London testnet dates, Futureswap v3 and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #147 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 21st of june 2021 all right everyone let's get right into it so just a recap of how bitcoin grants matching round is currently going so almost 200 000 has been crown funded from uh 55 600 contributions from 3 800 unique contributors here with 3 000 hackers joining and this is just five days into the current matching round which is really really awesome to see so yeah i mean 3 800 unique contributors and you know what you can actually tell that these at least most of these if not all of these are you are actually unique because as i explained on last week's refuel

there's a bunch of um different sybil resistant mechanisms in place to make sure that it's kind of like real humans doing this so i would actually love to see kind of a breakdown of these of these contributors and see which ones have actually registered with those various different simple resistant mechanisms and see you know how many actual unique people are donating here but yeah uh really cool to see this thank you to everyone that has donated to uh the daily gray so far and ether of course as well i really really appreciate it if you haven't made your donations yet be sure to do so the matching round ends on july 1st you still have a bit more time about 10 days and i'm gonna remind you periodically until until then anyway but if you haven't done so uh be sure to do it sooner

rather than later so you don't miss out here uh and also while i was doing my um donations uh you know the zk sync checkout experience is absolutely awesome i've used it before obviously in previous git coin grants matching rounds but i think they improved it a bit they made it a lot speedier a lot more fluid and it's just so awesome like just clicking checkout with zk sync being directed to the the correct page i already had funds on there in the address that i was using and then i just kind of like routed those funds to to the grants via zk sync so yeah and as i said here you know the best part of this is just a small taste of ethereum's layer two ecosystem where you know once you actually use it and like uh you know get a taste for it

and basically see how well kind of it works you you can't like um you can't go back really you're like well i wish like all of ethereum was like that which it will be soon uh you know waiting uh i guess like high fees long confirmation times and stuff like that will be a thing of the past like i know long isn't really long you know ethereum takes what like if you pay the highest fee it'll take at most like one block to kind of approve your transaction which is about 14 seconds but that's a really long time still and you know this this really does remind me of like the dial up versus broadband days of the internet like with dial up to load a web to load a web page depending on like how how heavy it was it could have taken that long right 14

seconds it could have taken a long time now there's no way in hell like any of us are waiting 14 seconds for a web page to load if it doesn't load within one to two seconds we're out right like you can see in the stats and the metrics of different kind of like web analytics tools that usually most people will click off if the website doesn't load within like i guess two seconds or something like that and i think that's what's happening with ethereum now with the layer 2 ecosystem where ethereum as it exists today is still in like the dial-up phase of kind of like the technology i actually think the adoption is still in like 56k modem stage but the the um the technology is around dial up i would say uh and then layer 2 gets us to broadband where we get to just basically speed

everything up get much more throughput and capacity to service much more users so yeah i mean obviously like i'm super super excited about layer two i talk about it all the time you know i think there's a few other things here that i'm gonna be talking about today as well but it's just great to kind of use this on a real live product um and you know just have such a smooth experience as well so yeah looking forward to more of those experiences going forward so you know we all know what the price action has been like over the weekend hasn't been great you know it's been pretty depressing and i spoke last week on last week's refill about kind of how i'm viewing the market right now and and and the state of it and everything like that and what i think's kind of

like going forward and the tltr is basically that short term i have absolutely no idea what's going to happen um my most bearish case i don't know if i mentioned it last week but my most bearish case is that we just retest the old all-time high so we go down to like the 1400s and then you know there's a lot of buy pressure then then we go back up but i've got no idea like short term i mean the number one reason why i don't trade is because i'm just too emotionally invested in this sort of stuff like ethereum is my life i am a permabull there's no way i could trade these markets with any kind of objectivity so for me i just take the long term outlook which means that you know years decades whatever like i mean obviously i'm taking a decade's look but

you don't even have to take that long of a look if you just go back and look at ethereum's history even its history from just like five years ago to where it is today absolutely massive like massive difference in both price and technology and everything um you know to give some context here five years ago was 2016 uh you know and this date in 2016 in june was like around the dow event and i think 8th was at like 20 or something but very briefly because of the dow and then during 2016 it went back to like six dollars or something by the end of it so you know less than five years ago if you had bought then six dollars to today you even though you know we just crashed from 4.4k to around 2k you'd still be up like absolutely massively um so you know i'm sure looking back

looking forward in five years is gonna be the same scenario but i put out this tweet where i said like let's look back one year and look forward one year just to kind of like take some context around ethereum and to not let the recency bias of the short-term market movements cloud our judgment here so if we look back one year we can see that the eth2 beacon chain launched and it launched successfully it was when it went off without a hitch it represented you know six years worth of work to get uh proof of stake ethereum live which was absolutely amazing of course then we also had the explosive growth of d5 and nfts over the last year or so um you know d5 i guess like lasted longer in terms of like its growth and it's still growing to today today nfts had like a very fast

kind of boom and bust cycle and but still nfts i mean i've been looking at things like the board ap yacht club sorry uh that is getting a lot of activity on there there's a bunch of other stuff happening there the metaverse is still kicking there's a lot of passionate people in that area that are still kind of doing things there and on top of that l2s began rolling out i was just talking about my experience as zk sync um you know and we had like obviously loop ring and diversify dydx a bunch of others out there hermes network um you know arbitrary devmainet went live things like that so those began rolling out now let's look forward one yet what do we have to look forward to well obviously aip1559 possibly the biggest and most anticipated upgrade i would say it's the most anticipated upgrade in ethereum's

history uh and that's going live late july early august hopefully then we have the eth ones eth2 merge of course which is early 2022 as i've been talking about that will be the biggest upgrade in ethereum's history after one five five nine um because it's obviously you know ripping out proof of work putting in place proof of stake and fulfilling the the full vision that that ethereum has had since basically it was invented by vitalik we have the continued l2 rollout i've been going on about arbitrary going to be opening up to the public any day now um you know we've obviously had you know polygon scalability solutions rolling out as well so it's not just l2 rollout it's also scalability solutions as well that have been kind of rolling out and really helping ethereum scale here uh and you know optimism of course zk

sync stock where all of it that's all that's coming within the next year um and it's going to get you know it's going to be i guess production ready and ready for users to take advantage of and then improved privacy tools as well we had some of those go live um in in i like aztec protocol went went live with their layer two roller but in very limited fashion it wasn't like a big release or anything like that they didn't have that many users but by design they were just you know doing testing doing like early alphas things like that we obviously had tornado cash going live with their um their mixer um and things like that uh so yeah i think the privacy tools are going to be improved going forward as well and then as i said here interim's future is bright ignore the short-term noise and

really that's all you have to do and i'm planning on putting together a video soon about what to do during a crypto bear market now you know i don't know if this is a bear market or not like as i've said before on on the refuel i don't consider to us to be in like a bear market unless it's like at least three months of of continuous downward movement because i i would say the same thing for a bull market i don't consider crypto to be an actual bull market unless it's been going up for three months straight and it's also breaking some kind of like um you know breaking new highs essentially so a lot new local highs i should say not all-time highs um so from that point of view i wouldn't call it a bear market but just generally you know i want to put together a video that

basically goes through what to do in these kind of down markets because there's so much to do and i won't i won't spoil it now but there really is so much to do i mean i basically you know uh did everything that i am known for today in a bear market except the daily great i started that in in the bull market but still um i you know i only launched the daily grade because i had such a large following and you know i figured it would have been very easy for me to reach a bunch of people so that that obviously played a played a big part in it there but anyway i'm going to leave that for the uh the video the standalone video i'm going to do hopefully i can get that out sometime this week um because i think it's very important

for those of you who want to actually stick around and be in it for the tech instead of just being in it for the speculative side of things i think it's very important that you understand what opportunities are available to you during these times and where best to spend kind of like your time and energy anyway look out for that one so i put out this tweet of this chart that said the number of ethereum addresses holding ten thousand plus eight just hit and all a new all-time high here so um this tweet was a bit funny because in the comments i got like a bit of pushback with people saying you know this doesn't mean that like you know it's bullish that whales are accumulating eighth you know there's so much noise in this data now blah blah blah and i don't disagree with that i wrote

today's daily grade newsletter about this i actually completely agree that taking one on-chain metric and extrapolating you know a kind of view from it is a fool's errand really and i and you know even in my data pump videos i don't do this i always say that it's impossible really it's near impossible to know if something's a leading or lagging indicator and and you have to take an aggregate look of the entire ecosystem you can't just look at one indicator but anyway i kind of put this out there as as a kind of test to see how people would react to this and people reacted exactly as i thought they would they took this as a bullish tweet um now and i purposely didn't say that this was bullish or bearish because i wanted to see reactions so you know kind of explaining myself further here

i look at this and i look at kind of like you know number of ethereum addresses holding ten thousand or more eighth uh being at an all-time high and i think to myself okay well um you know does this include smart contracts well no it doesn't that's the first thing you have to qualify this does not include smart contracts this is just normal ethereum addresses then if you wanted to dig into this further you would have to dig into okay well has some whale for some reason split up you know um their eth into multiple addresses and just kept it at 10 000 plus for whatever reason and you know that might sound silly but there are actually a lot of addresses like this um maybe not around the 10 000 mark but i was scrolling through and there's so many addresses with just 150

000 ether in them for whatever reason um and you know maybe they may or may not belong to the same individual or group or whatever but still it's just kind of like a bizarre i guess when you look at it like that then you have to kind of take out all the outliers here like all the exchange addresses and cold storage and and other things like that that are aggregate um aggregated addresses they're not just belong to one person uh there's a bunch of other things you would have to kind of consider here so from that point of view this could be bearish it could be showing that whales are still very bullish on eight eighth sorry sorry can be bullish because it shows a lot of whales are still pollution eat but it can also point to like nothing in particular it can also mean that maybe whales are a

bullish long term but it means absolutely nothing for the short to medium term kind of price action and as you can see here i mean it stayed flat for a lot of 2018 and 2019 here actually the first half of 2019 it it kind of like bottomed out and then trended back up and that was actually a pretty good indicator of um the market but i think it was like a lagging indicator there as well and then you can see during 2020 actually even even until like late 2020 this was still going down even though it's price was going up and i think this was because people were trading eighth for btc and then you can see at the end when e started waking up again all these whales seem to have just fomo'ed in but without more kind of context and around this data you can't really

extrapolate anything from it is my view on this sort of stuff so um you know i might dig into this a little bit deeper to see what happens here maybe i'll talk about it on the left on next month that next month's data pump but still just a kind of like word of caution here anytime you see any kind of on-chain metrics take it with a grain of salt don't try and trade on them really i mean i mean maybe i shouldn't say don't try and trade them if you do just don't expect it to go the way you want all the time because for example a lot of people like to trade based on you know how much stable coins are going into exchanges or how much like uh of each is going into an exchange because you know logically you would think okay

well all these stable coins are going into a centralized exchange there's only one reason that they would go there and that's to buy crypto it's like well i don't know about that right maybe they're going there because they want to change their stable coins for actual fiat and go to their bank account because yields actually dropped uh you know a lot in in d5 recently because of the market cooling down so maybe people want to take their stable coins and not yield farm with them anymore and just go to traditional finance with their fear that's possible i've i know people that have done this so if you kind of look at it from that perspective that's that's bearish right that doesn't mean that stable coins are going to exchanges to buy crypto they're actually exiting the ecosystem altogether that's really bearish um and then on the

other hand uh you have like tokens going to exchanges like say there's a lot of eth going into exchanges well people might say oh well this is this is bearish all this eats about to get sold you have no idea if that's going to happen maybe this person's just adding eth uh into a for collateral because they're going along on eighth and they want to add collateral to it or maybe this person is just doing it to psyops the market and they know people are watching the the the kind of like transactions on chain and maybe they have a short on and they're saying okay well if i deposit like this much eth onto an exchange can i trick the market into dumping a little bit and profiting off this short it's risky sure but i i can guarantee you that it happens so from that point of view i think i always

remember the rule about like if if something if if kind of like a metric becomes like a measure and something that everyone looks at then i think it ceases to become a good good mesh a good measure right if it becomes like the target then it ceases to become a good measure of anything really so i think that's what a lot of unchained data has kind of like um has kind of floated towards lately over the last few months i think but there's still gold to be found there's a lot of metrics that you can take in aggregate and compare to each other and see things and and kind of like gauge things from it but in terms of like trading for price i think you have to take a lot of metrics together and you have to take a macro look i don't think you can actually trade short term

based on on chain data but maybe some people do um i'll be i'll be curious to hear a few if you do from you if you do um definitely comment if you do but anyway i'm going to leave it at that you can read more about this in the daily grain newsletter so tim bico posted the london test nets announcement here which basically announced the fork blocks for the london uh kind of um network upgrade so it's going live on robson on june 24th it'll be on girly on june 30th and rinkaby on july 7th here um i can't remember if i actually spoke about this on last week's refuel i might of i'm forgetting i'm forgetting now but anyway even if i did still just a recap here there hasn't been a main net block date set for uh for london yet london for those who don't know is the

upgrade that includes erp one five five nine uh but yeah there hasn't been a mainnet block set yet as i said that's probably going to come late july early august barring any like catastrophic errors on the test nets but still june 24th is this week excited to see this go live on roxton and excited to see testnet eighth being burnt be pretty cool right because like then maybe just like a month and a bit later we'll have it on main net and and each will still be getting burnt i mean people still think that like it's not going to get burnt because the market's quiet as i've explained before there's still going to be lots of eats being burned even at ten gwai that's like what five million i think average a day of of fees five million dollars uh worth of fees even if like 3.5 of that million of that

gets burned that's 3.5 million each that we weren't burning before um so you know and it doesn't really stay at 10 way i mean it's at 50 right now because the market kind of um volatility picked up the market volatility isn't going anywhere d5 is not going anywhere so we're still going to have these kind of periods where it spikes up when the market heats up again because it will it's not going to be bearish forever when it heats up again we're going to have 1559 in place and we're gonna be burning that eighth baby so you know i think just uh people again just looking at the short term and not kind of like considering the long-term implications of this but anyway they'll see it play out i'm fine with it i'll be showing how much ether is getting burned all the time on

twitter you can be sure about that that's that's for sure all right on to future swap here so they announced that they're developing v3 of their protocol and it will launch natively on arbitrage so just another project that's going to be on arbitrary which is really cool so basically future top v3 comes with a protocol redesign it'll come with more leverage more assets and knowing permanent loss if you want to read the full kind of details about this i'll link this in the youtube description but this is super cool that they're kind of launching on arbitram natively here i don't even know if they're deploying on l1 i think they're just going to deploy on l2 and that's it and i think we're going to see more and more projects do this where they just deploy to ethereum's l2 ecosystem and maybe never deploy to l1

because realistically there's no point right for a lot of projects because when you think about it if if the long-term goal is and the long-term expectation is that you think that everyone's just going to be sitting at layer 2 because they will be then why even bother um you know accruing network effects on layer one just sit at layer two and then get all the users in layer two and you can be done with it i think dydx have taken that approach where they were on layer one but then they relaunched on layer two and they're not even focused on their layer one kind of exchange anymore they're all in on layer two so i think that's the same thing with future swap i i actually imagine that a lot of protocols going forward are gonna do this and i saw some comments today about people saying well

on layer two you can do much more than what you can do on ethereum with the evm and solidity you can do uh like i've spoken about how starkware has their own uh smart contract language called cairo they have their own virtual machine on there as well so you're not kind of limited by ethereum's uh you know evm and and solidity and whatever now i'm not going to argue whether that's bad or good it's just giving developers more options which is i think always a good thing to be honest if developers have more options and it's up to them what they what what they adopt at the end of the day and what they kind of like want to work with but still very very cool to see this uh you know good luck on future shop on this launch i'm man i am just like

itching for arbor trim at this point like it's got a it's got to be any day now right it could even be this week i don't know i haven't got any special knowledge here but it's got to be coming and i just can't wait to use it once it's live so ben edgington put out his latest what's new in eth2 newsletter and as i've mentioned plenty of times this is the absolute best newsletter to keep up with if you want to see what's happening in eth2 it's available at eth2.news but anyway bunch of our usual upgrades in here about the big sorry updates in here about the beacon chain altair the first network upgrade coming to eth2 uh planned very soon actually over the next couple of months i believe some more uh kind of updates on the merge uh staking explainers media research you know all

the regular stuff here just wanted to give it a shout out just so you guys don't miss it this i mean this newsletter is just amazing there's always so much meat in here and links to different things and you can get lost in this and this is actually one of the things i'm going to be talking about in my what to do in a crypto bear market video because i don't think a lot of people have realized just how much there is to do and how much there is to read to watch to learn i mean you can get lost for so so long i mean that's what i did in 2018 2019 really during the depths of a bear market i just got absolutely lost in reading everything and being a part of the community and helping helping everyone with things um but anyway i'm gonna leave it at that i

don't want to spoil the video but uh but generally just go check this out i'll link it in the youtube description for you to do so sam mcpherson from uh i don't think he's from maker here but i know he's he does smart contracts that make a doubt put out this uh this tweet that said um flash minting is coming to make a down now what flash minting allows people to do is basically get guaranteed access to 500 million in dire liquidity whereas previously borrowers would be constrained by the amount of liquidity available in lending pools but maker has no such restriction as it can mean to die into existence so essentially what this means is that i believe that people that want to do kind of like flash loans and things like that are going to be able to do it via maker

now instead of having to go through um something like uh i believe dydx uh was doing this um on layer one and like rv and things like that um just because because maker is the issuer of die and if it's a flash loan then you know it kind of like the die gets minted and then uh you know it's used for whatever during that flash loan and then it just gets paid back so really uh the makeup kind of protocol is not going to be at any kind of risk here and that's why they've got you know 500 million dollars available in die liquidity here because um that that die essentially only exists for that block um for that one ethereum block during uh during a flashlight or a flash minting or whatever you want to call it here so that's really really cool i mean

if if we're talking about stuff that's going to be like kind of fun to to kind of look at in the bear market it's stuff like this these pro like projects like maker and uni swap and compound and all those ones that have been around for a while now they're not slowing down they're not going anywhere they're going to keep iterating and proving they have very strong communities now and especially strong communities because they've got uh governance tokens attached to them as well and i know people like to meme about governance tokens all the time make jokes about them but there are actually a lot of people who deeply care about this sort of stuff and wants to to do governance and want to be part of that community i mean i got i've spoken about before how i got like a rather large git coin token air

drop and i i i mentioned this the other day i sold 25 of it because i wanted to take some off the table but i'm holding the rest of it for for you know pretty much like i don't even know when i'd sell it to be honest i'm holding it for a long time and i've delegated it to someone i trust trent van epps who's a good friend of mine he works at the ethereum foundation to like do governance on my behalf but i still keep track of everything that's happening on git coin and i'm glad that like i have such a powerful voice as well because i trust uh trent uh to to kind of like uh to to kind of have my best interests at heart with git coin um he's very aligned on things with me and you know if i feel like he's

kind of like on uh on a side of something that i would disagree with i can always you know talk to him about it and see where we can kind of find a middle ground or if he does things that i don't like i can literally just kind of undelegate my tokens from him and delegate it to someone else which is i think really cool it's like kind of a liquid democracy um so yeah there's a lot of communities like this uh and you know there's gonna be and and the funny thing is the people that stick around if we do go into like a prolonged kind of bear market they're gonna be the ones that uh that you're gonna want to get to know they're gonna be the ones you wanna get to kind of like network with and things like that but anyway this is really cool

from from make a dao i'll link it in the youtube description you can go check it out so speaking of erp 1559 before there was a proposal on the uh polygon forum to introduce 1559 to the polygon pos chain but the main difference is that they would remove the fee burn and basically send the uh i guess uh base fee to uh instead of burning it they would send it to like a a contract address that was managed to a dow for i guess like public goods funding on on polygon now i think this is cool but i don't know if this is something that i kind of agree with because this is actually discussions that was had between the ethereum community and like how to do

kind of like public goods funding at the protocol level do you do it through the one five five nine base fee or do you do it through a block subsidy something like what z cash has where they uh have some portion of the block reward going into a treasury and ethereum generally hasn't wanted this i don't know if this is the right thing for polygon still cool to see them doing this and this wouldn't actually burn uh or kind of like eat or or um direct that eth to a dow it would direct matic tokens to the dow because you pay fees on polygon and magic tokens so you know from that perspective matic isn't is a capped supply uh kind of currency it is not um perpetual issuance like what ethereum is so they have a different monetary policy to what ethereum does so maybe this makes sense

for polygon still i would like to see some kind of burn in there i don't know i i'm just like i really love the burn aspect of one five five nine i think it's very very elegant in in aligning the uh kind of network and feeding value back into the reserve asset of the ecosystem but again i actually think that the reserve asset of polygons should be eth in terms of like uh the fee payment token and stuff like that and have the matic token as just a staking token that can collect fees from the network as well which i think is fine you know that's kind of like how ethereum's doing it where eth really fundamentally at the end of the day is is it's like a staking token used to pay fees and uses trustless collateral um and and you know that part of it is

burnt as well whereas within polygon you know you could have like the medic token taking on all fudging functions except being like a fee token and people could just pay the fees and eat and that eth will get burned or whatever but who knows what they're going to do here you know there's a there's discussion on them there's actually a lot of discussion on the forum post if you want to go check this out like i think there's you know there's hundreds of comments here so i'll link this for you to go check it out it'll be in the youtube description so cyber hokey put out a really great flow chart here which you won't be able to see on the video but it basically describes kind of like the ethereum governance process now you can view this uh you'll be sorry you'll be able to view this uh in the

youtube description you go kind of like blow it up here i mean if i i guess if i open a new tab i may be able to to view it no no i'll have to uh you i think you can just like copy image address and then open it up but i'm not going to do that now but anyway um this basically goes through kind of like a flowchart and you can see at the top basically what governance looks like to bitcoin maximalist and what you know how governance actually works within ethereum and this is taking like a monetary change so you know how does the ethereum monetary policy kind of get changed or altered and you know bitcoin maximums believe that it just goes to vitalik he approves it and he uses his masternode to put the change in when in reality it goes to an extremely

lengthy governance process that has a ton of different stakeholders and you know each of them have a different role in each of them different powers um and that's what this flowchart kind of describes so i won't go through the whole thing because i want you to go check it out for yourself it'll of course be linked in the youtube youtube description but this is amazing i mean i had people asking me in the discord the other day kind of like what the ethereum governance process was and how it all worked well this is how it works ethereum doesn't have on-chain governance it has off-chain governance that goes to as i said a very very lengthy process and it is not something easy it's not easy to get things into the protocol even extremely popular things like one five five nine have taken over two years to get into

the protocol so you know i don't get it when people kind of like fud ethereum by saying you know it's really easy to change it you could snap your fingers and change whatever you want no that's not reality at all so yeah go check this out it'll be in the youtube description finally here we have some more bullish l2 news out of the graph and optimism so the graph announced that they're going to be supporting the optimistic ethereum network going forward now i've spoken about how i believe optimism didn't launch in march because of and they delayed their launch because their infrastructure wasn't ready they didn't have their their etherscan kind of optimistic ethereum block explorer back then they obviously didn't have the graph because they have it now i don't think they had something like infuria

or alchemy or another kind of like infrastructure provider like that um and generally i didn't think i don't think they had the developer docs up to scratch or anything like that so i think that three-month kind of delay was a way for them to do all of that and get all that up to scratch so that people could start working with it uh and you know that's that's what you have to do you can't launch any kind of network whether it be a layer one or layer two um without this supporting infrastructure in place and as i said that includes things like block explorers um nodes you know like what alchemy and infurial give you like full nodes archive nodes uh the graph the middleware for querying and things like that um and you know there's there's many more like wallets i mean you know layer twos on ethereum are very

easy because you have metamask as the native wallet that you can use with it but all that sort of stuff needs to needs to be considered needs to be implemented i mean oracle's like chain link you know you can't have a layer 2 without oracles and you know chain link has to be on there too so arbitrary already has support for it and so does optimism i believe um so yeah really really cool to see this really cool to see i mean i love the graph as a project i don't i don't hold the token i'm not just shilling it because i i hold the token i don't but i love the graph because they really do offer an amazing service to two different kind of projects and i and i've spoken about it before how they're basically the reason you're able to see kind of like all your

all your nice little fancy dashboards in real time whether that be on something like zapper or another on a d5 kind of interface the reason you can see all those things really quickly um and you know accurately is because the graph is doing the querying in the background for you so yeah anyway really cool i think that's it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone