Friend.tech frenzy, The SET framework and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #643 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel break up the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 21st of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so I'm sure you've all seen all over Twitter on the weekend about this thing called friend Tech now what is friendtech I'm going to go over what it is and I'm going to spend a bit of time talking about this today because it has caused a divide in the community so friendtech is basically this social platform where essentially you can buy and sell shares of your favorite kind of whoever that can be like a popular influencer or can really anyone with an account and you buy and sell their shares and it's based on a bonding curve and then you get access to this chat room now the chat room is a bit weird in

that it's not actually a group chat so everyone's in the same chat room but only the uh kind of like uh creator of the the chat room the person that that um uh that everyone's buying and selling the shares of can see everyone else's messages and they can reply to them uh and people and and but then everyone in the group chat can see those messages as well so it's like a group chat but not it's it's a weird way of doing things but you know what people have been doing is they've been copy and pasting in questions that they get asked and and basically answering them and then everyone can see the answers so if some people are using it as like an alpha paid group thing other people are just using it as something kind of fun to play around with and that's exactly what

I've been using it for uh now you know why are people excited about this hasn't this been done before it has it's been done before it's been done as in the form of bitcloud I think in the early days of like steam something was like this was tried not steam the gaming platform steam the decentralized social media platform and there's been experiments here and there of this okay so why is this suddenly the thing that's I guess taking off well I mean I don't think anyone can really pinpoint the exact reason why it's taking off and why it's kind of captured the Mind share but to me there are a few different reasons as to why this is happening and I I kind of um wrote These reasons down on filecaster actually I I said you know I think it's groundbreaking taking for a few different reasons number one is that

it shows people that crypto apps can bypass the app store because friendtech is not actually an app on any of the app stores it's basically just a web app and you can add it to your home screen um and then you can basically use it as uh essentially as an app it's got notifications and everything like that uh and but it's not officially on on the App Store so that alone is a pretty big deal I think because even though it's been possible for quite a while I don't think many people were aware of it and and I don't think many people were aware of how smooth it could potentially work so that's that's the reason number one the wallet ux is generally pretty smooth uh once you've uh kind of bridged in and you just sign uh you just you just sign transactions basically there's no need

to kind of confirm anything you just click sign you just confirm it and there's no need to to essentially have another pop-up for that like what you see in metamask and anything like that so it's generally smoother than what we're used to it's not obviously the smoothest thing ever it's still clunky but it's smoother than what we're used to which I thought was was pretty cool generally uh third thing is that it gets people on chain right and friend.tech for those of you who don't know he's built on base so base is obviously a layer two on ethereum So it's getting people on chain and not only on chain but it's getting them to use Layer Two so which is obviously the thing that we all want to see happening we want more and more people using layer twos and I'm seeing people use these things that

haven't gone unchain before at all and and you guys know I've been saying this for a long time now that I didn't consider people who just buy coins on centralized exchanges and keep them there to be crypto users I consider crypto users to be people who do stuff on chain and that's exactly what we're seeing now so that's another thing that's getting me really really excited and lastly um and this is the thing that's kind of causing a divide in the community it's a very speculative app right like obviously uh if you're buying sell shares you know you could buy it low and sell it high sort of thing just like any token but as I said it is on a bonding curve so it's it's different in that there is a kind of a known curve that the price can can go up and there's kind

of I guess a ceiling that gets reached eventually where essentially if someone's share is worth three eth uh then is someone going to spend for 3 8 2 to buy that chair to push the price up again and there's there's kind of like a natural natural ceiling there uh because it's actually a pretty aggressive curve as well I think Kobe was like the number one person on there how the 170 followers or something and his price was like three eighth so it wasn't really much right 170 shareholders I I should say but while it is still a very speculative app I think the app itself feels distinctly different to something like uni swap or a defy app that's speculative right it's definitely distinctly different even though it's still very speculative so that's another thing that that gets me excited and then I put out a tweet about this you know

like I didn't really understand why people are so mad about friendtech I said you know is it speculative yes of course is it sustainable probably not right because like with most things in crypto it not very sustainable um does it bring lots of new people on chain yes uh so I think it's a net positive for the ethereum ecosystem and I'm having a lot of fun with it so I think the term speculative or speculation is what causes a lot of the drama because it seems that when lot of people hear the term speculation they immediately think of gambling now of course a lot of what's happening on friendtech looks like gambling right I'm not going to deny that at all and there's a lot of gambling that goes on within crypto already and I've said before that I think that pure gambling is probably a net negative for society

that's my my personal view but on the flip side of things I think that there is still good to be extracted out of gambling uh like for example with my friend Tech shares all the trading profits that I'm making from from that uh because every time someone buys or sells a share this kind of a portion of it that goes to the um the actual Creator I'm actually donating all that to the protocol Guild and I've already donated 1.5 eth to the protocol Guild and I plan to donate everything else to them as well so that's falling into that thing uh of turning d-gens into Regens and that's where I think that there can be some positive externalities of kind of pure gambling but for the most part I do think it's a net negative because for the most part that doesn't happen obviously uh you know me donating 1.5 e

if there's hundreds of each being made and most of that is not being donated uh that's just not the way that this is working obviously people want to make money and that's totally fine uh but but yeah I I and I think generally um people have kind of kind of clutched their pearls about this a bit and said oh my God it's so speculative it's gambling we shouldn't be pushing people into this I mean I'm not pushing anyone into it I'm just saying hey this is fun right uh it's it's obviously speculative um I'm also not profiting off of this or anything like that because I don't want to profit off of of gambling or anything like that or the direct gambling that's happening here and I don't want to use my name as a way to to profit either right um so there's all that that falls

into it but at the same time get people on chain get people using the new wallet ux gets people using uh or gets people uh basically aware of the fact that you can do things outside of the app store within crypto and basically just pushes the space forward so that's my my general view on things but I mean I've been in a few discussions let's call it all debates today on Twitter around this you've probably seen some of them around butting heads with a bunch of people about this because I think in crypto there really exists two or maybe three category broad categories of people right there are the idealists like the hardcore idealists the ones who uh don't like anything got to do with speculation because speculation as I said isn't just gambling it's a lot more than gambling the term speculation can can mean really

anything you can speculate on anything it doesn't have to be just gambling so there are those hardcore idealists and I understand their point of view because I used to be like that but I feel like the reality doesn't cater to the hardcore idea list especially the reality in crypto and I think that speculation is the lifeblood of crypto whether people like it or not but it's fine you can be an idealist I have nothing wrong with that um but then you also have like the hardcore speculators right the hardcore gamblers The Profit Maxes as we call them and I'm not aligned with that group uh uh totally either I get why they speculate and I speculate as well but I'm not a prophet Maxi right like I don't think that um speculation and gambling should be done at all costs I don't think you should be able you

should extract as much money from everything as you can at all costs and that's all that matters of course I don't think that you guys know that right but then there's like that third category which is probably where I fit which is like fitting in the middle right you understand that speculation is the lifeblood of the industry you understand that most of the industry would never even been built without speculation you understand that people want to gamble and you're not going to be able to stop them gambling you can make it illegal but but it's just gonna happen anyway right but then you also have ideals right you have ideals about what you want this technology to be and how you want it to empower people you have ideals like for me I a public goods funding maximalist right I love just donating to public goods right and

turning degens into regions and all that so you can you can be both you're right it doesn't have to be a binary decision here but there is that spectrum that people fall on so I try to stay in the middle as much as I can but I understand why people fall on different sides there because I can understand why someone might you know just view the speculation as all gambling even though I don't view it like that and they may view it like that and they might say well I hate you know I hate gambling and the speculation just looks like that it's just ugly to me I don't want to be involved with that I mean that that's fine you don't have to be involved with that but denying the reality that the majority of stuff that has been built in crypto was built off

the back of speculation is where I kind of draw the line because you can't deny reality right the reality is always going to hit you in the face it's always going to be real I mean that's the whole definition of it right and I don't think that um it's good to just bury your head and be naive about it accept it you can hate it but just accept it and and move on and and deal with it in saying all of that as I said friend Tech super speculative please do not want like uh buy or sell shares or try to trade in this stuff without actually knowing what you're doing um as per usual with any kind of investment that you make within the within the ecosystem or any kind of thing that you buy and sell there is risks of losing your money right so

that's it's the same rule that applies to really anything out there but if you do want to just play around with it and see what the hype is about you can create an account for yourself you can just bridge in a little bit of funds into the um into into base you can start playing around with things you can you don't have to buy a share of anyone but you can right you can buy a share of someone if you can afford it if you understand that you may lose all of that money right because maybe everyone else sells and and your share isn't worth very much anymore as long as you understand all that I I see no issue with people playing around with this with this sort of stuff I see no issue with people uh kind of speculating on this sort of stuff I think uh it's

healthy and I think it's a net positive for the ethereum ecosystem now uh just before I finish up on the friend tech chat there was also this tweet from Nicholas who basically put it really nicely and succinctly everything I just said where he said you know frantech is not a revolution in Social tokens it's the first wow moment about about a brand new stack so this is what I was saying before Progressive web app basically um using an app outside of the App Store web 2 login uh because you can log in with an email or phone number embedded self-custodial wallet so the while ux is much smoother than what we're used to layer 2 transaction fees and of course uh notifications as well which is obviously huge for for it for something like a chat app so yeah it really is a at least that's the most interesting

thing to me is the brand new stack for sure and also getting people on chain because I love getting people on chain no matter what chain it is and it just happens to be in L2 which is obviously my my pick right so I'm I'm super excited uh about all of that there but yeah hopefully that gives you kind of the rundown of the friend Tech stuff both the good parts and the bad parts and everything in between uh but moving on from that for now all right so you guys have heard I think it was last week of the week before me talk about the SEC green lighting these kind of like eth Futures ETF products now Scott Johnson here has a really great thread on Twitter about this that I highly recommend giving a read I'll link to the YouTube description below the tldr of this is basically that he

thinks that the the SSC has kind of conceded the point about eth being a Security even though Gary Gensler has said before that he thinks everything except um BTC is a Security based on all the evidence that we have uh that's highlighted in Scott Johnson's uh thread here he basically says that there's no reasonable way for the SEC and for Gary Gensler to go before a court and argue that ether's a security and I totally obviously agree with that and a lot of this stuff is what I've been saying for a long time now uh but you can give this thread a read as to exactly why that is the case but I guess like if you don't want to read it I can give you the tldr the TR is the r is that because essentially all these products exist where eth trades as a commodity or if

exists as a commodity and for the SEC to to turn around and basically say well no ether's Security even though there are products that ether's been trading at under for years like the CME products as a commodity the SEC would have to basically argue why their stance has changed and why they're basically being hypocritical about things as well so I don't think that's going to happen but yeah go give Scott Johnson's thread a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right find a reminder that you have two more days left to contribute to the ethereum kzg ceremony uh the link is here I'll link it in the usual description below but yeah I think this is like the final final call I don't think they're going to be extending it anymore from here so if we go to the actual website we can obviously see uh

at the top the total contributions is pretty much 140 000 so great to see that uh but yeah if you want to be a part of it and still haven't contributed you have two days and 15 hours I guess from time of recording here where I where I've recorded this so definitely go check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right something that I noticed uh that um about ethereum validators was that ethereum added 177 000 new validators since withdrawals went live in April and this isn't counting the 60 000 validators that are currently in the queue in all of 2022 there was around 218 000 validators added when these 60 000 validators clear the queue they'll

have been more validators added in five months of 2023 than the entirety of 2022 who said withdrawals was bearish for each staking now I know there are like two sides of this where people were saying withdrawals was bearish for eth price and withdrawals is bearish for e-staking we obviously saw with price I mean it's remained rather neutral it pumped up a bit then came down and it's rather neutral right but uh and and and and it wasn't really bearish for the price from from the the price action that we've seen so those people were wrong and then the people who were saying that it was bearish for each staking where a lot of eth would be withdrawn from the beacon chain was also wrong based on the stats that I've just presented here but also based on the fact that we saw uh who withdrew once uh

withdrawals were enabled and the majority of it was just cracking because they were forced to withdraw because the SEC shut down their retail staking product right uh but then again I would wager that a lot of that eath that got force unstaked was probably just restaged with another service right whether that be another centralized exchange or maybe something like rock-a-pull or maybe even solo state so the the the those people were just so wrong and it's just funny seeing how wrong they were given that in less than uh half a year we're going to have added more validators this year in like the peak crab right the peak crab bear Market than we did last year so yeah just just great to see great to see that the um the thesis of uh withdrawals not being bearish for e-staking not really being bearish for price has played out

pretty much to its fullest I think at this point all right so I have mentioned this a few times on the refuel but it now is kind of like official official so the newest ethereum test net whole ski will be launching on September 15th and apparently it's pronounced I think holeski or something like that or holesky um but I'm just calling it whole sky or holski because uh I'm I'm uh English English is my first language and that's how I read it um but yeah it's launching on September 15th which is merch anniversary day this will be a long lived test net and we'll be replacing the existing girly test net uh now this test net as you guys know is launching with a lot of validators I think 1.5 million validators in order to stress test the network with lots of validators online and to give us more

insight into everything around that and also I'm not sure on what that's going to look like for uh yeah for dencoon I don't know if it's launching with Dan or it's going to be hard forked to dencoon I think what might happen is that it will launch without dencoon and then sepolia will be forked to dencoon and then um holeski will be uh will be Fork to Denco and then we'll get mainnet in like it could even happen late October guys like the the speed at which things are happening right now could I know I've been saying November but I think it could happen in in late October uh but we'll see we'll see October and November I don't think it really matters but yeah keep an eye on that there but hey it's going to be exciting times in you know not too long less than a month from now

for the whole Sky test net all right so there was an interesting tweet here from teshu who talked about I guess the more speculative side of Ethan maybe this is a little bit of a bullish rant that I'm about to go on but they basically said unpopular opinion too many people expect next cycle to be similar to previous ones but it won't the big surprise will be heavy BTC underperformance too many people will position themselves for the halving with not enough inflows left to push BTC up meaningfully Beyond all-time high nobody wants to buy Sailors heavy bags with meager upside and shaky narratives and mine is constantly dumping eighth on the other hand has a lack of sell side liquidity post merge Supply Dynamics

which will then shine narratives will catch up quickly story Value Plus global settlement layer plus deflationary plus yield bearing the flipping is inevitable and it's happening in the next Bull cycle so this tweet is basically like confirming all of my biases and preaching to the choir but I think it really makes sense and this is something that I've also been preaching as well for a while where I say that once the man comes back eats lack of South Side liquidity all the merge Dynamics you know that Supply reduction the burning the yield all that sorts of stuff that's all going to come together and and really push ether up in my mind I I think that not only against USD but against BTC I mean ethic and BTC has performed so well this bear Market uh it's kind of funny how well it has performed even in like the the

downtrends where essentially we saw the massive crash recently where each BTC went from like 0.063 to 0.06 and then bounced all the way up to 0.064 uh and and seems to want to continue going up from here so I've traditionally kind of uh uh said a lot a lot of times in the past that I think that in the bear Market in the crab market it's really not worth watching eth against USD but it's very worth watching eth against everything else especially BTC and the fact that it has still underperformed BTC by a little bit I think 15 20 or something like that since the top um it's in stark contrast to what it did last bear Market where it went down like 90 against the BTC right so if you had

put in 10 BTC into each at the top you would be left with one BTC uh at the bottom there right whereas this time around if you put in 10 BTC at the top of the BTC ratio you would be left with like seven or eight BTC still so when you look at it like that you can see that the downside has been incredibly muted for 8th BTC up until now now that's not to say that it can't fall further from here but it has just been so resilient for the entire bear market and crab market eth even bottomed first against USD in June of last year uh whereas BTC didn't bottom till November of last year so I think all of these kind of dynamics that teshu is talking about here apply against BTC in the bear

market and then apply equally against USD in the bull market so I'm just very very excited to see um and and also obviously apply against BTC in the bull market as well but I'm just very excited to see just how explosive this can get because they're really isn't much eth out there too to buy there is such a strong narrative for eth as an asset you know the story value global settlement layer deflationary yield a Trad fire loves yield if we're getting eat ETF they're gonna that's gonna be a staking ETF they're gonna love it right um and and I think that all of that together just creates such a amazing kind of demand uh uh uh kind of cycle for Ethan amazing Tailwinds for eth but I struggle to be bearish shot especially

given that we're currently in this kind of accumulation range I'd like to call it right even though we came down a bit make I've always said that the accumulation range seems to be between a thousand and two thousand dollars it could even be tightening between like I don't know 1400 and 2000 or something like that but generally I've just been dca'' in um and you know I I don't give investment or financial advice but generally if you're going to be buying things I don't know I feel like DCA is like the the best strategy by in in buying and selling just to prevent you from making rash decisions or trying to catch the top or bottom or anything and anything like that so yeah a little bit of a bullish rant for you guys there all right moving on to some tech stuff so each Global has announced the top 10

uh super hack finalists now super hack was that hackathon uh I think was the old online hackathon that I spoke about I think a few weeks ago on the refuel here uh this was focused on uh layer 2 cross chain all that good stuff there there were a bunch of projects in the top 10 here that you can go check out which I'll link in the YouTube description below I don't really have a favorite to be honest I haven't looked at all of them that closely yet to have a favorite uh but there have been a few interesting ones here that I I highly recommend checking out I think the winner may have been announced and maybe I I missed the tweet on the actual winner here maybe it's on the east Global page I'm just quickly looking at the East Global page uh no I can't see

it right now but uh but yeah uh oh wait no no here's the winners here so uh there was winners per category so like best infra best interchain app and stuff so you can go view that tweet as well I'll link that um oh no this was from hyperlane this wasn't the 8th Global winners this was from uh from hyperlanes uh I'll link that in the YouTube description as well because it might be able to give you a better idea of what projects to kind of look into and pay attention to uh but yeah congrats to all the finalists uh yeah all right so there were two tweets that were referencing something that I was talking a lot about on the uh bankless live stream I did with David Hoffman the other day this is kind of framework that I came up with uh and someone actually

put a tweet together here Jabs uh calling it The set framework so s-e-t being an acronym for social economic and Tech and uh next Alpha here described this in a tweet where he said imagine being in crypto in 2023 and not getting that ethereum is the best combination of uh the S which is the social layer such as things as like Community Values execution um the economic layer which is the E an efficient monetary policy for Economic Security and the tech layer which is the T for the modular uh kind of roadmap approach and and the modular ethereum approach here um and then Jabs of course expanded on all of this in his Twitter thread which I'll link these in the YouTube description below for you to check out

but the tldr of what I was basically saying on Bank lesson I guess what I say generally is that each crypto ecosystem has something that they over indexed on at the start and they started off at one kind of points here what they started either a social uh heavy on the social layer heavy on economic lay and heavy on the tech layer and the examples that I use is that ethereum started really uh from the social air side of things it was very idealistic there were very a lot of people in ethereum for ideological reasons they didn't care about money and the tech was was secondary right they didn't care about the economics of the chain or anything like that it was all secondary but then over time ethereum evolved we fixed the monetary policy so we started caring more about economic and the tech layer

we also uh fixed with the layer 2 row map where you can basically build anything you want at layer two and that's the modular roadmap here as well there so um and and then I said at the end of my discussion with David that I believe ethereum is the thing that actually hits on all all three of these layers right now in you know not maybe not equal capacity but as close to equal as you can get out of all the ecosystems and then I used an example of something that over indexed on the monetary side of things and that was Bitcoin right Bitcoin started off with a pretty ideological social layer as well but then it very quickly transitioned to being all about the monetary side of things it was all about the Bitcoin monetary policy you know keeping that

intact and really the social air became all about that so the monetary policy and the economic layer actually dictated the social layout and then of course it dictated the tech layer because no one that was in it for the monetary stuff wanted to change the tech because they wanted it to be as secure as possible and they didn't want a hard fork and all that sort of stuff so uh Bitcoin really has just completely over indexed on the monetary side of things their social layout in my mind is is weak um it's it's not great and the tech layer is basically non-existent with with Bitcoin um and then I use the um other layer ones out there the the monolithic layer ones as something that over indexed at from the start on the tech layer and forgot about the social I didn't even focus on that and didn't focus on the

monetary or economic layer either right so uh yeah and that's that's true for pretty much all the monolithic layer ones I believe they they all were like okay we have cheaper gas fees you know we're more scalable you can write smart contracts and things other than solidity all that sorts of stuff and that was their claim to fame and and then I ended the the kind of discussion with David by saying that the things can evolve over time but if you start from a strong social layer base it's much easier to evolve into a good a strong economic layer and a strong Tech layer than if you were to start from like a tech layer and then try to build a social layer because these things dictate each other because the social layer of the monolithic l1s are all dictated by the tech layout right it's not the other way

around whereas ethereum's monetary policy and Tech layer or economically and Tech layer were dictated by the social layer first so I believe that you need to start with a strong social layer first a strong social fabric a strong Community strong values and then you get everything else uh so that was my whole view of things but yeah you can go check out that tweet and also check out jabs's tweet breaking all of this down this is a framework that I'm going to be using a lot going forward because I mean I've talked about it a lot on the refuel in the past and in bits and pieces you guys know this is something that I'm very passionate about especially when it comes to the social layer side of things but I never really contextualized it and put it within a framework I didn't even call it the set framework that was

jabs's creation here so kudos to him for that but this is a frame rate that I'm going to be using going for because I believe that all of crypto falls into these three categories on all the crypto ecosystems fall into these three categories and um and and Jabs is kind of a picture here of the of the the circles in companies encompassing each other the social encompasses the economic which encompasses the tech right I think that's an accurate way of showing it as well so yeah just big kudos to these two guys next Alpha and Jabs for uh kind of listening to that live stream and then putting the idea out into the world because at the end of the day it really is just an idea and it's it's really uh something that I want more people to kind of iterate on and more people to talk about because

it's something that I really believe in and I think that it can be good a good way of getting people's points across when they're talking about these different layers that exist within crypto ecosystems all right finally hear the recording from the Meetup uh that I attended in Melbourne last week is now live uh there are time stamps on it as well so if you just want to check out my uh my chat at that Meetup you can I'll link it in the YouTube description below it's basically I think I went for like half an hour so it's basically a daily gray refuel episode um in of itself uh and it's it's actually pretty easy to listen to Because The Sounds uh sounds pretty good and everything so so yeah you can go check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below and just a big

thank you to the Oz defy Association for having me there I had a lot of fun as I mentioned um the other day but yeah I think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone