Ether.cards Relaunch, EIP-1559 benefits and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #59 - 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 sasano and today is the 17th of february 2021. all right everyone let's get into the news from the last 24 hours so before we jump into the news actually i did want to talk about the recent kind of price movements with ethan you know i mean ben from into the cryptoverse posted this tweet here uh basically having a bunch of arrows pointing to where people usually whine about the eighth price and this is the weekly chart here and it's kind of funny to see because i'm getting this as well like i have people messaging me and they're kind of like you know why is each stuck in this 17 to 1800 range well btc you know is over 50k

when's 8th going to over 2k you know all that sort of stuff right and i get it you know in crypto we kind of had like a a very short-term outlook considering how fast the prices tend to move and i think you know if you zoom out you can actually see just how fast we've actually gone up right this is about a year's worth of of the ethereum chart i think and if you take a hundred dollars is like i guess the bottom of this chart here and then to today which is at eighteen hundred dollars it's gone up 18 times in in just under a year which is a crazy price movement right i mean sometimes i think to myself like what more do do people kind of want and i get it right we always all want number to keep going up but

if you look at this chart you know eth is still in in a kind of like rise here right it's still following this this line that he's that that ben's drawn here and you know if i go to the chart myself here and i look at like the weekly chart like fully zoomed out from when he first started trading uh you can actually see you know just how kind of bullish it is like even the bear market doesn't look that bad anymore right that that dropped from 1400 to 80 sort of thing right it doesn't look very bad uh and then yeah i always like to zoom out and even just like going to the monthly chart as well like look at that right i mean that's just that's just beautiful we just like we went through this whole kind of thing and catapulted back up and

you know this is kind of i'm not really much of a trader or chartist myself but at the same time when i look at this like i can't be bearish right look at it we're going up we're at 1814 at time of recording you know it's it's really really great and this is the monthly chart right so obviously this covers like four or five years of trading here but at the same time just going back to the i guess even the daily chart here right if i if i kind of like zoom in here you know you can see that even though we've been trending i guess sideways for the last what is it like eight days or something like that um look at just be before that look at january right january was only last month like about six or seven weeks ago we were at 764 dollars and now we're at

like 1800 i mean yeah so i know that that that i've spoken about this before and about the importance of zooming out when it comes to price because i mean you can always get caught up in you know looking at the price every day checking it every day staring at the charts and thinking to yourself you know it's doing nothing right it's not moving um it's just like uh a stable coin when in reality it's been moving up for like a while now right like i just showed you the chart before from from ben and his chart basically goes back to here on the left right so this this part on the left here and then you know you kind of like get that price rise there and it's just been trending up right we do have dips here and then of course we do right this

one was pretty brutal you know went to 480 then down to like 300 or whatever but in general it's just trending up and i don't expect that to stop honestly i'm still very very bullish for lots of different reasons that i've gone through before but yeah anyway i just wanted to make a note there because i've got a few mis messages about this lately and i always just tell people to zoom out that's all i can say really i can't really kind of say anything else i can't say like you know oh don't worry about it you know he's going to 10k i mean i do say that because i believe that's going to happen but i'm not going to tell you when that's going to happen because obviously i don't know right and you know it's always going to be a bumpy ride it's not just going to

be straight up it's never been straight up i mean even if we if we go to the weekly chart right the only time that it's like straight up with absolutely no kind of like uh cooldowns is a few weeks at a time even in bulmark as you can see in 2017 on kind of left here um and then that's not sustainable like i personally would rather see like this slow movement up than an explosive move up because every single time we have an explosive move up it comes down just you know pretty violently look at this one for those of you in 2017 you remember from april we were at 50 bucks april 2017 we went to what 420 or something like that then we came down to like 120 right after doing that so 54 20 120

in a matter of i think it was like two or three months here like i don't like that i hate that to be honest that's the thing i actually hate the most about crypto is this explosive kind of moves up and then you just know that it's going to come back down right uh so yeah i'd rather just have these slow kind of movements up and yes it's a bit annoying because you keep staring at the price every day and you're like oh this is so slow right but again it's it's way healthier we don't have to go through such brutal drops in in the price sort of thing so yeah just something to keep in mind for sure so coinbase officially announced their eth2 staking uh system is going to be coming soon i think very soon i saw in the comments somewhere and you can join the waitlist

here now i wrote about this in the daily grade newsletter today obviously this is a totally centralized staking provider right this is not you know like sticking on your own or anything like that it's completely custodial and it comes with all those sort of risks but the benefits you get you know are pretty alluring right you don't have to run your own software or hardware you don't have to have the minimum 32 eth you don't have to worry about securing your own setup right you there is like a cut that coinbase takes which is 25 of the 7.5 apr that you'll be making um which is you know a pretty sizable cut to be to be honest right um but still right that you are kind of outsourcing your your your staking to them um so yeah there are there are a lot of benefits there

for sure and it's like kind of one click as well but at the same time you know it doesn't help the network to stake with a centralized party now if you don't have the 32 eighth minimum required to stake i don't blame you for using a centralized party and i don't blame you um for kind of like not wanting to lock up i guess you're kind of ethan eth2 until the merger happens that's totally fine um but at the same time i think if you have the means to do so if you have the hardware right to do so getting startup is very easy and you've got to have the 32 eighth minimum as well and you've got to be comfortable kind of locking it up right and you know a lot of people are comfortable with that there's millions of each stake that is not part of

uh staking services that is locked up and and people are fine with that i think because they're just long-term eath holders they didn't plan to sell that eighth anyway i mean i haven't i never sell a stock that i've got like it's a certain percentage of my eighth that i plan to always hold on forever no matter how crazy the market is or how brutal it is i'm just never gonna sell it it's gonna be permanently in staking and that's what i've sent over to to staking to do so myself so yeah just a little note there there's more details in today's delegate newsletter about this but just wanted to make sure that uh you kind of like you know even though this is very alluring i think it's very very important for you to stake on your own um for the health of the network keeping the

network decentralized um you know even though it might be you know harder than just delegating your staking to coinbase or something like that i think it's just very important and you know if you have the means to do so definitely do it and i think by now you know if you already had the 32 eth and everything like that you're probably already staking but for those maybe on the fence about it i mean the apr i think is at like what 10 still or something like that so it's very very nice return on your your kind of eth um you know i know you can get better than that in d5 but there's like way more risks as well so yeah just uh just something to consider i i don't as i said i don't blame you for wanting to to use centralized kind of services to stake

like i mean we building the eth2 network we can't just assume that everyone is going to be altruistic and everyone's going to be like you know like a cypherpunk and want to just um i guess like stake on their own right and and care about the decentralization of the network that's not how you build resilient kind of crypto networks so but i mean i can still encourage people to to stake on their own and there's plenty of guides out there you'll find them in the in today's delight newsletter i included a link to a few there as i said it's not hard to get set up on your own so yeah if that's something you're interested in doing definitely go give that a look so ethercard so this actually came out the other day i think february 13th and i had it in one of my tabs on chrome and

i had like a million tabs open so i forgot to cover it on on the 13th uh on the on that refuel so i want to cover it today and i kind of put a tweet out before saying that people are sleeping on ether cards and i think they are so let's let's go over what this is so ethercards i mean has been around for a while they kind of are re-launching now as an nft kind of gamification framework they're calling it but they've been around for a while as kind of like these physical cards you could get that acted as like an ethereum wallet i've got some somewhere in my house you know amongst the amongst the many things that i've got here i haven't i haven't been able to find it i actually was looking for it earlier today but they're really cool little little cards

but what they've done now is i've actually rebranded to an nft platform here so you can go to their website you can see they're actually launching in about 14 days uh 21 hours which is march 4th so not too long now um but what i found really interesting about this is it's not just your regular kind of nft kind of trading card game or card game kind of platform what they're actually building here goes far beyond that and you have to kind of dig into the docks to actually see and they've got the docs here you can go check it out yourself i won't you know go through them today but basically it allows kind of people to spin up their own kind of like cards here and give them like different attributes and stuff like that so for example you know there's an example here of a card that has

different attributes tied to it so if you click on this here this is like the bingo attribute so all the trait they call them so it says here the bingo trait is a free service trade it lets you create bounties and bingos for free now what bounties and bingos are is that they're part of the kind of nft framework here and they're like little games built into this platform which is all explained in the docs as well but you know there's also other traits like you know you can get a one percent right this is a one percent royalty trait which basically entitles you to one percent of all the revenue um collected by the ethercards contract so by this service which i thought was really cool now like going beyond this i think nfts in general need more utility

right you need to bring more utility to to kind of like uh i guess not just the gaming game items that people are using but also a lot of the art you know there's a lot of nfts that are just like art pieces right and and and i i understand why people value them but there's so much more we can do with nfts we can put utility attached to them like i just explained to you these traits are basically adding utility to these nfts and you know you can even go beyond this and you can think about how this enables things like imagine you holding a certain nft card in your hand and it entitles you to trading fee discounts on uh you know unisop or something like that right where you know you get like zero 0.05 off all your trades because you hold this card

and this card is not like it's available to everyone it's like a rare card and because of that it'll be valued very highly right because who wouldn't want trading fee discounts on uni swap especially arbitrages they'd love that so you could start assigning this stuff as like the project yourself and assigning these kind of like rare traits to them in order to kind of like i guess i mean drum up usage it's marketing right it's it's a really cool way to kind of get people more engaged with your app so i'm hoping to see more of that happen and actually using the etherclouds platform i think developers will be able to to kind of like spin up their own stuff here as well so i mean you can see here on the docs site they kind of explain kind of what's going on here and like the platform and the tokens and

all this sort of stuff i mean they've got things like for any of you have done trading cards before you remember like kind of blind bags where you can buy these bags and they would have a random amount of kind of these these cards that you could have um there's like uh these these kind of like mini games like bingos bounties raffles you know with raffles you can actually take nnft and split it up into like 10 pieces and then raffle off each sorry then sell raffle tickets and then you know the raffle tickets win a piece of kind of each uh sorry a piece of this nft which i thought was another really cool way to monetize nfts uh and then you have like death matches where you can like battle other people and the loser kind of like burns that nft so it kind of adds deflationary pressure

to kind of the nfts so yeah i mean what they're creating here is is pretty awesome i thought and i like when i kind of looked into it properly i was like you know you can take this so far like especially with this traits thing i mean i'm just like kind of spitballing here of what you can do with it but you can do so much more than than than like i've even said today and i think i think projects that embrace this are going to get like some really great hype and usage behind their project because you know people can be trading cards saying oh wow your card has this trade on i really want that because you know i use sushi swap a lot or i use uni swap a lot right so i think that's going to be very appealing to people but anyway

go check this out yourself it's it's linked in the youtube description or you can go to ether.cards and you can view the whole thing here as i said the launching on march 4th i think you'll be able to buy like the different cards as part of a sale i'm not sure exactly how much they're going to be i'm sure they're like somewhere here maybe on the tokens page or something like that um but anyway um yeah that will go live on march 4th and i'm sure there's going to be a rush for this like nfts are so hot right now right i just sounded like someone from zoolander there um but yeah in general like they're so hot right now and i think adding utility to the nfts is just way better than a lot of the stuff we have now i mean i get why crypto punks are valuable you

know i get why other nfts are valuable but you know if we just stopped at that i would be really sad i think there's such a huge design space here and i think that ethercars is just like the first step there's going to be others that spin up as well but i'm really really excited to see where people take this because i mean there's it's just just so much you can do with this but anyway i'll digress there for now i i mean the reason why i'm so excited is because i'm a trading card collector myself i have a massive pokemon card collection and you know they didn't really have much utility to them either unfortunately i mean i never really played the game itself um and they're not digital obviously so you're basically taking that having really cool art on the cards making them rare and

collectible and then adding all these awesome traits that you can use within like d5 and other ethereum apps which i thought was really cool as well so yeah definitely go give this uh give this one a look so interesting tweet from anti-pro synthesis today so he compared the two quote-unquote blue chip public net networks by metrics or public blockchain networks by metrics so that obviously being bitcoin and ethereum so uh the cash flow on ethe is actually 2.5 times higher than btc the fee demand is 4.4 times higher and the value capture of d5 750 times higher i mean he this 52 million for btc is actually taken as lightning network so if you consider lighting network d5 counts but i don't know if i would consider

lightning network kind of like i mean it is d5 but at the same time it's kind of like not but whatever i digress there doesn't matter i just thought that was funny but what's i mean i've spoken about it before but what's really striking to me is there's just this fee demand here from this site crypto fees.info i mean ether has been above bitcoin for a long time now i think it's been months now since uh since it is since ethereum's been up there and obviously the high fees are not great for end users and i've spoken about that endlessly on the refuel before so i'm not going to rehash it there um but yeah i mean i just i just think that's just amazing right and and the cash flow like the money mo like this site called moneymovers.info which shows you like money moving on the

ethereum network versus the bitcoin network as well which is you know been above bitcoin for quite a while too right you can see here um and then d5 value capture i mean i don't have to go into that either and then you know looking at this i just kind of think to myself like ethereum is so undervalued right as compared to bitcoin right in terms of network usage and you know at the same time kind of sad that the value doesn't translate more from network usage to eth and i think this is one of the reasons why people are so bullish on eip1559 just the fee burning mechanism now obviously you know one five five nine comes with a ton of other benefits one major benefit being like a much better fee market for ethereum

but you know people like to latch on to the fee burning mechanism because that you know theoretically is going to drive more value to eth and it should because if we've we're not going to burn all these fees like this is 24 hour fees we're not going to burn all of this uh it burns a portion of it but that's still a lot of eth being burnt each day like even if say only five million dollars worth of ethers getting burnt each day from this feeder man which is one-fifth right which i actually think it's going to be more than that but let's just say for example's sake it's it's just 5 million here you know that's a lot of heat right that's being burned each there and burn like not just going into cold storage not just being in someone's wallet literally burned out of existence right

so you know from that perspective it's like people aren't kind of like pricing in one five five nine right now and i put a tweet out the other day saying if you're waiting for one five five nine to be implemented which i've speculated on the refill before that i think is going to be in july or august this year again pure speculation there don't have any kind of uh info on that but if you're if you're waiting until that happens i mean i can see east being much higher than what it is today by that point and i just think that people are still not pricing in how much kind of like eat is going to be burned here and it doesn't have to be like a lot each year even if we only get 2.5 percent of this eighth being burned each year um you know that's actually a lot 0.5

percent of the total supply even if it was just like 0.1 percent or something like that you know when in eth2 when the merger happens the overall issuance collapses like the issuance right now is around four percent a year of new eighth going to minors in e2 it's going to be uh under one percent um pretty much like probably under point five percent depending on how much ether is staking so from that perspective you have like all this eth locked up in eth2 right the issuance basically collapses you have you know on the low end probably 0.1 percent of each being burned right i will eat being burned a year it's probably going to be higher than that um you have like all these locked in d5 you have all the eighth locked in like things like the grayscale investment trust people's cold storage right all this

sort of stuff and then you kind of think like like there's just going to be a sell side kind of liquidity crisis faith right it's not just going to be much easier to go around so yeah anyway i don't want to pump up is too much there but i just think it's insane how undervalued atheist compared to bitcoin considering that we've pretty much flipped bitcoin in every conceivable metrics at this point except market cap so i think you know there's definitely going to be a repricing event in store and it's going to take longer than we would like because there's a lot of both misinformation and information asymmetry out there where you know people don't exactly know why eth should be valuable still because it's kind of harder to explain than kind of like just selling a narrative of there's only never going to be 21 million bitcoin sort of thing

but we'll get there i'm pretty confident that we will get there all right so bison trails have put out a really exciting kind of uh i guess a new product today called the global blockchain sync now viktor buenan explains exactly what you can do with this here which i thought was pretty cool you can spin up an ethereum archival node in about 12 hours and then bison trails will basically manage all the maintenance the upkeep and upgrades so that you never have to worry about it essentially and no this is not a sponsored spot or anything like that i am friends with victor uh and i just but i really do like what bison trails is doing here for those who don't know they're like an infrastructure provider and for them to be able to provide you with like an archival node within 12 hours i think

it's pretty good because to sync one of these nodes yourself it takes a lot longer than 12 hours let me tell you i think it takes a couple weeks maybe three weeks depending on your hardware right and for those who don't know what an archival node gives you it basically gives you the history of the entire blockchain from genesis and it lets you query it for anything so say you wanted to query the balance of your address at you know i don't know something sometime in 2017 right your historical balance you can do that with an archival node whereas in a theorem full node won't let you do that without um basically going back and kind of recomputing that those those kind of transactions back then um but the way it works is that you can actually reconstruct an archival node from a full node because

obviously you know we have an archival node also um takes up a lot of uh storage space well it's like well until the terabytes of storage space but whereas a full node is a is a few hundred gig gigabytes uh you can still recreate an archival node from a full node and you may have seen this argument on twitter over the years between like archival versus full the main difference really is that a full node still gives you the same security guarantees it still verifies everything it still kind of tells you that the network is running as it should and everything is fine but it won't give you that historical balances right but in reality you don't really need the historical balances um most of the time right for things like you know you only care about those things maybe for accounting

purposes like for tax purposes and you know something like ether scan is fine for that or another ethereum block explorer but the fact that you can actually just spin up one in about 12 hours using bison trails now i thought that was really really cool so kudos to them on getting this out there you know it's not free i'm pretty sure you have to pay for it but again like doing this yourself takes many weeks you know you need like terabytes of storage to do this and it can actually be quite uh quite annoying because depending on your hardware it can get stuck right because it's just a very very heavy thing to compute so yeah but you know and if you're in full note isn't i theorem four note is pretty easy to run so you know if if you want to run a phone

or you can go do that and get it get you know kind of synced very quickly especially with the the various snap syncs and stuff like that so yeah good to see this coming out of bison trails here so another uh app is heading onto stark where's layer 2 uh so this will be badger so badger dao for those who don't know is a i guess like a yield aggregator for btc products mainly so what they're actually doing uh on with starkware is they're bringing a zk roll up amm uh to startware that is dedicated to trading between like tokenized bitcoin so this is really cool to see badgers actually quite large they've got billions of tvl for those who don't know um and it's good to see them heading to

layer two as well right i think as i've said like many times so many more projects are heading to layer two right and the more that head there the more that kind of will head there because they'll be like oh we're gonna get left behind if we don't go to layer two so really really cool to see this um i don't think that it's live yet no no it's not live today or or yet um but i i don't assume this is going to be very far away star quest tech is ready you know they already have diversifier live on their tech they have a bunch of other things they're launching soon i mean dydex is going to use them and for those who don't know starkware is is basically i mean as their name implies is uh is very uh specialized in stocks and they're building zk roll up

technology whereas something like optimism is building optimistic uh roll-up technology so yeah those are the kind of key differences there but yeah really great to see this i hope to see more kind of of these default apps kind of move to layer two it's inevitable right they're all moving to layer two it's just we need to get it done this year i don't think the teams and and the apps can wait anymore i don't think users can wait anymore you know i i i as i've said before in the refuel i think gas fees are fine you know for like i guess these are fine in the short term in order to encourage the ecosystem to scale and go to layer two but in the long term you know if the gas fees on ethereum remain what they are today and we had no kind of layer two

ecosystem we had no scaling coming you know we had none of this stuff then ethereum would bleed users to other chains you know ethereum's network effect would slowly diminish and i think eventually ethereum would kind of die out but that's not the case today and that's why i'm not bearish on ethereum at all is that it's evolving right it's it's it's it's still changing it's still upgrading and there's nothing to worry about from that angle so really great to see badger and starkware teaming up here all right last up we have a tweet from trent van epps here that basically says a short list of eip1559 benefits so the first benefit is more predictable fees which will reduce the overpayment of fees and give a better user experience now i want to be clear this does not mean that fees are going to get lower

i've said multiple times that one five five nine will not have a meaningful impact on the fees in terms of the cost but it will give more predictable fees so instead of you accidentally overpaying on fees which you know you would do a lot of the time it smoothens out the fee and and the whole mechanism so that people don't really uh overpay here the second one is it removes the incentive for reorgs in fee heavy environments now this is a kind of a technical thing um there's actually a paper i think down here somewhere in this thread that trent linked that basically explains what this means the trdr is that essentially if you have a fee heavy network so where the fees actually outstrip the block reward for miners it can lead to some perverse incentives so

go give that paper a read it's in the thread here somewhere so i'll link the thread in the youtube description um so yeah i won't kind of like going to the details on that one uh for now second thirdly sorry it cements uh primacy of eth with base fee burn and the the cost of economic abstraction mav goes up so what this basically means is that right now if miners wanted to they can go out of band and include transactions into a block uh for either free or charging people something other than eth to do so so if you knew a miner or a mining pool and you said to them hey man can i get my transaction in this block and i'll pay you like 100 usdc to do it right or 100 usd or whatever right whatever money it is i'll pay you this

they could do that right that is entirely possible for them to do um and they could do it for free as well you know we've seen miners include transactions without fees before so what eip1559 does is it basically makes it so that you have to pay for the base fee that is you can't get around that you can't pay any other token for that it has to be eth so even if this transaction went out of bounds right and kind of like went around the mining pool or miner would still have to pay the base fee in eth and then they could pocket the difference in the other token but you know ether still have to be paid at some point the fourth one is it will allow in protocol congestion oracle now what this means is that smart contracts can actually tap into this mechanism and be able to kind

of have more predictable i guess like gas prices because of it which means that they can kind of as an example you could have like a roll up or like a layer to roll up wanting to kind of checkpoint to the the main chain and they can actually use this on a congestion oracle to find out when the cheapest time to do that is or they can do it for like fraud disputes as well and things like that this is more on the technical side of things but it is a very major upgrade when used right and then the fist the fifth one here that trent kind of appended to his tweet was that the base fee burns enable net zero possibly negative issuance while maintaining the som the same long-term security properties are reached with consistent block rewards meaning it becomes an even powerful

asset now i this is what i was talking about before how about how in eth2 its annual issuance rate drops a lot right drops to under one point set about one percent hopefully around 0.5 percent and then coupled with a fee burn um and depending on how large that fee burn is we could literally see a an a new issuance each year be negative zero so literally there'll be more eighth being burned that's that's ish then issued her uh which which leads to a deflationary eighth which no other blockchain currently has uh out there right bitcoin does not have this it will not have this uh even when it reaches the cap it will not have a fee burn unless they've put it in i think they might they might i mean i think this model for security is better than what they

are kind of relying on which is just fee revenue in general uh but i won't kind of go into that for now but i think that's very powerful as well so really really great tweet from trent here i i really liked how how well he put it here and yeah one five five nine is literally just like one of the best upgrades to come to ethereum not just for the the eighth kind of fee burn but for all these other benefits i actually think the eighth burn is the least interesting thing of one five five nine if i'm being honest i actually think without it eth price would be fine but i think it just adds another layer on top of an already amazing upgrade to the network all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching give that video a thumbs up if you

haven't already subscribe to the channel join the discord server subscribe to the newsletter and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone