Devconnect recap, Optimism token and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #355 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where it cut the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the second of may 2022 all right guys well i haven't done that intro for two weeks now it's been a while it's felt like it's been a lot longer than two weeks actually that in a way for not just from the refuel but from like home in general it's pretty crazy like i had other people say that too it's like oh it feels like you've been gone forever um and i guess like if you watched the refuel it would have felt like that since it's a daily show so yeah i'm back i think today's episode episode's going to be a lot longer than 30 minutes i have so many tabs open uh this is just one window here that i've

got i didn't want to kind of like put them all in the same window because it would take me forever to to go through them all um and i was gonna take i'm gonna take breaks in between i'm not gonna just record for two hours straight i think so so yeah but i guess like i can start with recapping my amsterdam experience and like how amazing that was ah it felt so good to be back at an ethereum conference after over two years i met so many new people so many refuel kind of watchers and and newsletter readers uh so many people that i had kind of like met uh i guess like at other conferences you know two and a half years ago that have come such a long way and you know i think the biggest takeaway from me for devconnect was that the community has

grown so so much it's actually amazing like it wasn't just i mean i know 8th denver was quite big as well but from what i heard from 8th denver it was big because of the fact that there are a lot of kind of like everyone there it wasn't just ethereum community members but it was everyone whereas devconnect seemed like a much larger concentration of like just purely ethereum community members and there are so many of us now it was actually crazy like i i and the thing is devconnect wasn't just like one venue there was a bunch of venues spread around the city i went to a bunch of events i didn't get to all of them obviously because there were overlapping kind of events and things like that but i guess like the hub was the co-working space which was in the um they're funny enough the old

amsterdam stocky stock trading kind of like buildings that's so kind of like how there's still wall street people kind of like go there it's not really a you know that a thing where you go and trade anymore obviously it's all done on a computer but it was kind of like that old building which i thought was kind of funny considering you know crypto like ethereum was in that building right so that was really awesome uh and that co-work space was was great like i met so many people there it was so chill the venue was just awesome if you were there you know what i mean uh i don't have any pictures to show you guys but i'm sure you saw some uh from twitter during the last uh kind of like two weeks as as well there so other than that i think uh

my main takeaways from devconnect besides you know the fact that the community had grown so much is that there are so many interesting problems being worked on within the ethereum community right now that it's hard to kind of like not be engaged you know i know the price has been whatever over the last two weeks i'm going to talk about that at the end of today's episode i'm gonna go on one of my bullish rants again because there are so many things to be bullish about guys and i think like if you're not bullish at this point just because the price has gone down a little bit i mean i think the price is probably around the same as it was when i kind of like um blasted the refuel uh i can't remember exactly what it was two weeks ago but yeah anyway i'm going to

get a go into a bullish rant there but yeah i think like there's just so many interesting problems being worked on within ethereum from like layer 2 stuff to mev to um to d5 especially i mean there's so much innovation happening in d5 people just kind of like sleeping on it obviously nfts are still a big deal and and all that sort of stuff there uh i guess another another key takeaway from me uh fought for the event was that everyone just feels so energized like it doesn't feel like a bear market at all uh like at all seriously it just feels like everyone's just bouncing off the walls with energy wanting to solve all these issues wanting to work on on whatever they're working on and just super excited about the future and out of all the conversations that i had i think like

95 of them didn't mention price once which is crazy right like i mean that's the amazing thing about ethereum is that there are so many other things to talk about other than price you can talk about the uh to other networks i mean especially like bitcoin and i i guess like at a bitcoin conference i always wonder like what do they talk about i've never been to one maybe i should go to one but like other than the price there's not that much to talk about i know they talk about lightning network but that's a meme at this point so it's always amazing to me that with an ethereum you can go like whole hours long conversations without mentioning the price once because you're talking about a specific thing like maybe it's layer twos maybe it's mav maybe it's uh nfts maybe within the nft community you

talk about price a lot more because there's a lot more speculation than building going on in that community i guess at this at this stage but but yeah um and i guess like another key takeaway for me was how many pull-ups there was like i collected so many it was crazy because like people had their own like i met this person pull up there were these new kind of like devices at least new to me where you could basically just like tap it with your phone and if your phone has an nfc reader it would kind of like automatically pop up and you'd be able to admit that with that pull up um and those devices they're like like a a black kind of like um a device in a circle pattern with like a little symbol on it and it was a little card people had as well they were

like these special cards that you could tap and you can get their pop-up and people just you know minted uh sorry printed out their qr codes as well so i really like that i think having an alternative to qr codes is good especially one that's as simple seamless as just tapping your phone or nfc uh tag kind of like um reads that and it pops up on your phone that was very very cool but they were everywhere like seriously everywhere guys like no matter where i went there was a pop to collect which i i loved i didn't collect them all but i love that they were everywhere and people were just super excited about collecting them so that was another kind of like key thing there and i guess lastly um just on like a non-eth-related note amsterdam was an awesome city i mean my friend had warned me that

there'd be a lot of bikes um my friend that lives in amsterdam he's like yeah there's a lot of bikes i'm like oh yeah okay there's a lot of bike people always exaggerate things no he was not exaggerating there were a lot of bikes like no matter which kind of like street you went to no matter what corner you turned there were bikes absolutely everywhere and i learned that there's more bikes than people in in the city in terms of population not in terms of like tourists because i think more tourists pass through the city by like many orders of magnitude than residents live in the city each year and that kind of like i guess makes sense because amsterdam is such a tourist kind of like central city i mean i stayed my hotel was basically the heart of the city uh there was kind of like i mean some of

it was kind of crappy because there was a lot of like just tourist trap shops which i guess you find everywhere but like this on on certain kind of like strips it was just all tourist traps and it was pretty funny how like different i guess like the harder the city was to kind of like the outer city i ended up visiting uh uh vandal park i think it was uh and the surrounding areas there were much more i guess like non-touristy and and i immediately noticed that not just because there weren't many tourist trusts but because there wasn't many um i guess like english menus on on kind of like restaurants and things like that whereas in the heart of the city it was like english everywhere and dutch people speak english generally but i guess like the city's more you know catered towards

the tourists these days and it was just amazing i mean the canals are amazing just watching how the city operates like driving is a hindrance there like you don't really want to drive because it's just so hard to get around compared to a bike that's why bikes are so popular because bikes are basically a first-class citizen they're actually above pedestrians which was weird for me because in in melbourne it's pedestrians like pedestrians are the rulers like cars bikes all have to stop for it but the bikes in amsterdam didn't stop for pedestrian crossings which was kind of like a bit weird to get used to because usually at a pedestrian crossing i just waiting for them to stop and i'll just go like i'll start going but no the the bikes do not stop guys uh it was it was pretty crazy if you haven't been there

before take it from me bikes everywhere that's not an over exaggeration i think the canals were pretty awesome as well like i loved just seeing all the boats on there i mean i went on one um uh just on a kind of like a private tour for a couple of hours and my host was great knew a lot about the city it was a lot of history uh and just yeah i mean it's a european city right guys like there's a lot of history there in in general and i think amsterdam is obviously a tourist hotspot because of that and because of like the canals and things like that and all the culture there so that was really awesome the venue i guess like the um the the area they did dev connecting was awesome and i also spent uh a few days in paris after that as well uh with my

just with my fiance paris i guess i didn't know what i was expecting but it was like a much bigger city than i thought it was people always say oh australia is really big um and i'm like yes okay australia on a pure land mass is really big but like most of it is uninhabited because it's not habitable it's just desert uh and the cities they're much more spread out than um kind of like these uh these european cities are like melbourne for example i mean from the heart of the city to get to i guess what could be considered like the outback now you'd have to drive like two plus hours in either direct you know in every direction except south obviously because that's the water but like you know north kind of like east west um you know you have to drive a bit

to consider to be going into consider what's what's called the outback because the city's just built out so much like we have a lot of um suburban kind of like centers and things like that rather than everything being packed into a a kind of like tiny space and that's exactly what european cities are like right especially something like amsterdam but but paris just really really busy everywhere it was just absolutely crazy um especially around kind of like i guess the the popular spots and stuff like that obviously i went to the eiffel tower and things but uh but yeah i mean i think there were less tourists in paris uh there were there are definitely a lot of just kind of like residents and natives just kind of like obviously france's population is like 70 million or something like that so so that that makes sense too but but yeah i didn't

know what i was expecting from paris and obviously a lot of culture and history there too a lot of older buildings and things like that it's always funny going from australia to to kind of like the european cities because i mean australia is a very young country um the cities are very young as well we have we we don't have that culture and history that european cities do that is very much centered around uh world war one and two especially especially two um australia has never from what i understand been in direct conflict with anyone we've just joined other people's wars i think the only war that i know of that we had was the emu war and we lost that so if you wanted to kind of look that up it's on wikipedia yeah we lost that war um and other than that we haven't really been

in it so there's no kind of like history or culture around that we have some landmarks here and there to represent kind of like the soldiers that fought in other people's wars or other countries wars but yeah that's always kind of like a culture shock for me and especially the um i guess like how how densely packed a lot of the cities are compared to something like melbourne or or sydney which are definitely not uh you know the melbourne cbd is literally a business district there's not really that many apartments there uh where people live compared to i guess uh the european cities um it's it's mostly just kind of like suburban and like us out of you know the the outer ring of the city and stuff like that but yeah that was my i guess like journey of the last two weeks i as i said very very awesome to meet a

lot of people especially people that watch and listen to me ramble on every day on on the refuel and things like that um and at the i should mention at the event as well uh i judged the hackathon which was absolutely awesome like the 8th amsterdam hackathon so um as linda kind of like points out here there were 700 hackers from 56 countries and 31 of these people were new to web 3 which is absolutely awesome and the projects that i got to judge were pretty uh pretty cool as well um here are kind of like the the finalists so these are the 13 kind of like finance i judged uh nimmy.f uh and there was like i think there was one more in here and and i think i think no not collective action i think there was one more in here i can't

remember now um jet lag's kind of like playing up on me i think it was i think it was flown um so those are the two that i judged there which were really cool but you should definitely check out all of them i don't know if i had like a favorite out of all of them i think they were they were all really really cool um there was a lot less default representation than usual there's a lot of nft web 3 social stuff which is cool to see like um obviously you don't want to just see one category represented but a lot of cool stuff here especially stuff building or kind of like layer twos and and things like that but yeah this was i guess this is a picture of the co-working space but this was kind of like when it was trend transformed

for the hackathon um so this was kind of like the area and on that stage there that's where we kind of like had a live viewing of um of that of the kind of like finalists and everything like that um but yeah that's what that's the kind of like old amsterdam stock exchange building uh there so yeah check out this thread i'll link it in the youtube description for the finalists uh but i think that was it for my last two weeks now i'm going to move on to the plethora of updates that came out just a crazy amount like uh that i have to get through for today but i'm very excited to do that so let's start with this update from ar from the ethereum foundation which is as far as i know uh the first ever ethereum foundation transparency report which for those of you who don't know the

ethereum community has been asking for this for a very very long time like for as long as i've been in ethereum and they've been asking for it because the ef does a lot of work within ethereum but there's not that much transparency into their work they do post updates from time to time about the teams that they support and things like that but generally they will not give transparency into things like finances or their finances which is something that this report actually focused on so there are there's 28 slides 28 pages here i'm going to let you check this out for yourself but what i wanted to focus on was the um the financial kind of like side of things and i'm just going to scroll to that one now because it there is a slide on that where is it uh i think it is

uh af treasury so this is the first time they've done an actual treasury report and i'll just read out the meaty bits here so as of march 31 2022 the ef's treasury was approximately 1.6 billion dollars split between 1.3 billion dollars in crypto which we can all see uh on etherscan you know the 8th dev address holds all the eighth and then they said 300 million dollars in non-crypto investments and assets this is the part that we didn't have any insight into so this is pretty cool that they've got like 300 million dollars outside of crypto all together this is a really cool kind of like defensive strategy here and they go on to say that they follow a conservative treasury management pop uh policy that ensures they have sufficient resources to to fulfill the ef's core objectives um and they increase their

non-crypto savings in response to rising eth prices as we've seen you know this is meme that ef sells the top they don't really sell the top they just sell into strength which is actually like not a bad strategy i mean not investment advice but i think some of the best investors i know in this space are typically the ones who sell into strength even if the price doubles from where they've sold they're just taking profits uh that kind of like suit their own needs there and that's exactly what the ethereum foundation seems to do as well and there's a couple more slides about this um here's here is it represented as kind of like a pie chart um what they spent the money on in 2021 so they actually ended up spending a lot of money in in 2021 here uh they spent 48 million dollars uh and

uh i think the and 20 million of that was external spending i think they're on track to spend more than that for 2022 as well and here's a breakdown of where that money went uh i went to l1 r d he's over 20 million dollars spent on that and then a bunch of other categories here which i'll let you guys check out but yeah i highly recommend reading this whole report as i said it's the first time the ethereum foundation has kind of like put out this report which is super exciting for me to see i've been asking for this report as well for a long time especially around the funding which was great to see there so definitely recommend checking out this report i'll link it in the youtube description uh but i think there is a take here from uh sorry no no no no no take there from

trent that's about something else so yeah definitely go check out the report it'll be linked in the youtube description so trent uh put out here a kind of like a few pictures around the ethereum protocol r d amsterdam event now this event happened on the monday and tuesday of uh not last week the week before where the protocol teams got together and did a bunch of workshops around things uh mostly non-merge related as well so this was day two which was working on eip quadruple four the portal network status ethereum and proposal a proposal builder separation which which are some of the major upgrades coming to ethereum i guess like over i guess after the merge and you see here a bunch of just pictures of these workshops happening a lot of the core devs were at without this event i got to meet a lot

of them which was very very cool but yeah they're all working on just like non uh merge related stuff and obviously the merger was being talked about and some of the merge stuff happened here which i'm going to touch on later uh but this was very very cool to see so cool bunch of screenshots from trent here and then we have oh sorry i have to keep refreshing the pages here guys i think i crashed my chrome before by opening too many twitter pages but uh but yeah and next we have the quandary of uh kondru i think that's how you say it condreya i don't know how to say this our vocal test now is now open to the public at this link here which you can check out vocal trees are another kind of like upgrade coming to ethereum after the merge i've talked about these before so

if you want to get involved in the public testing that you can by heading to this link i'll link it in the youtube description uh below for you to do that all right next up we have this is gonna work yep the next up we have a a an update on uh the security teams funding from the ethereum foundation here so these are all the teams kind of like working on security especially on the clients this is obviously the stuff that we need to get done you know test nets things like that around the merge and other kind of like protocol upgrades so this is just a a kind of like recap on that so if you're interested in that you can check out this link it'll be in the youtube description below i think i'm gonna have to keep refreshing all these links uh okay now we're on to some non

uh layer one related news a new not new you guys will know about this scaling project i've talked about them before but scroll uh zk working on zk roll up stuff announced that they have raised 30 million dollars from bain capital and a bunch of other investors here so you can kind of like see who the investors are i mean i participated in this round as an angel just the disclosure there but uh this poly chain capital led the funding with bain robot ventures and geometry dow with others participating uh such you know bunch of angels here such as myself orion john adams uh santiago santos formerly of parify capital there uh and then they've got plans for a test net that they announced as well uh that basically going live soon that soon they're trying to build a zk evm so

this is i guess one of the i guess main l2 teams now i would say they've been building in stealth for a little while but yeah i mean i i think that they're kind of like up there in terms of like their technical prowess and what they're building with some of the the other greats like stockwear and mata labs and polygon um and i think that uh their zkvm is going to blow people away i i do believe that and i think that we have like four or five teams working on zk vm right now which is pretty crazy when you think about it right that we've gone from like zero to like four or five in such a short period of time um but yeah this is just another kind of like another another race for the long kind of like list of raises that have

happened for layer two teams i think that this just continues that trend and i think this isn't going to be the end of it i think we're going to keep seeing more and more of these razors uh obviously optimism announced their token which i'm actually going to talk about later i'm going through these updates as they kind of like happened from uh you know when i stopped doing episodes to today so they're all going to be kind of like in order but you know a lot of this news will be old to you guys at this point in time but i felt like it was i needed to cover it but yeah congrats to scroll on this raise obviously i'm proud to be an angel in in their kind of like race yeah but this isn't about me this is about scroll and everything they're doing to kind of like

scale ethereum all right so a a refill wouldn't be complete without a polynomial tweet i didn't mean for that to rhyme but it rhymes so paulie now tweeted out about a new project called data layout which is a data availability layout based on dank sharing that attempts to leverage the security of eth instead of a new token and is live on internal test net so this is just another data availability layer but i think i i shouldn't say just another i think they're they're um interesting because of the fact that they're using eighth and not issuing their kind of like own token and they're kind of like implementing dank sharding already so this is kind of like you could use this data availability network instead of ethereum to get kind of like cheaper i guess some fees and things like that but i think that you know you

can really pollinate us thread here for more information here but my kind of like opinion on these purely data availability layers is that short to medium term i think they're gonna they're gonna fit like a purpose but long term with like dank sharding and eip4488 on on kind of like uh on mainnet i don't know if they're gonna serve a purpose because mainnet you know posting data to maine is just going to get so cheap as i've discussed before it's going to be kind of like pennies on the dollar and i think when you get to that it doesn't really make much sense for other data availability networks to exist maybe it makes sense for kind of like these things that want to put absolutely everything on chain like games and stuff like that but for most use cases it's it's sacrificing security for for little benefits i think so we're

gonna have to see how that plays out but cool to see more data availability solutions i think this design space is large i don't think that we should just be relying on ethereum and it's it's kind of like dank sharding approach i think we should have kind of like multiple approaches here and there but uh but yeah cool to see this definitely give this thread from pulling a read i think it's very very interesting and i think that more competition is good in this space all right uh so connex network have announced their token so it's called next which i guess is a very uh aptly named token here uh they've detailed the token it's not out yet but they've detailed kind of like the token here how it all works distribution stuff like that um you know snapshots for the distribution of next uh the next airdrop has already

been taken so there's no way i guess uh to to farm it at this point the only way to potentially earn more tokens is through their contributor program um but yeah i'll let you guys read the blog post for more on kind of like how the you know tokens going to be used everything about it i don't actually think that they've detailed the distribution yet sorry um i think that that might be coming later but this is just basically the announcement that there will be a token as i said to you guys like everything's going to have a token this shouldn't be a surprise to to any of you everything except the daily way um but yeah this shouldn't be a surprise to you at all um and i think the they've said that the token will go live roughly a month from the date that they published this which

was april 20th so i guess we should expect around may 20th for the token to go live for more details to be announced on distribution and things like that uh and you can kind of like see the token address is already live on on on etherscan here the total supply will be a billion tokens and all that good stuff there so if you want the details of some of the details i guess of the next token definitely go check out this uh this blog post and get involved yourself as well at contribute.connects.network in order to earn more tokens if that's something that you want to do and i should disclose here i'm an investor and angel investing connects as well so just want to kind of like put that disclosure out there for you guys not trying to pump my bags or anything like that um but yeah they have a token

there we go all right on to the next thing here just a quick shout out to cll at clr fund which announced that they have with the support of their foundation it teamed up with easter eighth daycare to run a 350 000 die quadratic funding round on arbitram for uh public goods so you can go here uh and kind of like check out the details on this but the tldr is that uh that they've teamed up to offer this matching pool dedicated to open source public goods for the ethereum staking ecosystem so this is very cool i like this i like that there there's more kind of like uh i guess money going into the ethereum state ecosystem i'm going to talk about uh that a bit later around kind of like what the staking ecosystem looks like today because i know that lido was a big topic of discussion while

i was away for the last two weeks and i want to kind of like hit on that um but this is just kind of like trying to i guess fund the open source development of of kind of like more ethereum staking related things because i mean there's been a lot of hunger to stake recently but people have kind of like brought up that most of it's gone into lighter and i think that's because lido is kind of like the path of least resistance and as i said i'm going to talk more about that but but kind of like what clr finally is doing here is trying to kind of like improve that trying to get money into the hands of people that are kind of like developing solutions other than than lighter other than and solutions that make it easier for people to stake because we just need

more pads which is what i'm going to talk about later but anyway i'm going to leave it at that you can check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description all right so uh we have spruce id here who has announced a 34 million dollar series a lounge around led by a16z now i've talked about spruce a bunch before they're working on a bunch of different kind of like identity related solutions for crypto and web3 they're particularly working on signing with ethereum that's kind of like their flagship project right now and this funding will allow them to keep doing that which is very very cool to see now again disclosure i participated in this round um but yeah they had a bunch of investors participate in this round you can see here um you know as i said a16z uh kind of like um

i've led the round and then participation from a bunch of other investors here as well as a bunch of other angels that you can see listed here as well so i guess i congrats to them on this this is just like kind of like a raise announcement great to see uh more i guess like web3 stuff getting funding um you know obviously we've seen a lot of big raises around layer twos nfts and even d5 but this is kind of like web three this is kind of like core infrastructure for web three unbundling the login kind of like process the identity process kind of like the profile and all that sort of stuff is really really important i think um it's very very cool i think that web 3 kind of decentralized social media all that sort of stuff just going to get more important um that's actually one

thing i forgot to mention uh about my time in um in amsterdam i actually uh there's not that many details about it that's why i didn't mention it but i think i should mention anyway on the first day on the monday i actually spent the whole day recording for a documentary that is going to be uh kind of like a docu-series on how ethereum how crypto is going to enable kind of like web 3 and decentralized social media and how uh you know decentralization is going to help uh kind of like heal the world and heal us from all essential the perils of centralization that we seem to be suffering from and i think it's going to be really cool because it doesn't really focus on what ethereum is today it's going to focus on what a theme can do in you know five to ten years from now and

how it can change the world not just on the monetary front but on the kind of like social front and re-architect our centralized institutions in a decentralized way so i recorded you know it's a professionally shot thing it wasn't just kind of like some backyard thing professional set up professional cameras it came out really well maybe i'll share some tease images with you guys uh in the discord or maybe on twitter um when i get around to it there but that's something i should mention as well as as it's related to what spruce is doing around decentralized identity logging all that sort of stuff there so again congrats to spruce on the rays there all right we have another race here from oasis uh they have uh raised six million dollars in a series a led by libertas with participation from a bunch of different kind of i guess like uh angels

and funds here now i didn't participate in this race but i have used oasis many many times before for anyone who hasn't used oasis before they're basically building tools around kind of like um you know using different default tools they've been focusing on maker i've i've used oasis almost exclusively to manage my makeup positions and it's a really really cool service they're at oasis.app if you want to use them there but essentially uh they've kind of like raised this money obviously to keep developing this kind of like front end out uh for i guess like not just makeup but other d5 kind of like tools out there and i think that we need more of this we need more of these front ends that do you know do it all for d5 make it just really easy people to get involved with d5 to manage your

positions obviously there's a bunch of other solutions out there like insta dap and defy saber and stuff like that but the more the merrier i say like i don't think we should just have one i think we should have like thousands eventually right there's gonna i said before there's gonna be a bunch of kind of like decentralized and centralized front ends that hook into the d5 infrastructure that allow people to do all these sorts of things and allow people to kind of like choose their own adventure which i think is really really cool i think is really really important so very very cool to see this uh from oasis that they've raised six million dollars in uh series a round all right we have epns project which has raised a series a round as well they've raised 10.1 million dollars at a valuation of 131 million dollars now you

guys will know about epns as i have participated as a seed investor in them uh quite a while ago and i've been talking about them uh for a while now but basically epns stands for ethereum push notification service they want to do decentralized push notifications for the entire i guess like crypto web3 ecosystem which is something that we need obviously i think it's something really really cool that's why i back them i still support them i i very i'm very very um happy to to keep to supporting them here and i'm happy that they were able to raise a series a round to keep building out their vision of epns here so if you haven't checked out epns yet be sure to do do so and you can check out their full funding announcement in this uh in this kind of like article which i'll

link in the youtube description below all right we have uh i kind of like news uh from this ronin hack that happened now you guys remember that the ronin hack was to the tune of hundreds of million dollars worth of eighth one of the biggest hacks to happen in in crypto and it was on the kind of like bridge here but essentially the fbi has attributed the uh north korea as the hakka uh so the lazarus group which you may have heard of before um to hacking the the ronan bridge here which is crazy because the lazarus group is what's known as an apt or an advanced persistent threat in the cyber security world and these the apt is basically a threat so big it doesn't have to be a nation state but it's usually tied to a nation state where they can basically get away with

anything because of the fact they have nation state protection now what better thing for apts to target than crypto uh i guess like uh contracts or crypto bridges or anything to do with crypto because once they steal the funds there's no i guess kind of um way back for people like unless there's kind of like a centralized key that can reverse the transaction or anything like that if they're able to steal the funds and kind of like settle it on ethereum um a lot of the time there's just kind of like no way back there so the the chances of getting these funds back now is basically zero percent like there's zero chance um i think uh uh uh what's the company behind the sky mavis behind um ronin and axe and all that have already announced that they're going to be kind of like backstopping it

right you know raised funds by selling i guess like tokens out of their treasury in order to backstop it but yeah there's no way these funds are ever getting recovered like north korea is not just going to be oh hey guys we'll take a a 10 bounty and you guys can have all the funds back no and they're not really worried about how to get those funds out they just they'll find their own way to get them out like it's it's the north north korean government here doesn't matter i mean they've been finding ways around things like sanctions for ages so for them they don't really care so that was uh quite interesting to see that um that the fbi attributed north korea uh the lazarus group to this so quickly as well so now we know who was behind the attack um and i think we're just going

to keep seeing more and more of this as time goes on it doesn't really matter that uh uh they've kind of like known that this is the group at the end of the day these actors don't care because their nations stay back they're protected they basically have immunity from everything like if they if they're based in north korea then how is the fbi or how is anyone going to prosecute them they're not because there's no way north korea would ever extradite their own citizens let alone the citizens that they're funding to do these these attacks are to the us to prosecute them or to any other jurisdiction so that's why these apts are so um i guess like so scary and so kind of like such a big deal is because of the fact they can keep doing this keep getting away with it they're

state-sponsored actors so there's not really any recourse that anyone can have here but still cool to know cool no interesting to know that they were behind this attack and i guess like uh skye mavis is just gonna plug um the the attack instead of getting the eighth back from uh from lazarus group here all right so the block shared a article saying that coinbase's nft marketplace actually went live in beta on april 20th yeah so it's been i think a week and a half it's invite only at this stage but from all that i've seen it seems to have kind of like gone off to a slow start there doesn't seem to be that many people who are using it right now yes it's still closed off yes it's still kind of like a white list only mode but i don't know i feel like they waited too

long to launch this i mean we already have open c we have uh looks you know the looks rare marketplace we have a bunch of others popping up we have openc acquiring others like gem was a very popular marketplace that openc acquired uh we have yuga labs doing a bunch of crazy stuff um with their kind of um with their kind of ecosystem which i'm going to talk about a bit later but yeah i mean the nft marketplace is live i haven't used it yet myself i actually got an invite code for the beta but i was in amsterdam and i didn't really have any way to kind of like set it up and i wasn't really paying attention to it so i haven't used it yet i should use it but let me know if you have used it what your thoughts are you can jump in

the discord channel and tell me there if you're like obsessed with nfts you guys know that nfts are kind of like a not something i really pay attention to like i only really cover the major announcements here even though it's such a big ecosystem it's actually crazy like how big nfts are but like i just have so many other things i that are more interesting and that i want to pay attention to that i'm just kind of like not paying attention to nfts at all but i still kind of like um i guess from a higher level paying attention to the major developments and coinbase's nft marketplace is one of them i wonder if it's going to get more usage once they open it up to everyone but from what i've seen it's a nice interface it works well ish but yeah limited number of users right now just

because it's an invite-only uh sort of beta right now all right i just wanted to highlight this dune analytics dashboard from hill dobby here who i met in uh in amsterdam so that was great to meet him there but basically this new dashboard uh will show you everything we've got to do with two staking deposits such as the top deposited depositors deposited amount liquid staking market share validators and more so if you head to this dashboard here on dune you can kind of like see all this all this data so you can see here it's loading up so there's over 12 million eighth deposited right now over 379 000 validators uh liquid staking market share is at 34 this is what i was talking about with the lighter stuff before lighter has a 30 share um of kind of like um

of the liquid uh staking market share right now uh it's it's just crazy i mean and the validated crew has been kind of like non-stop full for the last i guess month or more which is pretty crazy to see i mean what is that right now if i load up this website over here it's at 14 400 still so it's hung around 14 000 pending validators for a while now and most of that has gone into to lighter which i don't know if i'm going to talk about that next now i'm going to talk about that soon um but uh but yeah this is a really cool dashboard from hill dobby that i just wanted to highlight you can go check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description below and lastly got to do with staking uh i um i mean lucy got to do with staking i

did a written interview with cryptostaker.com that you can check out i'll i'll link it in youtube description but it's basically a bunch of kind of like questions that i answered and and kind of like it was very interesting um so thank you to kryptostaker perhaps for letting me uh kind of like uh answer these questions here you can check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description below uh now this is where i'm gonna take my first kind of like break but i'm gonna be back with the rest of the updates uh in in the new kind of like uh tabs so i'll see you guys in a sec all right and i'm back so during the i guess last two weeks there was another mainnet shadow fork that happened on i believe last saturday it's not the one that just passed the one before that

this was successful so you can see here ben edgington had a running thread on the mainnet shadow fork that was kind of like happening uh at kind of like the dev connect venues here and we got to terminal total difficulty which is obviously the threshold that needs to be met for the emerge to happen and we had a fork of mainnet running on proof of stake now i think everything went fine there were no major issues i think that uh there was kind of like maybe a couple of small issues that were ironed out but yeah it seems to have gone well as danny ryan says here which is very very cool to see so these mainnet shadow forks for those of you who don't know are so important because it basically allows us to fork the network for the existing network uh and kind of

like create this uh this mainnet shadow fork as we've kind of like called it in order to test things like the merge using kind of like a real environment using kind of like something that represents real live ethereum which is obviously very important for catching things like edge cases during the testing of the merge so very very cool to see this just one step further to the merge there's actually more merge related info that i'm going to get to later but but cool to see this and cool to see kind of like ben's thread here documenting that there just wanted to kind of like mention that that happened on the april april 23rd um the the saturday that i just mentioned there all right so a very interesting kind of like proposal or i guess like um something out of the eu here where the

eu officials have been talking about banning bitcoin uh and by that they want to ban bitcoin by essentially kind of i guess like suppressing its prices or some comments about this because of the the fact they understand that the higher the bitcoin bitcoins price goes uh the more kind of like miners come online more hash power comes online the more energy gets used and there's actually a comment here which i i think i remember saying on a refuel and the discord channel but this comment in as i quote says if ethereum is able to shift to proof of stake we could we could legitimately request the same from bitcoin remember i said this to you guys i don't know when i said it it's been a while now where i basically said that the popular narrative is going to be once ethereum transitions from proof of

work to proof of stake is like why can't bitcoin do that and you know the thing is like why can't bitcoin do that right like i'm not anti-proof of work i know why can't why bitcoin can't do that like as someone in the ecosystem or i know why bitcoin won't because the ecosystem just does not want it but a lot of people sitting on the outside are not going to have this kind of like uh this i guess context and they're going to be legitimately asking that question and that's going to lead to just more and more bad narratives for bitcoin for proof of work uh and bitcoin's going to be fighting that battle alone and i think that i've seen that kind of like fud around the merge pick up lately where people are saying you know i think that ethereum should remain proof of work i think that

there's a few reasons for this one people just kind of like chasing engagement farming which a lot of people do but i think the second reason i think more more of a legitimate reason is that having a theorem on side and as as proof of work in the in the upcoming fight against kind of like these nation states and their bad narratives around people work or just you know bad narratives in general um would be much more beneficial than ethereum being proof of stake well i mean i'm sorry to break it to everyone ethereum is going to be proof of stake very very shortly and we will not have to fight this battle and i'm so so happy about this i do not want to fight this kind of like ridiculous battle that's going to be ensuing doesn't matter who's right or wrong the narrative around

proof of work is going to get so much worse guys like it's it's already bad but it's going to get so much worse and once ethereum is proof of stake it's going to be even worse for bitcoin because as i said and as the quote is kind of like um is laid out here the narrative is going to be like why can't bitcoin change to proof of stake and honestly i actually think bitcoin needs to change proof of stake anyway uh just from a kind of like economical security point of view you guys know and i've discussed this before about how bitcoin's blocked subsidy isn't going to be enough to to maintain bitcoin's network security um and then they're going to rely on fees which the fees aren't even close to enough the fear revenue has been stagnant if not decreasing for a while now because all the activities is

basically moved to ethereum and other networks uh so yeah bitcoin's going to need a solution to that and i think the solution to that is moving to proof of stake and and adding a perpetual inflation and you know this is why i think ethereum has the best design for economic security because layer one is going to be that settlement layer we're going to have perpetual issuance but that issuance is going to be offset by a fee burn and the fee burn uh works because ethereum has real economic activity happening on it and growing right and layer one you know i know the fees are high but there are plenty of people willing to pay those high fees and and there's plenty of um uh things like layer twos that are willing to pay those high fees as well so when you take all that into

account ethereum has such an amazing i guess like uh tailwind behind it moving to proof of stake whereas bitcoin has this incredible headwind in proof of work and i think this is going to be one of the major drivers of the flipping i've always thought this i think you know if you're moving to proof of stake more and more eth being locked up uh being negative issuance deflationary all the bad narratives going away for ethereum around proof of work is just really going to lead to to that flipping and i think that within a very short period of time uh ethereum will flip bitcoin after after the the merge i think in a short period of time i mean depends how you define it i think it could happen within a couple of years i think that's a short period of time when considering kind of like the long arc of

crypto but i think that it can happen relatively quickly i mean i'm going to go on at my bullish rant at the end of uh at the end of this episode about kind of like eighth and what i expect to do over the next couple of years especially post merge but yeah i just wanted to kind of like highlight this and highlight just how bad these narratives are gonna get for bitcoin it's it's gonna be so bad i was like i don't think people are prepared for how bad it's going to get i think bitcoin should stop kind of like calling everything else a scam and call and you know focusing on ethereum i think they should look inward and focus on bitcoin because if they don't it's getting flipped and then there's nothing to stop it from getting flipped again like there's no guarantee

it remains at number two after that guys like bitcoin's claim to fame really is being number one like that's it like if once it loses that spot i am convinced that it's going to lose number two number three i don't see how anything's gonna keep it there like the total adjustable market for for bitcoin is actually relatively small compared to everything else out there and i know there's a lot of people who would argue against that but i i don't think that that's going to be the case i believe in the flipping since pretty much i got into ethereum i continue to believe in it i believe that even when ethereum against bitcoin was kind of like dumped really really hard during 2018 and 2019 and i'm not going to stop believing that because i believe ethereum has the best design to accrue value to the asset and

the best design for economic security which is incredibly important on the longer time frames but i'm going to go into that uh later in the episode there but just wanted to highlight this here all right so i alluded to this uh topic before but basically i put out a tweet uh on april 22nd here where i said lido is not the enemy the enemy is the fact that most people always take the path of least resist resistance especially when money making opportunities are involved if we want to fight this we need to create more paths not demonize the creators of those paths now this was a tweet i put out in reaction to the concern around lido getting a large share of of the staking kind of i guess of the stake teeth going into the beaking chain at this point this is a few different reasons i think the

biggest reason is that they just make it so easy to do it like once the eighth goes in you get the ste token and then you can exit your staked eighth position without having to wait for withdrawals if you want to and if there's sufficient liquidity to do so uh and you know as we know most people are always going to take the path of least resistance and right now lido is that path i think exchanges are probably you know centralized exchange staking is probably easier but they don't give you this kind of like derivative token that you can use within d5 that you can sell if you want to later on or anything like that right they just let you stake with one click and they actually take more of a fee i believe so lido has become very very dominant we obviously have alternative staking

service providers or pool staking providers like rocketpool swell there's a few others out there but slido is far and away the biggest i think they have a 90 market share at this point and as we know liquidity gets liquidity so they've got like a very nice flywheel going for them right now now the reason why i mean there's a few reasons why i said that they're not the enemy the first one as i outlined in the tweet is that we shouldn't be demonizing them for creating a product that lots of people love to use we should be making more parts and we should be kind of like looking at the design of the beacon chain and being okay what can we change here maybe not so much at a protocol level but as kind of like the app level to make sure that the stake is

more distributed well one of those ways is to build better pooled staking services and build more of them i think rocketpool is fine but rocketpool is inherently limited by uh by a few different mechanisms that that kind of like makes it tick it makes it work uh whereas lido is not limited by that we also need to look at things like liquidity beginning liquidity lido is going to probably remain large for quite a while because of the fact that they have all the liquidity and you know as i said more liquidity but gets more liquidity and so on there's like a flywheel effect there but i think that i have this kind of like opinion that might be contrarian i actually flirted this opinion with a few people at devconnect and people didn't really agree with me on this because of that liquidity beginning liquidity phenomenon

but i don't think lido is going to remain at 90 forever i think the business opportunity for staking eighth is so so big um especially pooled staking that i think lido's share will actually come down in time as more services come online and especially in kind of like a post withdrawal world not post merger post withdrawals we're actually going to see a big shuffling of of staking i believe we're going because of the fact that withdrawals are now enabled i think that people are going to kind of like shuffle around who they're staking their eighth with they're going to withdraw and then re-enter maybe fire a different service maybe not via lighter at this time or maybe not via a centralized exchange fire a different service and we're going to see a shuffling there and it's going to take a while because of that validator queue

for the shuffling to take place but there should be a name for this maybe the great reshuffling of eat steak i think we're going to see this definitely i think a lot of people are going to enter and exit various different reasons and they're going to do so through different services um and i guess like on to my second point here creating more paths we also just need to make it really really easy if people to stake on their own like as toby kitty says here you know we need to incentivize solo staking which i totally agree with but it's one of the harder parts right now right like especially with the 32th requirement but even if we remove the 32 requirement staking on your own is not an easy endeavor like i mean i don't consider it like super hard to do i think following the guides you

can actually get to a point where you do it or using things like dap node um but it's still not like very very easy like a one-click kind of thing right so we need to make that a reality but also at the same time you have like even if you have 32 eth and maybe you you know you want you want a solo stack to support the network but you also want to get a derivative token you also want to get like a token that represents your stake teeth right now that can't be can't be done kind of like in protocol because of the fact that there's no withdrawals so lido is actually taking on a risk here by by issuing this right now and if there was a bank run this could be an imbalance in the liquidity pools but um and you know

same with kind of like rocker pool with reef and stuff like that but i think uh you know post withdrawals we're going to have more options here as well so that's kind of like one thing there but um we need to kind of like just create more parts we need to create more parts in the in the kind of like sense of making it easy to solo stake getting more staking service providers online uh you know better education as well i think is is is one thing and just realizing that as i said people will always take the path of least resistance and unfortunately most people you know at least i guess from uh uh maybe from kind of like uh a first principle sort of speaker like from you know just getting to this ecosystem from a kind of like uh just just first thing

i think that uh when you kind of look at all that and take all that into account people will just not care about decentralization at the beginning they only care about it when it matters so we might see kind of like a great slashing event at one point that gets people to care and stuff like that but this is the state of it right now as i mentioned before by looking at hill dobby's doing another league's dashboard i think lido accounts for like ninety percent of uh of the pooled staked eighth they're 30 of the whole stake date i think right now which is obviously not ideal but we're gonna have to see how this plays out post withdrawals i think pre withdrawals is kind of like very hard to tell very hard to kind of like uh assign any kind of like weight to any of this

sort of stuff um but yeah i mean lido's just created such a good product that people love to use we should not demonize them for that we should be encouraging people to create products and i think they will because of the fact that the business opportunity is just so big um and we're going to see more of that i think post withdrawals here all right so speaking of staking superfiz share that there is a new uh project called project sunshine which is a new dashboard to monitor decentralization in ethereum it's very early npr's are welcome um but you can kind of like check this out here so this is just another website to monitor i guess like the health of ethereum's decentralization across more than just client diversity so you can see here client diversity is actually pretty amazing right now um you know there's

only uh kind of like 48 of the super majority that being i think prism still so that's come down a lot uh but you can see here execution client diversity is nowhere good enough right now it's only at 14 uh kind of like percent so it's in the danger zone here you can see and then you can see how many clients we have on the consensus and execution side we have five each year and then we have non-hosted validators and geolocation diversity which is still kind of like a work in progress with a bunch of others uh other metrics coming as well so you can help them if you want by contributing on github it's all open source so definitely go check this out and put in some pull requests uh there so polygon had two massive announcements uh that that kind of like came out of

their event polygon ignite at at devconnect tr so the first one was a new i guess like uh spoke in their ethereum scaling suite called polygon super nets which are an answer to uh i guess like avalanches subnets which as i described them here are dedicated to scalable blockchains that aim to ignite mass adoption of polygon and web 3. they put 100 million dollars behind this as part of a support fund now the reason why i say that they're the answer to avalanche subnets which are really just side chains is because i mean they're called supernets right like this is not not an accident like the name is pretty much uh pretty much kind of like a play on subnets here but it's basically the same design where people can kind of like spin up their own blockchains with their own validator sets uh and and

basically uh kind of like create i guess like a more scalable but less secure systems so essentially what they can do is the same as what avalanche subnets can do uh they can use uh the polygon pos chain validators out of the box they're interconnected can be managed maintained by their polygon certified partners and supports the edge architecture so this is actually powered by polygon edge which is polygons kind of like data availability uh sorry not data availability network yeah it's their um they're kind of like a sdk so it was known as polygon sdk here so this is a very very cool major announcement out of them cool to see this i mean some people people were critical of this being like you know why do we need this like this is just a copy of avalanche subnets blah blah but

really guys like avalanche is just a copy of like ethereum so i mean i'm all for kind of like copying back and kind of like hitting them where it hurts and stuff like that so i'm i'm happy to see this at a polygon but as i said before i think stuff like this may be niche and i don't think it's going to be kind of like the long-term sustainable scalable solution once we have kind of like that cheaper data on ethereum and more mature roll-ups but i think it's needed for the for the short to medium term and i think it's that needed long-term for niche use cases as well like maybe even gaming and stuff like that and the second major announcement out of polygon is that stripe has integrated with them to uh kind of like introduce crypto payments here so this is being

done by the polygon pos chain from what i understand um so basically uh people using stripe can now be paid out via a crypto wallet uh in addition to bank accounts and debit cards that they've been able to get paid out to before now for those of you who don't know what who stripe is they're an absolutely massive payment processor this isn't a small time kind of like thing this is absolutely huge and the fact that they've chosen polygon to do this is is massive i really like the chosen polygon um and and and kind of like enabled this and enable this kind of like payout infrastructure using uh using the polling on pos chain now in the future i'm sure they're going to add more options here hopefully we see some kind of like roll-up options that'd be really cool to see but i think starting

with the polygon pos chain makes a lot of sense since i mean stripe is centralized payments to begin with so then using um maybe a less secure solution with the polygon pos chain then something like a roll up is totally fine like i don't think that that's a big deal at all i don't think you need ultra security for uh payouts from centralized solutions and and you know this is one of those kind of like solutions that i've discussed before that just doesn't need that ultra ultra security um that ethereum gives you with roll-ups and stuff like that so and then the polygon post train has more kind of like uh a mature infrastructure at this point in time has more integrations with uh with kind of like crypto stuff so yeah it makes sense for this to kind of like be playing out like this so

i guess congrats to polygonal landing this absolutely massive uh partnership here with stripe all right so another raised announcement here this one from liquify that have raised five million dollars to build the carter for web 3 uh from investors such as dragonfly nascent six-man six-man ventures and more uh disclosure i participated in this round as an angel of course uh but i participated because i really get what liquify is trying to build here they basically want to build a unified dashboard for uh companies kind of like issuing tokens so for those of you who have used kata before card has been used by crypto companies but it's really only a platform for equity it's not a platform for tokens and uh with liquify what they want to do and for those of you who kind of like have

any kind of like tokens that are vesting out to you they basically want to make this a dashboard where you can see things like you know you start date of your investing what the length is of the vesting where your tokens are kind of like how much you've been paid out you know where they're being paid out to what their value is all that sort of stuff the way it currently exists is this fragmented mess like i have a bunch of projects paying out you know resting out to me right now that i invested in and they all have their own dashboards or maybe they're using sablia and things like that and sableye doesn't really give you that much information anyway i wasn't really built for this so liquify is creating the kind of like all-in-one solution and the reason why i invested in it is because like as i said i see

the value immediately in it because i have so many companies that i've invested in and it's just like really annoying having to go through everything having to record things in spreadsheets having to go to different links just to kind of like manage all these positions so if i had one unified dashboard for this sort of stuff sort of like how i have cada for equity uh i'd be you know i'd be much happier about it so yeah that's why i think liquify is really really great uh and i guess that congrats to them on the race here i'm you know i'm i'm pretty happy to to participate as an angel here um but definitely check them out if this applies to you obviously it's something that is more for people like the i guess like investors and the angel investors and things like that but the thing is i think people can

invested out tokens from anywhere not just from being an angel investor like maybe you've invested in kind of like a um an ico or i guess we're not calling it icos these days but like something that invests the art could be applied to here as well so anything to do with vesting anything paying out can use liquify uh so yeah very very cool to see this in congrats to them on the rays all right so zapper's ios mobile wallet app is now live well it was live as of april 22nd i'm just reporting on this later so you can download this in the app store uh here if you've got an ios device and you can kind of like import all your accounts and stuff here which is also very very cool now as i've said to you guys before i think i played around with

this when it was in kind of like beta it works very very well you got all the the same features you have i guess on on desktop but i think with with kind of like the mobile wallet app they're actually going to take this um a bit further and kind of like turn it into an actual wallet instead of just the kind of like a dashboard you see here i'm featured in the video here like my profile which is pretty cool uh but yeah this is this is really cool uh definitely check it out if you haven't yet you can download it it'll be linked in the youtube description uh below alright so something i wanted to highlight here is just how powerful uni swaps brand awareness is the unisop protocol after just three months of launching on the polygon pos chain has 50 of the market share that's

crazy crazy considering that there are app that there are kind of like amms that have been live on the polygon pos chain such as quick swap for a long time these have been native amms that uh do not have uh the you know the the market share that um the polygon has here and you can kind of like see what the market share looks like on this uh this dune analytics dashboard here so essentially uh i think that uh this is the actual query that's running here but i think that unisop you know counting 50 and then you've got a bunch of others like sushi swap quick swap clipboard kyber and balancer uh making up the other 50 so uni swap i think at this point we'll probably have over 50 because this is from april 21st um it just speaks to just the brand awareness

of of uni swap right like when i think of amms i immediately think of unisop i trust uni swap i want to use it if i'm liquidity providing i definitely want to do it through uni swap and stuff like that because i know their contracts are secure i know that the um they're built with kind of like uh security in mind i know that you know it's just a brand that i trust i think a lot of people forget this is that everything is brand awareness brand trust it doesn't matter if it's decentralized or centralized it's going to be the same thing so i think that it's just really cool this is just a really cool kind of like start to highlight just how much trust people have in polygon and and and how um big brand awareness is for for for uh for uni sorry i'm going to trust people

having units hop and how big the brand awareness is for uni swap here all right so this is an interesting tweet put out by wayfield which shows the very clear divide between crypto twitter and nft twitter now you can see crypto twitter is on the left in circled in red nft twitter is on the right circled in purple and then there's a subsection called the apes which i guess of the the people with the eight profile pictures circled in uh i guess like a turquoise here now i've mentioned this before and i've mentioned how big this divide is and it really is just kind of like two different worlds here you have most people in crypto twitter and most people in nft twitter that have absolutely no interest in each other there's no real overlap here i mean there are some people in the middle

between the two but most for the most part there's hardly any overlap between the two communities and i see this easily like on whenever i'm on crypto twitter like i see just the difference between it and a lot of people that are kind of like big on nft twitter uh have big accounts on there they're not following like me there's not a lot of people that i know that are following them i'm not following them there's just this huge divide and i think it's typically because nft people generally don't care about crypto they don't care about ethereum they don't care about things like the merge layer twos whatever all they care about is trading jpegs at least most of them there are some of them that care about the other stuff but most of them just care about trading jpegs and i think a lot of the

complaints around gas fees come from this community because they don't understand how ethereum works how ethereum is going to scale they don't understand why the fees are high and that was just really eye-opening to me uh uh when i kind of like saw this image when i kind of like ran it through uh kind of like my head and things like that uh and kind of like seeing it just visualized was just yeah incredibly eye-opening so i'm glad that wave put out this tweet it kind of like validates my thesis that i already had around these communities being very separate and i think this is going to continue to separate i just i genuinely don't think that most people that will ever come into nfts will ever care about the underlying infrastructure and i think this is going to be true for most use cases like defy i think a lot of it's

just going to be used through kind of like front ends and centralized intermediaries and most people aren't going to care about uh what's what's kind of like powering it at all and crypto twitter will just become like this niche community of just like a small relatively small group of people that care about these sorts of stuff and that's fine like honestly i mean there's a there's a small community of people who care about the protocols powering the internet and pay attention to that sort of stuff i'm not one of those people but i use the internet we all use the internet right um there's a small group of people who care about all the infrastructure powering the internet but most of us uh most people don't and that's gonna be the same for crypto like to be to expect anything else is to be naive i believe and i think that there

might be a bit more care just because of the people people holding the tokens of these different projects like if you hold eighth maybe you care slightly more about what's coming for ethereum in terms of upgrades because you might believe it's going to pump eighth and things like that obviously like the merge but i think for the most part there's just going to be this divide that's going to keep growing between the different communities that use the the kind of like platform and actually care about the underlying infrastructure here so if you're listening to this on the podcast definitely check out i'll link this tweet and link this image in the youtube description below look for 0x wave in the youtube description and you'll be able to see the image that i'm talking about here all right so last thing i wanted to kind of i guess highlight here was my second

video that i did with altcoin daily which was talking about layer twos and how ethereum is scaling for those of you who watched the refuel religiously this would be nothing new to you but i still think you should go check this out for just like i think i think it's about 20 minutes kind of like recap of kind of like l2s how ethereum scaling the modular approach all that good stuff there i'll link this in the description for you to check out if you would like uh but that's the end of the second uh kind of like a set of tabs i have here take another break be back in a sec with the last set of tabs uh last set of kind of like things to talk about there all right we're back with what is probably the biggest news from the last two weeks which was optimism announcing

something called the optimism collective which includes their governance uh kind of system and of course the op token now we all know this has been a long time coming the first major l2 to issue a token uh this is the token wars they've begun right like the layer two token wars now i want to focus on the non-token things first with up with what optimism announced because i think it's really cool so the optimism collective is basically their i guess as i mentioned like governance system kind of like their way of doing things they're kind of a culture that they're trying to kind of set here now uh there's all these kind of like details you can read in these blog posts i'm sure you've already read it there's no there's no point me trying to tell you to read it on like this is i mean one of the most

popular uh kind of like um events in in crypto history sorry in ethereum's history he had to happen so i'm sure you guys have already done it but they have a bunch of blog posts one introducing the collective one one outlining the vision they've got like this tweet thread that kind of does a tldr now what i really want to focus on is uh how the optimism collective is going to be governed so it's actually going to be governed co-equally by two houses that they're calling the citizens house and the token house now obviously the token house is pretty self-explanatory it's going to have like token incentives in there the the token token's going to be managed here the treasury is going to be managed here um and it's all going to be run by the op token and the citizens house will be doing things like retroactive public

goods funding and citizenship for this house is non-transferable so once you become a citizen of the citizens house uh you cannot transfer that citizenship to another ethereum address from my understanding now i think your citizenship can be revoked um i would assume that it would be need to be revoked by the citizens themselves uh but this is really cool this is starting to look more like the real world government government systems that we already have which i think actually work quite well for separation of power so you have here like the token holders are separated from the citizens who um have maybe an nft that kind of like represents their citizenship and then i can imagine like a third prong coming and that being the judiciary kind of like um house which is kind of like the courts right like arbitration process um which you know could fit in here as well so

this is kind of like how they're how they're going about it here which i thought was very very interesting and the goal is to obviously drive sustainable growth of the optimism ecosystem so they outlined here the citizens house will govern public goods funding uh and then the token house will be powered obviously by op and it governs some stuff like protocol upgrades project incentives and more and it also drives growth now of course there's an airdrop of the op token but not just one airdrop there are going to be multiple airdrops so the first airdrop that they've done you can check your eligibility at this link here app.optimism dot io governance uh they basically uh i kind of um did uh a bunch of kind of like different things you had to meet a different kind of criteria you had to made not just on

the optimism network but in the system more generally such as being like a multi-sig signer or kind of um uh donating on git coin and if you got six out of six you've got a massive token bonus on sassel.8 i actually ended up getting six out of six which uh was a complete surprise to me i was like holy crap like that's that's a coincidence there that's the only address that i really got like any material op tokens on but i think the maximum you got was something like 30 000 op tokens uh which was crazy because the i think 25 000 of that was the bonus for hitting all six which is which is quite insane there uh now the token's not live yet it's going live i think in the next few months after this announcement so i'm not sure when that will be it could be any time

you know in may june or july or i would assume so it's going live uh quite soon there but yeah there's only uh there's not only one airdrop there's going to be multiple airdrops now what i really like about them teasing multiple airdrops is that they have uh obviously optimism has this thing called retroactive public goods funding where they take all the revenues all the profits from their sequencer that they have right now and donate it retroactively to public goods now there's kind of like a flyer wheel here that that develops where the demand for op block space goes up uh public goods funding goes up investments into more public goods goes up and i put a tweet out here i said future op airdrops is the best psyop because what it does is it drives more activity on optimism for people who are trying to farm the

airdrop it generates more fear of a new for optimism from that and then it donates that fear revenue to public goods it's turning degeneracy into regeneracy as i've kind of like been talking about a lot on the refuel over the last few months just turning kind of like people into regens and this does that because activity and optimism already went up because people are like oh i better get on there because there's going to be future air drops and that will naturally lead them to check out all the stuff that's happening on optimism and to lead them to actually using the network even more which just generates more revenue and donates more to public goods and that's just amazing flywheel that's kind of like going on here so i really really liked that they basically announced that there's gonna be future airdrops and there's as far as i know the the um the

way the future air drops will be kind of like constructed will be based on i think the governance from both the token house and the citizens house coming to kind of consensus on how to do this um and and kind of like stuff like that as well so you can read more about this in all of these kind of i guess like blog posts they've linked here there's also kind of like an overview of the governance there's also the eligibility criteria here of of for the op um erp token also the allocation so this is kind of like the pie chart of the kind of total thing here so i think what makes people are generally interested in is how much are investors in the core team getting well investors in the core team are getting about 30 uh if i'm doing my math right 35 i think is my

math right there oh 36 percent um of the total network and the remainder is going to 20 to retroactive public goods funding 25 to an ecosystem fund which is split out on the right hand side that you can see there and 19 is actually going to user air drops five percent has been allocated to air drop one and 14 for future air drops i actually think this is one of the better token allocations out there uh i think it's not too heavy on the investor and core contributor side remember core contributors includes the whole team i think optimism's teams up to 40 people right now and in the future that's going to be even more um and then sugar zaddy's they call it here which is investors is 17 this is investors across the seed i think pre-seed seed series a and series

b which is coming in at 17 and then as i said like most of the uh the allocations is going to the community because retroactive public goods funding is going to community projects and anything that kind of like the dow votes on ecosystem fund is going to similar things there's going to be um what i found interesting there's going to be 5.4 percent of this ecosystem fund dedicated to a seed fund which means that the optimism collected will be don't it will be uh fun uh investing in other projects and and kind of like getting a share of that uh that token into them as well and then user airdrops of course that's going directly to users there which i thought was very very cool let me know what you think of this i think there was a bit of pushback on kind of like this design and this token

distribution uh i know some people were saying oh that's too much for investors and call contributors and i kind of look at this i'm like like guys like how much do you think that these people should get like okay investors is one thing but call contributors this is something i wanted to kind of like talk about core contributors i mean these people have been working on scaling ethereum some of them since like 2016 and they haven't really taken anything from it i mean they may have eat bags that have gone up in value and all that sort of stuff but they haven't monetized optimism at all they haven't generated any money for themselves they've actually donated all the revenue that they've generated which is millions of dollars by the way from their sequencer to public goods funding so i don't understand why people are being critical of core contributors

taking 19 when as i said that is split amongst pretty much like the whole company not just the founders but like everyone in the company now obviously people's shares are different i'm not sure exactly what the breakdown is there but uh yeah i don't know why people are kind of like uh harping on about that and then investors guys like until recently no i wanted to fund this stuff like the money was not raining down upon the layer two teams until recently and and uh optimism did their seed uh round uh really early on and then they did their series a round earlier on series beer was very recently but their seed round uh i'm not i don't think there was much money going around for them back then when they wanted to do this like scaling ethereum was not something that people really even cared

about because gas prices were quite cheap still and no one really kind of like no one had the foresight most people didn't i i kind of like i kind of knew that the gas prices were going to go up but no most people didn't have the foresight of this and so they weren't investing here it's just recently over the last i guess year or so that investments into layer twos have exploded but don't take that to to kind of like uh mean that it's always been like that and generally when in the kind of like seed stage especially if you're finding it hard to raise money you have to give up more of the company to do so so i actually think 70 going to investors is not that big when you consider optimism's history um but i should disclose here that i'm a series b

investor here but that doesn't really have any bearing on my thoughts on this um i think this is just a great distribution and doing air drops doing token distributions is really hard like it's not a solved problem i don't think you can ever perfect it you can only get as close to the perfection as possible we only do that through iterating through and through experimenting now this isn't me saying to you guys that uh you should go buy op tokens or i think it's going to be a good investment i possibly can't i can't possibly say that because i mean i have a conflict of interest of course as being an investor but i also don't know at the end of the day i have told you guys plenty of times before that a lot of these tokens um not not not necessarily like uh optimism or l2

tokens but just tokens in general like a lot of them have no reason to be worth anything like i'm actually amazed that some of them are even worth anything when you kind of like look at how they accrue value so i'm not going to make any comments on the tokens value or anything like that but i think the distribution is actually fine like i actually think that honestly 20 to retroactive public goods funding is insane this is going directly to public goods funding guys like this is this is coming directly this is a fifth of the tokens going to this sort of stuff so i don't know i thought that was very very cool and i think that the way they're just structuring their entire governance process with um with the token house and the citizens house and possibly kind of like the the future

the um the judiciary house later i mean i don't that's just something that i've kind of like um come up with but this this is kind of like super cool i just love it i think this is one of the most ambitious and interesting governance kind of like designs that i've seen and i can't wait to see this kind of like play out in the ecosystem so that was the biggest news from the last two weeks i think uh trent van epc had a great kind of like um a take on this where he said you know many cool tidbits around uh the optimism collective he said that well considered initial airdrop with more in the future non-transferable governance with balanced token governance reaffirming public goods commitment and you can mint the post the actual blog post on on a mirror on l2 as an nft which is really

really cool so optimism really does seem to be setting the standard here around governance and around tokens and stuff like that i really i'm really curious to see what other l2s do now you know arbitram is already pretty much teasing their token because stephen goldfeder said on twitter the other day uh the appetizer comes before the main course and i took that to reference you know optimism being the appetizer uptrend being the main cause we'll have to see we'll have to see how that shakes out how all the other l2 shake out with their tokens governance processes but optimism really set the bar here and it's a it's a high bar to reach now i think but very cool to see this we'll obviously keep you guys updated on everything happening within that ecosystem if you haven't onboarded optimism yet i mean now would be the time to do so you could

possibly get an airdrop in the future but also you can just check out the awesome ecosystem they have on there that's been developing over the last i guess six months or so especially uh so yeah go check that out all right so uh i guess pauline uh sorry before i move on polly now how to take on optimism as well where they said it's interesting to see just how innovative roll up tokens can be unshackled from the challenging work of economic security aka the consensus part of a blockchain so challenging indeed that only two protocols in this industry's history has gotten remotely close to achieving it and no one else is even attempting it those two protocols being bitcoin and ethereum as i said to you guys before it is so much better to just have an l2 not have to worry about economic security consensus all that

sort of dirty stuff that's just like really hard and we've seen the failures of this time and time again of these other chains i mean i was um i was in transit in dubai yesterday and i saw that solana went down again and i was like what like for the same reasons that we've been calling for like many months now that their bots are just going to spam the network and keep them keep killing the network and that's what keeps happening um it's just really freaking hard to do consensus at scale guys like it's really hard to keep it decentralized it's really hard to um kind of like scale a layer on blockchain and as i've said before i don't think the monolithic approach is long-term sustainable we're already seeing it break apart at the seams the the best approach is modular for so many

different reasons i am so bullish on the modular approach i get more and more bullish on the modular approach as time goes on i think optimism with their token setting a standard setting a trend and the next year or so we're going to see an explosion in these sorts of things happening and i really do think if the market hits up again post merge we're going to see just an absolute explosion in everything across this ecosystem i'm so bullish i'm gonna save the rest of my bullish rant for the end of uh this video i've got a few things a few other things to get through before i do that um and oh yeah there's also like a bad take here from em and guns here from avalanche which i i guess kind of was like expected where he said called it every l2 will eventually issue its own

asinine token and try to cannibalize eighth which is the dumbest take ever and john here uh on twitter said called it and it kind of like in a sarcastic term every subnet will eventually issue its own asinine token and try to cannibalize avax except they won't pay a penny back to avalanche unlike rolloffs with which pay will pay tons of fees back to ethereum so this is true subnets if they issue their own token in avalanche will not pay uh back to avax holders or it will not benefit avax holders because it's not paying back to the avalanche network itself it's issuing its own token but with l2 tokens guys as you guys know l2s have to pay ethereum in eth for their security so it doesn't matter if they issue their own tokens or wait they'll they will always be posting

their proofs and their data at least roll ups um will to layer one ethereum and always be paying in eighth for that which obviously most of that gets burned and it flows back to eath holders and we have this just beautiful economic security this beautiful system happening with the symbiotic relationship between l1 ethereum and l2 ethereum emin right here is actually spreading uh information and i'm pretty sure he's smart enough to know this so at this point he's just being willfully spreading this misinformation which i consider to be one of the biggest sins in this industry as an educator and i freaking hate it um emman blocked me so i can't even reply to his shitty takes anymore but like i when i saw this i was like this is just getting me really angry because um emma knows better for one two is

completely false three i can't reply to it to tell him it's completely false but other people did which is nice um and you know i i just kind of like look at this and i'm like they're scared like anyone fighting roll-ups at this point he's just scared especially if they're building monolithic chains like solana like avalanche like some of the others out there they're just scared they're really really scared of ethereum and it's rollup centric vision because why wouldn't you be it makes the most sense right it basically kills all these alternative l1 platforms it kills them dead guys once we have dank sharding in the new year in 2023 and roll ups are basically sent on the dollar to deploy to and they have a better developer experience and they have more users they have a better network effect than any of these alt l1 the older ones are going to

fade into irrelevancy very very quickly i believe and then we're just going to see an explosion in roll-ups happening on ethereum it's going to be magical it's going to be awesome i am super excited for it as you can tell and i just get more and more excited as time goes on about layer twos about roll-ups and all the stuff that they can do especially with their tokens so i guess emin copada honestly like i'm i'm gloves off at this point guys like i'm sick of playing nice with these people they say good vibes only you know we're all in this together and then they just on every single thing got to do with ethereum while forking ethereum to power their own chain and make themselves billionaires gloves off at this point i'm going to be more ruthless because i don't give a if people

call me an ethmaxy anymore i'm sick of it honestly as an educator i'm sick of it and i'm going to keep calling it out anyway end rant for now moving on so uh okay so there was a bit of um details on the last core dev call uh which you can kind of like read a summary from from tim biker here about the difficulty bomb now the difficulty bomb was not pushed back on that core dev call which and then i tweeted out which means the merge could likely happen in july or august now i tweeted this out a bit prematurely i think i think went on to say you know keep in mind that the bomb could still be delayed at a later date if need be as always it's hard to give any concrete dates around ethereum upgrades especially the merge but imo we're very

close now you guys know that i've been saying that it could still happen in in july uh and more likely august uh i i did say zero percent chance in june and i mean look at this point in time it's just not happening in june guys like we haven't even done the public test net forks yet so july coin toss i think at this point still august i think is pretty likely to be honest i mean don't quote me on this but i mean the shadow forks are going uh the magnet shadow folks are going really well people are feeling very confident in it the god days at this point are just like let's just merge like we've done so much testing things are good we don't we aren't finding major consensus bugs anymore or anything like that let's just get this thing done now i think the next

cordev call that's happening not this friday i think the friday after will probably determine if the there will be a separate hard fork to push a difficulty bomb back or if the merge is going to uh go ahead and just remove the difficulty bomb altogether in something like july or august now if we wait till august to do this i believe block times will be up to 20 seconds due to the difficulty bomb which means that fees are going to go higher again now can the community deal with this for under two weeks i think so but any longer than that is just going to be really really bad um i think at least in the short term honestly i'm more of the uh i'm more of the opinion that the community can deal with this for a little while but at the same time the

block time's just going to get longer and longer and it does lead to some perverse effects here so i think that if they don't delay the difficulty bomb on the next core dev call it's most likely means that we're going to merge in pro late july kind of like early august time frame but again don't quote me on that we have to wait for information to come out it's very hard to tell but as i said we're very very close guys it's coming it's coming sooner than people think uh obviously super exciting stuff uh around the merge here all right and as i said you could read this thread from tim bico going over everything that was discussed on the latest called devs call all right so ethereum.org has published their q2 roadmap so you can check this out now on github so the must do's on

their roadmap is merge preparation revamping wallet pages redesigning the learn page consolidating ethereum wikis translating the ef blog an open design system implementing the ui library typescript rollout user insights translation quality sorry translation quality and much more here so if you want to get involved and help with this guys you can it's fully open source you don't have to be working on the ethereum.org team directly you can just go contribute as you see fit here and there's a lot to do so definitely if you're interested in contributing to ethereum.org go check this out make some comments you know check out everything that needs to be done make some pull requests jump into the discord channel and kind of like get talking to to the people right uh working on the site here they're great people i met a few of them

at devconnect they work really hard on this sort of stuff to make sure that everyone is educated about ethereum so this is a really really interesting tweet thread from mizbani here i hope i said your name right there who basically said that uh there's often more to metrics than meets the eyes and the metric that they're talking about in this thread is fear revenue specifically fair revenue on avalanche so evan avalanche is currently generating about 400 million dollars in annualized transaction fees up almost three times a year to date it's the third biggest blockchain by fees behind ethereum and bsc so what's actually driving the volume here now the trdr is that what's driving the the revenue is 50 is coming from a play to earn a game called crab crabada or

something some crab game right now this like i've always said before that as long as people are paying to use the network it doesn't matter where the revenue comes from uh it's all well and good it's all uh you know people are paying for it it means they're driving value out of it but what becomes concerning i think for a blockchain is when so much of the fear when you was concentrated in one app or one particular kind of like contract or one set of contracts and in this case there's this this crabata play to earn game which i'm assuming is very similar to um you know uh to other player games that have uh ponzi like mechanics to it but fifty percent of the revenue to be coming from that one game is really bad because if that game just kind of like collapses

and people lose interest in it then 50 of the fear of revenue for avalanche disappears and to be honest it could be even more than that because of the fact that this is just the game's main contract the game could be utilizing other contracts on avalanche such as the amm contracts that will be driving even more revenue there it could be driving more revenue of token kind of like transfer furs of avax kind of like transfers um and you know it could be even higher than this so whenever i see uh one app or one or two apps dominating the fair venue of something i always get very bearish on it because that's not sustainable honestly like one app isn't going to sustain for for that long there's going to be trends especially play to earn things it's very trendy it's very ponzi like they can collapse

as fast as they they kind of like increase in value so there's that there and then uh mizbani goes on to kind of like say that a bots is driving a lot of the value which again is not necessarily a bad thing but at the same time these bots are just kind of like sucking out value from this game from the real players at the end of the day like mev sort of thing so there's that but then you can kind of see ethereum's fear of a new breakdown here and no single contract drives more than 50 15 of the fear revenue on ethereum so the most popular ones are open c uniswap gem usdt and usdc and then you can see that other accounts for like more than i think 60 of the fear of a new here so i mean ethereum has a very very healthy

market of many many different use cases driving this fee revenue so you know that's very sustainable right this is not something that's going to go away anytime soon and we've seen it sustained through both bullish and bearish periods for such a long time now i mean the fees started spiking like i guess you could say like earl maybe early 2020 or something like that so it's been over two years at this point where ethereum sphere revenue has has been very sustainable over bull and bear periods there so there's this kind of like that happening here so i thought this was just a really great thread to kind of contextualize what's happening on uh on not you know not just avalanche but like on every chain when it comes to fear in you it's always good to dig down and see what's sustainable and what's not um and i think that ethereum has

proven to be sustainable for over two years now ethereum block space is just in such high demand it's just incredible i mean seriously guys the demand for block space has actually outshipped even my kind of like um uh my uh predictions and my kind of like uh uh thoughts on it i didn't think we could sustain for this long but we have we've sustained it and it just keeps going and we're burning that eth2 which is even more amazing tens of millions of ethers burned each day and i'm going to talk about that impact in a sec with with my bullish rant but yeah anyway great thread from mizbani here you can check this out i'll link it in youtube description below alright so xerox announced that they have raised or xerox labs i should say an additional 70 million dollars in a series b round led by greylock vc here

uh and with a bunch of other investors on board as well so this is uh i think there's a bunch of other investors yeah there's a bunch of other investors here so this is a quite a big race i mean zerox is actually a pretty big ecosystem now they've been through a lot over the years they started in 2017 they did an ico i remember participating in that ico actually back then they've had a token since then the token hasn't performed very well but the ecosystem has grown like they have they're on a bunch of different chains now they have a bunch of different integrations they have their own matcha product which is their own kind of like dex aggregator which is driving a lot of volume and things like that but yeah i guess congrats to them on raising 70 million here that's a huge raise i'm assuming

that they that this raise was done by selling uh tokens in like at a discount which is which is fine i guess um but i i'm actually like the funny thing is like 0x as a project is is awesome i'm really really bullish on the project i think that their growth has been awesome they've they've come you know they're they're defy ogs but their token is just like i don't know it just doesn't really want to do anything right so i guess like there's that this happens with a lot of kind of like d5 projects where the project does really well but the token kind of like stagnates doesn't do very well uh and just kind of like it doesn't doesn't move at all and just keep continues down only right but uh but doesn't change the fact that they were able still able to raise 70 million

dollars here to keep building out their vision to keep deploying to i guess more change doing more integrations building more very very cool stuff so congrats again to xerox labs here all right we have another raise here from arjun who have raised 40 million dollars in a series b around to i guess continue building their mobile app out to support more define web3 infrastructure here so the round i think was if they got the announcement of who that led this round here not uh i guess not in the uh not in the uh the twitter thread here maybe on the blog post no i'm not seeing anything right here so i'm not sure who the investors are but still 40 million dollars is nothing to scoff out that's a great kind of uh i guess round here and arjun's been around for a while too i mean i

remember exactly when they started it might have been 2018 but yeah they've been around for a while they've been doing a bunch of different integrations i think argent got hurt by the layer one gas fees because they're a smart contract wallet and obviously generating a smart contract when gas fees are high is very very expensive so they've had to re-architect move to layer two which they've done now that layer two integrations are very very awesome and their wallet in general is just great so i guess congrats to them on this uh on this funding this is gonna allow them to continue product development expanding into latin america and hiring of course so they are hiring just like pretty much every team in crypto is you can check out their open roles here i'll link it in the youtube description so hash flow has now launched their hash

flow bridgeless bridgeless cross chain swaps product powered by layer xero labs you can go to app.hashflow.com to start using this now this currently supports uh ethereum avalanche bsc arbitram and polygons pos chain uh so you can basically do cross chain slice between all of these all of these networks using layer 0 under the hood very very cool here how it works market makers manage the quiddity pools on both on both chains traders request quotes market makers issue quotes which traders submit to kick off the first transfer cross chain messaging channels deliver payload to the destination to perform their second transfer that's all the magic behind the scenes and how it all happens here so if you want to go try it out you can as i said at

app.hashflow.com definitely go check it out very very cool to see more of these kind of like cross chain swap solutions go live uh within the crypto ecosystem here all right so i just wanted to highlight this new guide from john here who has a guy running an ethereum node should be but he said running an ethereum node should be as simple as downloading an app downloading an app i am building a node app to make this easy sorry nice node to make this easy so this isn't just a guide this is also kind of like an app you can see here a nice node run a node just press start so essentially this is what i was talking about when i was talking about the lido stuff we need to make it super easy for people to run nodes a stake e do all these sorts of

stuff and this is kind of like one thing that john has kind of like built and launched into alpha today so if you're looking to i guess test this out or to looking to run ethereum nodes and it's kind of like it gets daunting for you to do so and you want just an easier way to do it you should definitely check out nice note here from john this is very very cool i hope that he keeps building this i hope that he builds out ones for kind of like um with for staking as well and i hope that he uh kind of continues this and hopefully gets fine this is i guess like this is a prime example of something that is a public good that would that would need funding and that we should be funding because at the end of the day like if uh these people don't

build it then who is going to build it like i i thought more people would build at this point but there's kind of like a tragedy of the commons where the things that deliver the most value the things that we need the most of just don't get built that's how we need public goods funding for these sorts of things so definitely very very cool to see this and uh yeah i hope that uh that john gets funding for john's gets funding for this um either through i guess like optimism or git coin or some other kind of like thing like the ef or something like that uh very very cool definitely check this out all right so i spoke about this before but i just wanted to highlight it highlight it again so as i said yes uh yesterday solana fell over again had to

be restarted for like the nth time i don't know how many times it's been now but there was a screenshot of this kind of like uh discord chat with this line of validators where one of them leo from certain one was suggesting that blocking uh certain projects that were spamming the network or certain smart contracts that were spamming the network is perfectly fine for now and then larry goes on to say i'd rather have a network that is up without nfts versus a network that he's down and you can see the emoji reactions here people are actually in favor of this this is pretty bad guys i mean this isn't just like something that's bad for solana this is bad for the ecosystem there shouldn't be suggestions like this made because these platforms are supposed to be

maximally censorship-resistant i mean solana's been talking about being the most censorship-resistant platform uh for for kind of like things here and if their only solution to stopping the network from going down is to censor projects because they just they they say that they're spam then how is this any better than the centralized systems that we already have it's not and i've been going on about this a lot because this is very fundamental to blockchain this is something that needs to be thwarted every time it's brought up ethereum if a theorem if someone in the theorem was to ever suggest this it would immediately be shot down but here you have one of the top validators i believe on solana suggesting this with support from people just because they can't kind of like uh scale layer one and they don't want to introduce a fee marker which

they're going to do anyway but this is kind of like really really bad and i think this kind of like lends itself to something else that i've been thinking about lately which is this great debate between modular and monolithic designs which even if you could extrapolate it around further it's a debate around how to manage block space like how to manage demand for block space there's two ways to do it you either censor transactions or you do quality control where you drop transactions that you suspect is spam which i am so against and i think is just a completely broken system and we don't need that or you do a fee market which regulates supply and demand of blocks block space which works amazingly right it does like the yes okay the fees go up when there's more demand and an outstrip supply of block

space but that is much better to me than a network falling over and i'll explain why so there's this concept of liveness right ethereum as a network has been live since day zero it has not gone offline at all and this is thanks in large part due to its limited gas limit or limited block size which basically limits limits its block space and its fee market which regulates the block space which basically stops people from being able to spam the network so that is exactly why ethereum has been able to be alive for so long now why is liveness important especially for a smart contract chain well it's critically important because of the fact that on a smart contract chain you have a lot of things going on all the time that require real time kind of like updates like oracle's for example mev keeping

prices in check can you imagine the ethereum network going offline for 10 hours what that would do to the kind of like prices of everything what if the market moved like 10 down across the board people were going to get liquidated before they can save their positions mfv bots are going to go crazy it's it people going to lose some there's going to be so much value leaked it's going to it'll be it'd be really bad when the network came online and everything had to be kind of like reshuffled again a lot of people will get hurt so that's why liveness is absolutely critical now okay the high fees on layer one are bad how do we get around that like liveness is all well and good but if only the rich can afford to use the chain then it's kind of like useless for 99 of

people that's fair right well then we take the modular scaling approach and we do layer twos right we make it so that the layer twos uh get very very cheap fees and then they're happy paying the expensive fees to layer one because they're generating their own fair revenue at layer two from their users in aggregate by using by um by uh providing more transactions per second and that pays for the economic security on ethereum so as i've explained before we keep ethereum maximally decentralized secure sustainable and healthy by uh limiting what can be done at layer one and just charging layer twos to use it while all the users sit at the layer two layer and enjoy a really cheap transactions and post bank sharing they're going to enjoy ultra cheap transactions with that liveness guarantee with the liveness guarantee for layer 2s because

they want to be able to post their data and post their proofs to ethereum and ethereum remains extremely secure and decentralized i just this design just makes so much sense to me guys like i haven't seen anyone been able to poke holes in this design the the best i guess like uh i i guess bear case for this design or i guess like the best um uh i guess like the most negative thing about this design that i've been able to come up with is the fragmentation of i guess like liquidity and composability but this is solved on in in the long term by being able to share state across these layer twos with proto-dang sharding and other kind of like such mechanisms which is going to be amazing and also it's sold in the short to medium term with bridges and cross chain swaps and

all that sort of stuff as i just spoke about like cash flow went live with one of their apps there's plenty of things going live this stuff is not a death now for the modular design it's just something that we have to work around and in my mind it's better because as i've said before i've said this for so long after this for years at this point it is impossible to scale everything on a layer one chain without either implementing a free market which means you're just basically back to square one of of um high fees or dropping transactions and regulating them through some kind of subjective uh mechanism which just defeats the entire purpose of a blockchain so i'm not going to change my opinion on this i don't think i it makes too much sense it's the modular approach is based on years and years worth of development and

research from the top minds in this space and we've seen this monolithic kind of strategy fail time and time again i don't need any more proof at this point i'm convinced like i was convinced in the eos era that scaling everything at layer one would not work and then we've had more chains come along and do it because you can get away with it short term and all that sorts of stuff but we're seeing the cracks they're playing out in real time they're playing out a lot sooner than i thought they would to be honest i thought that i didn't think that celina would be down this often but it is and it's not just only down it also suffers from performance issues because bots just spam the network um and and that was everyone predicted it would happen this is not a new thing

so yeah anyway that's a bit of a rant there about that i hope that you guys are seeing what i've been banging on about for years now i hope you guys can understand why sometimes get really upset and people call me an ethmaxy because i just i i'm not an ethmax i just think that all the innovation or at least 99 of the innovation is happening in ethereum there are some innovations happening in other chains i've mentioned them before i think uh the cosmos ibc is pretty cool for an interchange messaging platform but i think cosmos as an ecosystem is just not really going to take off in the long term i think app chains are a cool idea but done at layer 2 i don't think most chains care or need to be a sovereign chain need to be able to boost up their own validator set it just

doesn't make any sense to me and i just get called a fada or i get called an ethmaxy for saying these sorts of things and then they play out exactly as i say that they're going to play out so like at that point i'm just like okay well i don't want to be like i told you so i don't want to give myself an ego but i kind of look at that i'm just like i i i knew it like this isn't a surprise to me so i hope it's the same for you guys i see a lot of you guys saying this is the similar sort of things in the discord channel which is awesome to see but at the same time don't just take my word for it go learn from other people go explore other ecosystems like there's nothing wrong with using other

ecosystems exploring it seeing how it ticks and then kind of like realizing that you know a lot of these problems ethereum has already solved or is working to solve in the future because it ran into them a lot sooner than other chains did and i have this popular thing that i say that pretty much all the l1 are just making their way back to ethereum they're all going to look like ethereum eventually they're all going to have roll-ups but i don't think that any of them are going to be able to catch ethereum at all i don't think their tokens are going to accrue much value long term i think it's going to bleed its value to eth because eth is able to capture its value much much better it has a monetary premium all that sorts of good stuff there so that's my little rant about that there

now i think i'm going to begin my bullish rant which is the final part of this mega episode so uh and before i do that i just wanted to quickly mention that tim biker put out a great tweet here where he says and this follows on to my bullish tweets he says in the next year he thinks that uh ethereum as as core developers can ship proof of stake obviously with the merge ship withdrawals ship 4844 roll-up fee reductions which is kind of like prototype shouting ship improvements to the evm align the execution lane consensus layer governance and maybe have a path for quicker evm upgrades outside of layer one this is something interesting that i'm not going to talk about today there isn't too many details about it but when there is more details about i will talk about this but this is really

really cool having a path for quick avm upgrades outside of l1 there so that's cool to see tim put some kind of like timelines behind it again timelines in ethereum is like really really hard but i think once the merge is done we're going to be having quicker upgrades because these other upgrades are simpler than the merge they're less risky than the merge and they're actually i think they're even more critical because they're user-facing upgrades at the day but yeah that leads me to my bullish rant so over the last 24-48 hours we had the the latest yuga labs kind of like nft mint right where they minted some kind of like land and they did it on layer one ethereum for some reason and thanks to that they burned you know i think like in only a few hours 55 000 eighth in those in that

time that is over 150 million dollars worth of eighth guys in like a few hours this smashed all burn records like for ethereum since august last year since 1.559 went live and this is a ton of people that got burnt that's 150 million dollars that didn't go to the nft man this is just for people wanting to pay the fees wanting to front other people wanting to mint these things because of the fact that they wanted to flip them on secondary markets this is insane guys like the nf tiger system just continues to amaze me just absolutely crazy and this meant that like eth has is like ultra deflationary at this point under proof of work imagine the proof of stake like it's just crazy and when i look at the current price i'm just kind of like people got no idea like the current

price is such a meme i'm looking at this being like buying atheia to me is like bargain like i can't believe that is still trading at this price given all the bullish kind of like mechanisms happening here and that this is what actually led me to to this tweet that i put out a few days ago where i said i remember in 2019 there was so much bullish news for ethereum but the price of eth didn't react to it at all and now i feel that a similar thing has been happening over the last six months maybe six to twelve months but now we have even more bullish catalysts for ethereum like the merge and i just said just keep it stacking that eighth friends it's exactly what i'm doing by the way i'm just keep stuck in there as i said i think that the current prices are still

not investment advice that's just my own personal kind of like views on these things but let's recap here guys like i know i haven't done one of these rants for a little bit like the market's been shitty lately we went to 3 600 then went back to 2 700. now we're at like 2 800 or something it's choppy it's very hard to trade this sort of stuff so why should you continue to be bullish on eth well okay friends the merge i've talked about this plenty of times before the merge is the single most bullish thing to happen in crypto's history it is the single most underpriced thing to happen in crypto's history it is not priced in anyone who tells you that as priced in is stupid in my opinion how can something be like this be priced in where most people have no idea what's coming we have a 80 to 90

percent insurance reduction we have staking apy being bumped up which means more atheist being is going to be staked we're already seeing that happen two week plus queues of eighth being staked it's happening guys like more eighth is being locked up here we have one five five nine burning a ton of eight that's just a crazy amount of it right we have ethereum no longer having to deal with the bad narratives around proof of work that are going to be happening or with with the merge there uh which is which is obviously awesome in of itself uh we have um uh kind of like once the merge is being done we have those other upgrades that are going to be able to be shipped uh very very quickly we have uh deflationary eighth obviously happening there um and that's just kind of like on the merge side of

things now next layer trigger system absolutely exploding we just had optimism announcements token we're going to have the other ones do that soon growth is steady there it's going it's going really nicely cool very very cool to see that not just on kind of like the um the actual stuff that's live today the innovation side funding of layer twos is through the roof it's crazy it's awesome uh you guys know all about that right and the nft ecosystem is still exploding it's still absolutely massive still still going for it and it's going to be going for it for a while yet and even if they move to layer twos it's gonna drive activity up there it'll drive activity back to level one ethereum and then we're gonna burn uh burn more ether there so so very very cool there lots of innovation happening across d5 even if you're not paying

attention to it i'm seeing a lot of really cool things happening there and d5 still growing a little bit slower than other things but it's of course uh still growing there um and those other network upgrades that are coming as i said are going to be user facing which is really really cool very very bullish stuff happening uh more and more of institutions are getting on board i think with ethereum and ethno especially post merge when that apy bumps up from the unburnt fear revenue going to uh going to stakers that's going to be absolutely massive i think as i said we're already seeing the fomo in with the validated queue and stuff like that now if that wasn't enough to to make you bullish a bullish i think just from a kind of like a pure technical price perspective the fact that the macro environment

looks really right now like if i'm being honest you know inflation is out of control interest rates are poised to rise um not as much people expect that they will but they will rise i believe um just because they have to um we have the stock market just absolutely the bed especially tech stocks they're really really they're down really bad i don't know if you saw what happened to netflix guys it got brutal brutalized right made crypto look like a play thing compared to what happened in netflix there um as far as i know the s p 500 had one of its biggest drops last friday um in in a while i think maybe even since the covert drop it dropped like three point six percent in a day which is huge for stocks guys like that's a normal day in crypto but very very huge for stocks

on the backdrop of all of that ether still not set new lows it's still at around three thousand dollars now why is that well coming back to 2019 this is the same thing that happened eth bumped around from like 100 to 360 it was more volatile back then um but if you look at kind of like what's happening today ethan has been bumping around from what 2200 to 3600 right over the last few months or so six months or something like that um if you look at that and put that into context ethy's doing amazingly compared to what the backdrop it currently has and why is that i truly believe that in the short term in the short to medium term

fundamentals don't act as a demand driver they act as a cushion for the dumping because think about it like this if you are holding an asset and you know that there's a lot of great fundamentals backing this asset you know there's a lot of bullish catalysts coming for this asset you know that a lot of people don't know this and you have an information advantage here you're not going to sell you're going to keep stacking so the already the people that already have e people that are keeping their wreath they're probably going to keep buying eth so that is a demand driver there but they're not going to be i i don't think they're going to attribute for for like enough demand they're not going to have enough demand to push the price up but they will have enough demand to both stabilize the price and they're not going to be

selling the eighth which also stabilizes the price and that's why i think from a technical level the price has kind of like just been ranging here and hasn't dropped to two new lows there um now on on top of that look at a lot of the other assets that don't have this sort of stuff they've been killed there are a lot of assets uh in crypto right now that are down a lot from their all-time highs eighth is down about 40 or something like that from its all-time high but there are a lot of assets that are down 70 80 90 percent from their all-time high and some of these were like the things that everyone was talking about and this is simply because they don't have fundamentals backing that up um and i mean obviously the liquidity matters as well there's not as much liquidity for these things

but you know a lot of them just don't have those short to medium or even long term fundamentals backing it up so people are like okay well i'm not going to hold this i'm going to sell this for something that does have fundamentals and no people don't want to sell it for cash because at least in the in the very short term they may go to cash but definitely the medium term they don't want to be in cash with inflation the way it is so they're either maybe going to you know yield farm with their stable coins or they're going to buy an asset that they have a very strong conviction and confidence in and i think for most people that falls into b2c and eth like obviously i can't forget about btc even though i'm not bullish on it i know a lot of people are

and that's fine but i think you know within the ethereum ecosystem you're going back to eth and this is why 99 of things will underperform eighth over the long run because people trade better i'm sorry people trade their worst assets for better assets you don't want to sit in cash long term because you're just getting away by inflation especially in the inflationary uh kind of like dynamics that we're seeing today but you also don't want to uh kind of like um you know buy into something straight away when you've cashed out because you might be thinking okay well uh maybe i'll wait a little bit to see what the market does and kind of like play it by er or maybe you'll dca in so maybe you've cashed out like you know just as an example maybe you cashed out like 50 grand uh in kind of like cash

and you're like okay well i'm going to sit on this for a little while but i don't want to sit up for too long because i'm going to lose to inflation but i'm going to dca into eth for example and that's what a lot of people do and it's a it's a decent strategy i i think it's a great strategy i mean i technically dca in uh not because i don't have the cash on hand just because like the cash is just coming in and i'm kind of like buying and i've bought at the all-time high and i've bought like at the lows like it's just the way it happens and over time you average out a price and then eventually once the market go it's really going again once we get out of a range and we start going into like a proper bull market again

that's where you know you obviously see the most gains and that's where your dca pays off and that's exactly what i did in 2019. most people don't know this about me but i bought most of my eighth in the bear market like i like the majority of it i think i think i bought 80 or something of my eighth in the bear market and that's simply because in 2017 i didn't have much money and eth ran away from me like very very quickly i remember buying eighth and then it just started moving and i put all my money that i could into eat while it was mooning and then it just ran completely away from me it went to 420 by june and i just didn't have enough money at that point i was not i mean i was getting paid like fortnightly and i'm trying to put in as much money

as i could into it but i had other commitments other bills stuff like that uh and then you know obviously eth went even crazier than that and uh yeah and then during the bear market i had more money i was saving i had and i was able to save for longer while the price stayed flat and i bought most of my eighth then and i'm buying a lot of eighth now like i you know i i consider what we've been into the bear market right i mean it has been since the last all-time high of 4900 uh which happened in like november i believe uh so yeah we've been in a bear market since then but obviously i don't believe that's going to last forever obviously i'm extremely bullish on 8th and obviously there's a ton of reasons to still be bullish on 8th as i outlined and i've

outlined this plenty of times on the refill i think you guys maybe just needed a reminder a refresher there to keep the faith and no does this mean that new lows can't happen i mean no not necessarily like there is always a chance of that happening i'm not guaranteeing anything here but like it's been months now of this really negative backdrop and eth has held on so well and as i said i think that's because ease fundamentals have never been stronger and a lot of my participants know this especially the bigger amount bigger money they know this and post merge look i don't know what's going to happen around the merge post merge i don't know what the price is going to do but i think you know on over the long long term the 5 to 10 year term i i still think my 100k price target is is in play

i just i don't see how it doesn't go to that i don't like we have no precedent for what's about to happen to eth with that massive issuance reduction of 80 to 90 percent the fact that miners aren't going to be kind of like selling anymore because there are no miners right they're stakers obviously stakers will sell but at a much slower clip than what what miners do and we've never seen a network go from proof of work to proof of stake like this especially not one as big as ethereum so just taking all that together taking all these catalysts and just like taking a bird's-eye view of things there has never been a better time to be in ethereum there's never been a better time to be holding eighth in my opinion um i just think that there's just so much bullish stuff happening and there's

more and more stuff coming as time goes on we're perpetually burning so much eat like it's just crazy guys like it's i mean the 1559 exceeded all my expectations i think that the the issuance reduction is going to also exceed my expectations of what it can do for eighth and i don't think people are ready for this i don't think anyone owns enough eath um maybe the north korean uh lazarus group group owns enough eighth now because they're hundreds of thousands of eighth from from that rodent hack but you know i i don't think uh any of us own enough eight i think we can keep stacking more i'm going to keep stacking more i'm down in the trenches stacking it i don't care what the price is doing in the short to medium term it's going to do what it's going to do but long term i'm bullish as i hope

all of you are as well there's that bullish rant i hope that got you up just uh i hope that got you kind of like bullish there guys like i'm getting to the end of what i can do now i'm still jet lagged so like i think i'm going to end that mega episode there tomorrow we're going to be back to our regularly scheduled half an hour episodes but i really hope you enjoyed this this long one i hope it covered all the major things that happened over the last two weeks i don't think i'm gonna be taking a break for a while again here maybe a couple days here and there if i if i go kind of like traveling with my fiance or something like that but definitely not for 2x again for the foreseeable future uh i had withdrawals from the refill as much as you guys did honestly

like not doing it for two weeks felt super super weird i was like oh my god like i need to be reporting on this i need to be talking about this and then when optimism did their token i'm like ah i'm going crazy i almost did a mini episode on just optimism but then i was in my hotel it was like i think it was like 11 p.m and i'm like oh my god i'm so tired uh and the internet's not great yet i'm not even gonna worry about it so i just waited i did it then but i think that's it for now so i'm gonna go splice all this together put this out for you uh for you guys now and by the time you've heard me say that you've watched it so you got to enjoy it all uh but yeah i guess thank you everyone for

listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone