DEX growth on fire, Zapper adds NFT support and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #64 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 24th of february 2021 all right everyone let's get into the news from the last 24 hours so quick update i guess on the price here so we actually had a very nice kind of bounce i guess uh since uh yesterday's refuel here after going down a lot right we went down to below the previous all-time high down to about 13 54 here kind of bounced back up to around the 1700 level which is really really awesome to see i think after such a brutal dump it scared a lot of people of course um but i think that you know we're back up here i think that we're obviously

still bullish i mean i'm always bullish so whatever what for whatever that's worth me saying i'm bullish i think um you know it doesn't really mean much but yeah i think we're all good here but i just wanted to you know quickly kind of point that out i think obviously we all kind of watch the charts religiously so i'm probably not pointing at anything new but it's really healthy to see this i am i'm i'm you know i'm feeling good i'm not feeling bad about things you know march is usually a pretty good month for eth during bull markets you know uh so yeah we'll see what march brings us we're only about a week out and maybe we you know finish february up nice and strong so i'm really looking forward to seeing how the rest of i guess the month plays out on the price

front here so today i put out a tweet uh basically just a very simple tweet saying the ethereum economy never sleeps and i wrote a delegate newsletter about this it's actually today's newsletter you can go check that out if you want uh some more long form thoughts there but i'll quickly break down kind of like what i mean by this i mean obviously it's a very short tweet doesn't really say much but if you kind of dig into it it says a lot right i was thinking about this and i was just like sitting down i was playing with like different default tools and i'm like wow it's like 9 p.m at night right i don't have to ask anyone's permission to do this i'm just playing around with an entire financial system from my kind of metamask wallet doing whatever i want whenever i want um

and i was just like for some reason like it just just kind of like hit me all at once and i was like okay this is crazy we've never had an economy before that operates 24 7. literally never sleeps right never goes offline the ethereum network uptime is near 100 i think that there's been like i actually think actually no i think it's it's pretty much 100 like even accounting for what happened with the dao um and the shanghai dos attacks i'm pretty sure it's 100 but i don't want to say exactly 100 just in case i'm wrong there but you know it's close enough so um and because of that right you or me or anyone we can do transactions on the network whenever we want right if we don't have as i said we don't have to ask anyone's permission we have to wait for like the trading to

start again or like um you know it's something to open right it's always open it's just like an entire world or entire entire economy that is always open ready to take out transactions now yes you know it's clunky right it's slow sometimes the fees are obviously very high but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's still available ethereum's availability is insane and i know that the world computer kind of term that's used to describe ethereum is kind of a meme at this point but i still think it fits i mean a world computer doesn't mean that it has to be like a fast computer right it doesn't have to be like a cheap computer a computer is basically just like a piece of kind of hardware and with software on it that kind of executes arbitrary

i guess not transactions but like instructions um you know so the ethereum kind of network does the same thing with the ethereum virtual machine instead we call them transactions right so whenever you kind of talk to the ethereum network you're issuing a transaction or multiple transactions um and and those are being processed by this kind of computing network that is worldwide right there's nodes everywhere there's miners everywhere so when you kind of like think about it like that ethereum really is a world computer at the end of the day it's a world computer that never sleeps and processes any transaction you want it doesn't even have to be a financial transaction it can be anything you want to do on here all right so from that perspective i think you know it requires a little bit of a kind of change of thinking as well because

you know not only are we rebuilding the financial system right like we're basically replacing the old financial system rails with new rails we're going far beyond that and we're kind of like changing what it means to have a financial system because there are so many products within defy and on ethereum that could not exist in the traditional finance system because we do not have composability we don't have money legos we do not have a truly permissionless neutral platform to build these things on and that's what ethereum gives us so you know from that perspective i mean the ethereum economy economy never sleeping is just the tip of the iceberg then you have everything else underneath that that kind of powers this entire economy here so

yeah i mean you really just got to like sit down you know get rid of distractions and think about this really deeply to kind of really understand exactly what we're building here because it's easy to get caught up in like the hype right and the speculation and the trading tokens and you know watching charts and all that sort of stuff but if you really look at it and really dig down into the technology you will see that you know it's not just kind of changing so rebuilding the financial system it's changing it fundamentally from the ground up with new and exciting kind of products and and and things that people are going to get a lot of benefits out of and already are getting a lot of benefits out of and i use another example i guess in um in in the newsletter today where i

said that it's also a kind of autonomous economy right where it's truly passive income uh where you know there are other vehicles where you can get passive income from but they require a lot of trust right where say you have like a a rental property you have a property that you've bought and you're renting it out right there are so many intermediaries in that transaction and so many things you have to trust right so yes it's passive income but there's still all sorts of things that can go wrong with it of course right whereas um on ethereum like you can become for example a uni swap liquidity provider and no one can take that away from you you know unless the entire network you know was to collude against you essentially like but then we'd have more stuff to worry about than that but basically

the uni swap can't take that away from you right uh the the no one can take away your liquidity provider tokens unless they hack you or whatever so and you are earning kind of trading fees on that liquidity by being an lp which is essentially passive income so we've never had this autonomous 24 7 passive income system like we do with ethereum um and you know unisoft's the tip of the iceberg as well you have like all the stable coin farms you know things like that but i use unisoft because it is truly decentralized a lot of these other protocols still have admin keys because they're young and stuff like that so that's why i like to use uniswap um but that is enabled by the fact that the ethereum economy never goes to sleep right it's always on autonomous accessible from anywhere in the world

and it's just like really really amazing once you think about it so i won't ramble too much here but i mean i could go on about this forever like this is the stuff that kind of gets me going i mean like this is just what's most exciting for me and you know i'm mostly excited by things that kind of push the boundaries of like the technology that we have today and kind of like do innovative and new things and i'll talk about rv and balancer teaming up uh in a little bit they've done something really cool here that i think people missed today um but yeah i mean just really think about it because it really is game changing here and also one another thing that i don't think many people are kind of realizing is how amazing it is to have a spokesperson like mark cuban uh kind

of like being a supporter of ethereum now uh i this was prompted because i was listening to the bankless podcast with mark cuban on it and i had listened to the defined podcast as well and i've spoken about this before he has more domain knowledge of ethereum and d5 the 99 of people in this space i mean i'll just straight up say it he he's so well kind of like versed in how this technology works and he can articulate himself very very cleanly and he's even learning solidity right now i mean he's going beyond what i'm even doing like i haven't learned solidity yet and i don't really plan to because i i'm not a developer but neither is mark cuban and he's just doing it right and he is not like a crypto native guy he's a billionaire who has like all these other businesses

you know he runs kind of like shark tank he he's very into his sports and stuff like but he's doing all of this with all of that so if you're in you know spending kind of like all your time in the ecosystem and like uh you know i see a lot of people do this and they have like all these like weird takes and like what i consider to be bad takes on certain things i just amazed that mark can kind of can kind of follow along with this stuff given how busy he normally is and the reason why i say that he's an amazing spokesperson is because of that domain knowledge but also because he reaches a completely different audience to what myself you know bankless the defiant defy dad you know all those sorts of things completely different to what they reach right

because we reach kind of like crypto natives and people coming into crypto or or already in crypto right mark is reaching people that have never even thought of crypto before and never even thought about anything got to do with like ethereum right they might have heard of bitcoin but probably never even heard of ethereum of d5 of nfts like he's a big fan of nfts so he's bringing in all these new people and he's he's just like the greatest person for that because he has fans across like many different domains right he has fans from people from his early kind of internet days right where people kind of looked up to him and and he was like an early uh internet kind of entrepreneur and pioneer there he has fans in um that that are kind of like sports fans right because he's big into his

sports he's basically a celebrity within the us because of his shark tank stuff and and because of the sports stuff i mean and and he doesn't just have a younger crowd either he has an older crowd too which is even better because obviously crypto skews young but we want to get this technology in everyone's hands so i mean just thinking about that and realizing that you know he's not just a talking head he actually knows what he's talking about is incredibly bullish and you know i i guess i said it just before and like it's hard for me to be more bullish on ethereum and eighth but i i definitely whenever i hear someone that you know you think is just going to be like a talking head right um actually articulate himself really well you know i don't know anything about mark cuban right i just thought like i mean he's

not really a celebrity in australia he's a us centric celebrity for sure but you know i i kind of like ask my friends like you know who is this guy what has he done they kind of explain it to him i'm like okay i get it blah blah then i listen to the defiant podcast and i was like holy like where did this come from how is this guy so well versed so yeah i'm not i won't gush over him too much here but i just think that if more people were like him right we would be in a much better place and i think ether would already be at 10k if i'm being honest because the information asymmetry in this space is insane right the the amount of kind of false info that going around the misleading marketing the bad takes like it's so bad and i've spent the last four

years trying to correct it and it's still bad like in bull markets it's even worse because people don't even care right they're making money whatever it's a bull market but um the fact that he kind of like looks past that and kind of gets down to what actually matters is incredibly positive so yeah kudos to him i don't think he watches the daily way refuel unfortunately maybe he does maybe he'll say this um if you if you if you want you can tag him in it it'll be fun to see if he he sees this but basically yeah i just like want to thank him and kind of like thank anyone that does this because i mean i have an audience obviously but my audience isn't like you know anywhere near as big as marx i'm nowhere near as known as mark and same with like uh

all the other media outlets within ethereum so we need more of these people and not just because i want them to kind of like be a marketing vehicle for ethereum i want them to actually be proper spokespeople that understand the technology and mark is a shining example of that and someone that should be emulated i think so an update from umbra cash here so umbra uh for those who don't know is a kind of privacy protocol that's been uh that's working to kind of enable the sending of stealth payments on ethereum uh so i spoke about yesterday about aztec protocol and how they're doing zero knowledge kind of um wrapping around different i guess like assets on ethereum like die and stuff like that and umbra is taking i think a different approach here but doing the same

kind of thing they want to do like private payments right um and they reach the phase one on of their road to mainnet right now which means they're on the rinkerby test net so you can actually go test this out right now and test out their technology which i think is really cool and they've got like a kind of detailed post here about like what's coming you know what what what phase one um has been and how it's complete now and how phase two is in progress and then uh the audits and everything like that so yeah if you haven't heard of this project yet i suggest going to checking this out you'll be able to get a quick recap of what it is how it works and you can go play with it on rinkaby which i i always love right so definitely go check

this out uh if you've got some time so doon analytics posted this tweet that over the last 24 hours there was a 4.2 billion dollars of decentralized exchange trading volume and the total trading volume of dexas for 2019 was only 3 billion holy right we did more volume in one day than we did in all of 2019 through dexa's this is the exponential growth of d5 people are still underestimating how quickly this can keep growing even with the high fees it doesn't matter there is so much capital coming into this system right now so much capital entering we've got layer two growing too like there's just money flying absolutely everywhere and people are hungry for this technology they're

hungry to get involved they're hungry to like liquidity provide and provide more liquidity to the system so that these traders can get better kind of deals and less slippage and you know dexter's are competing with with centralized exchanges and doing more volume than them absolutely insane right um i mean i can't wait till we do like more volume than we did in 2020 because 2020 was really the breakout year for dexers so i can't wait till we do more volume in one day than we did in the whole year that's when it gets like really amazing because 2019 was like obviously three billion dollars for the whole year isn't very much um and and that was like when i guess defined indexes were still in their infrastic infancy but the fact that we've done more in one day by a lot not just by a little bit

4.2 billion is like a lot more than 3 billion is incredible to me and i mean you know even if we look at the dexes here like on the chart most of these weren't even out in 2019 too to be fair i mean it was really just uni swap uh i don't even know if bangkor was really functional back then i'm just looking down the list here uh i don't think synthetics was really live in any any great capacity there they i think they were but it was a very limited kind of thing curve wasn't live right kyber was uh oasis was it was i think it was called uh to diet back then um and i think dydx might have been and 0x of course but basically like there was a lot of them that weren't like sushi swap is doing a lot of volume it wasn't live back then

right curve as i said wasn't live back then um 0x uh was but it wasn't doing too much volume but just like the volumes across the board weren't great uh so yeah this is a huge huge kind of like statistic here i am really impressed by it i mean you know and if we even broke record on the amount of fees paid to i think there was like 50 million dollars worth of fees paid within 24 hours and you know i i am a big proponent of that like this the reason why i like kind of like the fee revenue is because it's a very hard metric to gain right because it costs a lot so it shows how much usage the ethereum network has that's why i like that but at the same time we just paid minus 50 million dollars when we could have burned that with

eip1559 not all of it but like some of it right so i just can't wait till one five five nine comes in and i can't wait to have a website where we're tracking the eath burn then we can actually see that going down it's just going to be absolutely incredible because then we'll have something even more to celebrate that we did 50 million dollars in fees but all this eth got burned because of it as well so i can't wait for that i'm really pumped to see to see that be implemented obviously right one five five nine is like one of my favorite things in the world coming to ethereum so we're really looking forward to that so awoke from get coin posted that grants uh git coin grants matching round nine is coming soon as i mentioned on one of the refuels i think

last week it's coming on march 10th it's going to be running from 10th to the 25th you can donate to your favorite projects get your donations matched and currently there is a 500 000 matching pool i think that's going to increase as we get closer it's still about two weeks out from the bitcoin grants matching round that i reckon that'll definitely get to a million plus and if you are someone interested in being a matching partner um definitely contact your wiki or get coin in general you can reach out to me and i'll put you in contact i have um a line of communication there but for those who don't know what this matching round is basically uh it's the fund open source kind of software and open source media and what happens is people can donate and get their donations matched by this matching pool

quadratically so what that means is if you donate one diet to the daily grade that could potentially be matched up to like 200 times so so the matching funds would put in 200 and you for your one die which is just amazing because it means like your money goes much further than it would um previously and it means you don't have to kind of like struggle to donate and pick between different projects you can donate to like 20 different projects give them 10 die each if that's all you can kind of spare and that will get matched a lot as well and the more individual contributors to each grant the more matching that grant will get as well so really really awesome um if you yeah if you are interested in being a matching partner definitely a dm or wiki get coin or myself and i'll

put you in contact so the ethereum name service runs these finance reports that they do every so often and i think this is really great because this is really great transparency from a team that is much loved within the ethereum ecosystem right we all have our own ens names that we love to kind of like use but basically what this report does is kind of break down you know what their income was what their expenses are kind of what the balance is and you know how they're how they're basically using the money essentially uh which i thought was really really cool and i and i i've seen this come from other projects as well i think sushi swap and yern have done something like this before i would like more projects to be doing this it's really nice to see like a breakdown of what's happening with the

funds being kind of used especially funds that may have been raised in like a sale or whatever um and i think it gives more confidence the kind of token holders as well not that ens has a token but i mean the fact that they're doing this and they don't have a token is really professional so you can go read the report it'll be linked in the youtube description as usual but yeah kudos to ens for getting this report out there all right here we are with the balancer xrv news that i wanted to talk about so what balancer is doing with their new v2 asset manager tech is they're going to allow idle assets in their version 2 pools to earn yield on rv without increased gas costs for swaps either so what this means is uh and in the

paragraph here pretty much explains it on balance of v2 all tokens are held in a single protocol vault now any poor can however use their deposited tokens in the vault through an asset manager which means that this would put the capital to work when it is not being used as swap liquidity so this is um i mean to fully realize why this is so mind-blowing and i'm probably gonna butcher the explanation here you have to kind of like break down why composability is so mind-blowing and i've spoken about this before about how there is so much capital trapped in defy right now that's doing nothing that we can put to work right think about the amount of eth in maker that is just sitting there right backing die but most of the time it's doing

nothing the only time it really matters is when there's liquidations going on and things like that right and yes it manages to back up the whole system and if people want to kind of burn their diet to get their eat back but most of the time most of that capital is sitting idle doing nothing what happens when we harness it right what happens when we can harness that capital that's exactly what balancer and alva are doing here there ave is going to be harnessing balancer um kind of like the protocol vaults uh capital to do all kind of like fancy things here so basically i mean there's going to be a lot of yield farming and going on i imagine as well with this a lot of different things going on i think they gave an example here if i if i go here um the basically

they're working with the curve team as well i think uh to to kind of do this with compound um and yearn i mean like all these teams are working together i think this is just an example of like how it's really efficient on the gas price side as well so as gas prices continue to soar you know gas efficiency is paramount importance for amms unless the amounts are very large the transactions become you know very costly um and unfortunately like doing what their example here above here costs like over 240 dollars which is which is quite expensive right their solution is the v2 asset managers here and i won't go into it because as i said i'm probably gonna butcher the explanation trying to trying to go through this but you can read through this blog post and get get the kind of idea of what's happening

here but i mean this image kind of shows it as well right there's like a token pool and there's like a a kind of like um it takes the idle assets in that token pool and routes them to rv to generate additional yields now the what the reason why um some assets are kind of idle is because in a pool unless the i mean it's a bit it's a bit hard to explain yeah like an output like a a pool of assets for like uh a liquidity kind of pool on an amm most of the time most of the assets are just sitting there and waiting for like the price to either go up or go down right because you know if you're if the price of eight is going up then people are selling their eighth for die if the price of eight is going down and

then they're selling their um their diet for eth right they're buying more eight essentially on the way down um and because of that like unless you go to like the bottom which is impossible right there's a there's always like um assets that are kind of like sitting idle right like say the price drops ten percent all the assets under that price drop are not doing anything they're kind of like sitting idle it's a bit hard to kind of conceptualize and i as i said i'm probably butchering the explanation here but you can see it in the visualization right there's like an active amount of capital at the top and then there's like a stable amount of capital and you probably can't see it from the from the video but there's like a line in between um and it takes that and puts it into like what's called a cache amount

which i guess is uh uh which is part of like the swaps and then takes the other kind of idle capital puts it into the invested amount and the invested amount uh is going into are there to earn additional yield here so very cool go read the full blog post i'm not gonna kind of butcher it anymore but uh yeah definitely really cool so defy polls added a new feature to their site today called uh the crypto dollars page now as you might have inferred the crypto dollars page is tracking stable coins or crypto dollars as they've known on ethereum you can see them all here right there's a dedicated page you're probably familiar with the interface you can see all the stable coins listed here right usdt usdc die and all that with them tvl or market cap as it's known

which i thought was really really cool because what's funny is that usdt um on it i mean a lot of it is actually on other networks right now too i think on tron there's like 15 billion dollars worth of usdt so but this is only measuring what's on ethereum and it's really cool to see on ethereum that usd sees almost 50 percent of usdt so usdt is 20 billion usd sees 8 billion and then die is at 2.2 billion then you have busd which is binance's stable coin at 2.1 billion and then there's a bunch of others below here as well so this is going to be really interesting to keep track of what's happening with stable coins i really want to see usdc flip usdt i know that we had news yesterday about the tether news which i actually should

have covered and i haven't got in my tabs here but i'll quickly cover it now there was the news that tesla tether kind of the organization settled with the new york attorney general's office or the nyag as you might have seen um and they had to pay like a i think it was like a 18 million fine or something like that it was quite a small fine and just not operate in new york anymore but basically it kind of like i guess ended the tether fudd right where people were saying it's not backed apparently in the report it said that at one point it wasn't exactly like one to one back but now it is and you know a lot of the fud was centered around this investigation but you know apparently you know they they were just able to settle with a fine and admit no wrong

doing as well so but in saying that i trust i don't okay i don't really trust any centralized stable coins but if i had to pick one out of usdt and usdc i would still pick usdc because it's much more transparent than tether right it has like you know it's based in the u.s right it has a full kind of like um regulations of the us on it because it's issued by circle and coinbase it has regular auditing by third parties it's just much more safe now obviously ideally i want to be using dye right instead of these other ones but i'm just saying if i had to choose between the centralized stable coins i would uh i would you know choose usdc for sure yeah but anyway this page is really cool i mean i i've kind of like been yearning for like a

go-to stablecoin page for a while there are some other tools you can use but they're not as good um and this one's pretty good i mean you can see the stable coin kind of growth here and as i've said before on the refuel i think we can get to a trillion dollars by end of the year um total and this is as i said this isn't including the usdt on tron so you can add another 15 billion here which means it's about 50 billion probably more than that at this point of stable coins i think we can 20x that this year we'll see how we go but yeah it's going to be cool to kind of like uh like keep an eye on that for sure so zapify has added a nft kind of uh feature to their portfolio tracker now full disclosure here i'm an investor in

zappa so i'm not just kind of shilling it for the sake of it but what you can do now is you can track your and all of your nfts in the zapper interface which i thought was really really cool i mean i have a lot of addresses i don't know which nfts i've bought and hold and where they are zapp is really good at that zapp is amazing at finding the assets that you don't know where they are right and what address they're in so really cool to see this from them here and there's actually a toggle as well so you can just toggle this on and off if you don't really want to see your nfts the only issue with this is that it shows you a price but because nfts are inherently non-fungible their price is not exactly accurate right just because someone bought an nft for a

certain price like once upon a time doesn't mean that they're going to buy and someone's going to buy the nft for that same price now i think this is the function of we don't have very liquid markets for these things yet and that'll improve with time um but so yeah if you do see prices on there for your nfts don't get your hopes up because it's most likely you won't be able to get those prices um especially if they're like the lesser known random nfts or not things like crypto punks or whatever right so yeah definitely go check this out if you haven't yet so the uh next rebalance for the d5 pulse index is coming up it happens once a month and they've posted kind of what the rebalancing and weights will be what's really interesting is that it's going to be purchasing another 8.3

million dollars of sushi which is 0.44 of the total supply of sushi which i thought was really cool right i mean this is i mean and the rebalancing here is based on kind of like the market cap and the weight of of the market cap within the index so i think it's going to be selling some ave uh for um for sushi here or some other ones for sushi as well uh which i thought was was was pretty interesting but yeah i mean that's a lot of sushi 8.3 million dollars right and this is quite a large rebalance because the um the total market cap of the dpi i think is over 150 million dollars now so this is some of the biggest kind of rebalancing within d5 today so yeah i mean and plus 0.44 of supply that's huge right and

this plays into meta governance as well where eventually not not currently because to participate in governance you have to stake sushi i'm pretty sure but eventually there'll be a a way to kind of do meta governance here with sushi i imagine and that'll be play into it as well where index token holders can actually use those tokens to vote on proposals within the sushi ecosystem and holding 0.4 percent of the total supply is a pretty healthy chunk of the vote i think so yeah really cool to see that all right finally from the block they posted a uh kind of news piece here saying i guess the sac commissioner hester pierce has actually called for legal clarity and the freedom to experiment for define now there's a choice quote in

the article here and i'll read it out to you so hester says here um that regulators need to provide both legal clarity and the freedom to experiment so that defy can compete with cfi to offer investors financial services i'll read that again so that d5 can compete with c5 i love this right this is it this is what we want to do right and if you can kind of like lower the regulatory hurdles to doing this especially in the us right this is going to become like much easier for entrepreneurs to build new tools i think we're still kind of hamstrung by that i know a lot of us-based teams are definitely hamstrung by that and they can't do what they want so if we create like a regulatory sandbox for this sort of stuff we can have some amazing experimentation

going on within d5 uh for for us based teams and you know a lot of uh countries around the world world follow the us regulations as well so that's gonna kind of like have domino effects there too which i which i kind of really like but yeah i mean it's just great to have someone like hester who's pro crypto you know as the sec commissioner and you know influencing kind of like the politics around this here which i thought was really cool um and yeah i mean that quote just there just says it all right i don't really have to say much more than that i think um you know she what else is she saying there's a quote here about like the anti-wall street sentiments i mean it's a there's a pretty healthy pcs you can go read it in the um youtube description but i mean just

generally any kind of positive regulatory news is great i just i one thing i do kind of fear i mean i don't fear it too much but i think one thing that can kind of like put a pause on the ecosystem is very harsh regulations now i don't think that's going to happen but if for some reason someone kind of got in and said i hate crypto right i want to regulate the crap out of it they could they could choke the fiat on ramps they could choke the innovation in the us and it will take a little while but the u.s would lose this innovation to other kind of like countries and other places around the world because crypto is global but it would put a bit of a dampener on d5 because the us accounts for a lot of the uh i guess activity within d5 right

the us dollar still dominates uh kind of like the stable coin arena so yeah i hope that more friendly regulatory kind of news is coming out you know i think the tether news was huge i think this is just you know this is big as well i think hopefully we'll get more positive news going into the future but anyway i digress for now uh thank you everyone again for listening and watching that's it for today uh give that video a thumbs up if you haven't yet subscribe to the youtube channel join the discord channel and subscribe to the delegate newsletter and i'll see you tomorrow thanks everyone