh i just think it's it's just you know it's it's quite pointless to to to hop on about this and it's also confusing to new users right

if you're trying to avoid confusing new people then you're not by by arguing semantics right you're just you're you're contributing to that confusion so i i was really sad to say that but in general it's like it doesn't that doesn't doesn't really matter everyone's still really excited people don't really care about their semantic arguments you know whoever wants to be at the forefront of this thing and actually be on the right side of this thing knows what this is and what you know what it what it means and what what it shows that the that that you know the clients and developers client developers and researchers have done over the years so yeah there's just a little note on that uh i probably won't bring it up again because it's such a silly argument really cool out of chain link as well

over the weekend so they're going to be participating in git coin grants round eight as a kind of like a matching provider so they're going to basically put up a bunch of funds to become a matching partner for those who don't know you know these git coin grant rounds basically uh are based on what's called quadratic funding a bunch of organizations will put up a you know a bunch of money last round i think it was like half a million or something like that i think this round they want to go for a million dollars and this will get spread out to the grants on bitcoin based on individual donations and you know the more individual donors you have and the more smaller donors you have to your grant the more matching you get and that comes from these partners basically so yeah this is going to be

huge this is going live this week as well i think the second or the fourth of december or something like that the round date goes live i can't remember the exact date uh but perfect timing right straight after the eth2 genesis um event happens and a lot of great projects are going to be going to be in need of funding as well so i'll talk about this more once it goes live and everything like that i definitely want everyone you know listening to this to participate if they can donate to a few projects projects that they like and everything like that so yeah i'll cover it more in in a future refuel episode probably later this week another really positive thing coming out uh i guess this is more of a long-term thing over the next two years but i basically put this tweet out that said

ethereums get to celebrate so many major milestones with eth2 right so we saw last week that we all got to celebrate the deposit contract minimum eth required being reached that was a huge celebration right you saw it on twitter everyone was talking about it everyone was super excited people who were like i would never reach the minimum we're just like wow this is like an impressive showing of support from the firm community for this new new thing that we're launching so we've already achieved that right next up is the beacon chain genesis we're achieving that tomorrow uh you know i mean there's a there's a small chance maybe it doesn't go live for whatever reason but you know it's it's pretty much 100 that we're going to go live with that sharding implemented is coming you know hopefully next year if not 2020 like early 2022 eip1559

on both eth1 and eth2 so the the eip to basically improve the fee market and to introduce burning on eth uh on on on the fees being paid uh that's you know i don't want to give any dates here but maybe end of 2021 early 2022 eth one to eat to merger same kind of deal there that's that's huge right in and of itself i think that's self-explanatory um that's probably going to go live end of 2021 early 2022 we hope right um i i'd actually say 2022 for the merger to be honest that's a very complicated thing and you want that to go right you you can't screw that up and then the final thing was rich sharding so this might be uh confusing

to some people but what i mean by this is that the shards going live as part of like the first phase of phase one aren't rich shards right they're data shards so they can't actually do kind of smart contracts or state execution or anything like that what they can do is they can host data which can be used at layer 2 to do these things so yeah rich sharding is basically introducing that which is commonly referred to as phase two which is uh execution on the shards and smart contracts and things like that that's still very much an open research kind of thing and it'll probably evolve over the years i wouldn't expect that until maybe late 2022 early 2023 but we don't need that for eth2 to basically be

a full kind of like on you know parody with eth1 i think that's going to happen either late next gel or early 2022 with sharding and the merger and these layer 2 technologies going going live so lots to be excited about there for sure all right last thing before you wrap it up for today so there's going to be a genesis live stream party put together by ether so myself and eric connor bankless david hoffman and ryan sean adams and uh defy dad uh as you as as a lot of you will probably know him uh from from zappa and also from his own youtube channel where he explains a lot of d5 things um so yeah this live stream is going to go a lot going to start at 6 30 a.m eastern time eastern

standard time in the us and that's about half an hour i think before the genesis is slotted to go live so the links will be on twitter for that uh definitely keep an eye out uh we'd love you to join us there'll be a a a chat on on the youtube stream and everything like that so you can you can talk to us in there uh and yeah let's watch this thing go live this i think it's gonna be more than just obviously our genesis stream like ethub's one there's going to be i think our 8th staker is doing it i think there's going to be an official one from like the official quote unquote official from like the ethereum foundation i think there's going to be a few of them around right but we'd love for you to join our one uh if you want to watch multiple you can

you just have to have like a bunch of monitors or you know one big monitor and put them everywhere so you can try that as well but yeah definitely i mean this is gonna be huge right the next refuel tomorrow will probably come out just before the the chain goes live and then the one after that will be when i kind of do my recap on on everything that's happened there so an exciting two three days week for ethereum as i said get coin grants matching round eight going live as well this week i'm sure there's going to be a bunch of other things happening as there always is in the ethereum ecosystem so yeah keep an eye out and if you want to keep updated with it you maybe don't have the time maybe too many real life commitments and you don't live in ethereum like i do uh

you can you know subscribe to the youtube channel subscribe to the daily guy newsletter uh you know follow us on on on twitter uh join the discord all that good stuff uh to keep up to date with everything that i'm doing at the daily gray and you know keep up to date with ethub as well we also have a weekly newsletter that goes out with ethub that covers ethereum and we also have a weekly podcast where eric and i talk through kind of like recapping the previous week so always good to get eric's perspective on things i really you know i really i think highly of his opinions on things he's got some great context there so different to what i do with the deadly way the the daily great refuels so yeah that's it for today i think everyone thank you for

watching listening wherever you are i hope you have a great week and i'll catch you for tomorrow's episode thanks everyone