Market commentary, EF fellowship program and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #116 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 7th of may 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i wanted to talk a little bit about the markets to get today's episode started so as you all have probably seen if you know you know frequent coin gecko or coin market cap or any of those coin tracking sites there are a lot of coins and tokens going up considerably in value that many people thought were dead right dead or dinosaur coins or you know some people calling this a dinosaur season because they're all going up in value now i was kind of like wondering like why are these things going up in value these are these are dead projects no one's using them

they were like 2017 fan favorites as well uh which is which was odd so i did some digging and really i mean it was quite obvious once i found the reason but essentially robin hood has this on their website where they have uh i think it's like seven currents uh crypto available here for cryptocurrencies available here for trading that being btc uh bitcoin cash bitcoin sv dogecoin eth ethereum classic and litecoin now if you look at the right hand image here you can see that ethereum classic is up 300 over the last week and it's like okay why like i don't know anyone using ethereum classic their network metrics are you know basically uh very very low they've been 51 percent attacked multiple times so you know why is it up

this much and it really is because it's just on robin hood robin hood is an extremely popular retail investing app uh it's even more popular than crypto exchanges are uh and you know obviously there's a lot of robin hood users that came in recently um because of the gme stuff that happened the game star stop stock and all the kind of like uh new dr news and drama surrounding that um but also people are buying ethereum classic because they think it's a cheaper ethereum and it makes zero sense but this is kind of like you know that bell curve maybe you've seen this is middle of the bell curve thinking people will buy this stuff because they just truly believe that ethereum classic is just a cheaper version of ethereum now i mean i can understand that if you're totally new to the ecosystem it's not

exactly explained to you what ethereum classic is you you know just it's got a theorem in the name so you might think oh well okay i must have something to do with ethereum same for bitcoin cash same for bitcoin sv um obviously doris cohen i spoke enough about that don't need to say anything there and litecoin which i like to call the cockroach of the crypto ecosystem because it just refuses to die but i mean i don't really have any ill will towards litecoin i just think it's pointless and yeah it really does refuse to die but then if we move down the list here and we see the um list of assets that robin hood doesn't support for trading but has net has market data for there's just a bunch of 2017 error coins that it just makes no sense like when i saw

this list i'm like how do they come up with this list it must be kind of like a leftover from 2017 2018 because they have assets like bitcoin gold dash neo kutum uh or qt um i assume it's kutum um you know ripple and stella and whatever else here so i look at that and then i looked at coin gecko and some of the top performers this week are qtum omisego or omg network right bitcoin cash lisk uh dash and then a bunch of others below that that's not in my screenshot here so that explains that and because i was just really puzzled like i actually i wasn't too puzzled by ethereum classy because it's on coinbase as well and i i know there's a lot of people buying it

because of ethereum but i was puzzled by kutum and i've been puzzled by eos as well and i was really puzzled by bitcoin cash and dash and things like that so this this basically explains it so i wrote a newsletter today about this as well where i basically gave like an overview of like why this is happening and it's happening because of of partly because of robinwood but because there's a ton of retail investors coming into this ecosystem now and they don't know one thing from the other this ecosystem or these coins and tokens to them are literally just rappers around marketing and narratives they've probably seen these narratives on facebook or on youtube or on tick tock which obviously we didn't have in 2017 and we have now and tick tock's absolutely massive so they see these narratives and

and kind of marketing speak and they think to themselves uh okay well this must be crypto right and they don't know any better because they're new to the ecosystem and i think that's fine because like when we were all new like i'm sure we uh you know i know i like back in 2013 i definitely came into into bitcoin because i i sourced money to be made like i was not coming in for the tech like i'll freely admit that um and a lot of people do that and i think most people come into this ecosystem to to make money first and and that's totally fine i'm not here to moralize and tell you what you should or shouldn't be doing or why you should be in this ecosystem but that comes with the flip side of having to watch all this crap pump up and

you know random people that um you don't know outperform you you know you may have been fundamentals based investing for four years and you're getting outperformed by these quote unquote apes or like retail investors coming in um and you know buying things like you know ethereum classic kutum doge whatever so don't be disheartened by it the thing that just gets me down is that a lot of these marketing and narratives are like you know fake marketing skinny marketing and it's allowed to like proliferate with no checks and balances at all and i'm not inviting government gov government regulation or anything like that but if you just go on youtube i mean there's so much crap on there like it's really bad and it's actual scams too i don't know if you've seen if you go to youtube sometimes there'll be a live stream a channel

playing like a live stream and it'll be like a pre-recorded video from another uh kind of like channel like i saw one um of bankless interview of hayden adams the other day and the channel was like faking as if like hayden adams was doing this live interview and then obviously they have links to their scam in the in the youtube description so there's a lot of that going on and then there's a lot of fake marketing and narratives around these platforms like people saying you know ethereum classic is going to uh basically uh get new new life when eth1 merges into each two because all the miners are gonna go to ethereum classic it's like i mean okay maybe some of them will but not all of them will there's other coins they can mine and at the same time why is miners coming to the coin

bullish like they're just gonna dump like the coins on you i don't know um but anyway and then things like q10 which i hadn't heard about until since 2017 right until i saw it pumping up and then even things like verge and i mean i'm not gonna go through all of these but it's just the same thing the same tune playing out 2021 is 2017 on steroids i had hoped that there'd be a little bit of maturity in the ecosystem uh by now but there doesn't seem to be but in saying that it seems that we have two separate markets now where ethan btc seem to be attracting a lot of institutional capital and the rest of the markets is is attracting a lot of retail investor capital so i think and then this is why i think that you know it's going to be one i mean i i i've

kind of said before that i don't think we're going to have a two-year bear market again but i apply that to to eth right and maybe to bitcoin as well i don't apply it to all this other stuff like all this other stuff can easily fall 90 plus percent aren't in a down market because they're the first assets people sell off because they know that they're worthless right at least the smarter people that have been in secret system for a while that are just trading this stuff the traders know they're like you know they're just trading momentum from retail investors and they're going to take all the money off the table once the the market turns south on these things it's the first thing they're going to sell whether they go into eth or btc or usd it's gonna be those three three things so when i say that i don't think there's

gonna be another two year bear market i i apply that to ethan bitcoin pretty much uh only uh the other things even defy tokens not going to be spared it's all about what people offload first and that's what's going to happen there but anyway there's one other kind of like tweet i put out today in the same vein here where i said there's only one person that i know in real life who's new to crypto and is actually interested in learning about the tech and using the products everyone else just asks me about coins or scams and whether they should buy into it or not it's just depressing to be honest and it is i mean it's depressing i understand it but it's still depressing because i when i talk about these things in real life i want to talk about the tech i don't want to talk about random

coin xyz and like whether you should ape into it or not like i'm not going to tell people what to buy and what not to buy if i tell them not to buy it because i know it's a scam and then it goes up 10x which typically you know it typically does then they're going to be like well bro why did you tell me not to buy it it's gone up 10x so i really just stay away from from that sort of stuff there but yeah i mean it's just really disheartening because i i mean as i said there's only one person that i know and and he's great to chat to and i really enjoy like um you know educating him on on this sort of stuff and answering his questions and i know he's like really interested in the tech side of stuff but you know everyone else i talk

to just seems to just be like wow you know there's so much money to be made i want to you know buy into all this stuff and as i said i get that but it's like it's definitely not something that i want to be talking about and i think you know there's a lot of discord channels like this too we were discussing it in the daily grade discord channel today where we said you know um the daily great channel is is not very speculative at all we talk a lot about the tech and like i'm hoping we can keep it that way um because that's just not what i want to invite into my life i guess like i i don't want to respect the pump on all this kind of stuff um so to speak so yeah i'll leave it at that for now

because there's one other thread here that i've been asked to cover over the last few days and it's this thread from a guy named john and a lot of you may have seen this it was very popular it got you know sixteen thousand likes three and a half thousand retweets and it's basically john uh kind of talking about how uh working in crypto is over romanticized um and it's it's basically you know marketed or advertised as a thing that's like this grand thing that's like rosy and you know always awesome and and things like that now john's threat i'm not going to read through the whole thing but if you read through his thread literally all of his points or at least most of them apply to startups in general it's not just unique to crypto and that's why i actually think this threat is is kind of

kind of trash if i'm being honest because he describes the problems well i would say but he he he basically has like blinders on where he thinks that for some reason that this only applies to crypto now i've worked in both a very corporate job and a startup when i was working at set and then before that i was working for a telco company in australia they were very very different in the telco company there are different problems right sorry in the in the corporate company there are different problems uh you are basically a cog in the machine you you know there's lots of toxicity depending on management um you know you don't really feel like you're making any impact uh and you and you really do feel like you're just uh you're just there kind of like a doing kind of like monkey work at the

end of the day and this doesn't happen at every corporation but the bigger the corporation the more bureaucracy uh the harder it is to really get anything kind of done startups are the complete opposite when you join a startup it's it's it's very different you have a lot of agency you have a lot of impact if you if you're joining a startup with less than 10 employees then really you're 10 of the company if there's 10 employees so your impact is is outsized um and and you basically get to steer the direction of some things your feedback is valued you have a direct line to the founder ceo all the executives right you have a direct line into all of them and you can talk to them as if they were just your normal co-workers and stuff like that so from that point of view um you know

startups are very very different um and you know startups come with a lot of um a lot of headaches as well so where in the corporate world you may think that it's a safe job because like it's a very big company and you know they make you know they're profitable they're making lots of money and you're you're you know it's a lot harder for you to lose your job in a startup it's kind of like much riskier because you're building new products and new things and new services that may or may not get adoption right and you're starting a lot of the time you're starting from from basically zero um you know first-time founders who have maybe no name behind them no experience behind them are even um are even in an even riskier position because of that as well so all of these

points i think that john brings up in this thread about like um bit you know doing different things building communities um working with vcs uh i i guess like um working with the law and the and regulations and stuff like that that all applies to startups now and like startups generally so now but where john actually has some i guess like okay points um i know i said the the thread collectively was a bit trash but i think where he has some okay points is that he was talking about like governance and crypto building a community the token price and things like that what i think happens in crypto is that you still have the startups right you still have the startup companies the startup culture all that sort of stuff but when you have a token involved it amplifies

all the good and all the bad when the tokens going up everyone loves you your community is on the moon right your community is absolutely um you know in love with your product is using it your tvl is exploding your volumes are exploding it's all well and well and good now inevitably the the coin is not just going to go up forever it's going to go down at some point so what ends up happening is that when the coin's going down and depending on how much it goes down your community starts to turn toxic right and the toxic community starts dominating your kind of like team's mental space it starts dominating your social platforms it starts dominating your your forums and your governance process and things like that depending on how bad it gets that's where the really tough times come in and i think that um you know

to john's point here is that that's that's kind of like the uh why i think people over romanticize it is because like you can look into a i guess like a crypto product and be like you know everything's amazing when the number's going up uh because i actually you know as an example here i remember back to yern and when that launched with wi-fi everyone loved joan right because the wi-fi token was absolutely exploding everyone loved andre they thought he could do no wrong they were like how is this guy shipping something every week um and you know inevitably the wi-fi price crashed like very very hard i think it went down like 80 90 or something from from the top and then yearn fell out of favor with a lot of people they hated it they hated andre they you know they they basically turned

very sour on the project and then it took them a few months to they kept building but it took them a few months to get back in community favor they're nowhere near what they were in terms of like i guess the amount of people interested in it and the wi-fi tokens not like exploding in value like it used to be but i think that um you know projects go through this all the time and it just amplifies all the negative and positives of of a startup at the end of the day so yeah i guess like that's just like my tl dr on this thread and like i guess um you know my perspective here like i mean i think i can probably add a little bit more here about my time at set and like working with a startup it's not great it's not i mean i wouldn't say

it's not great but it's not like sorry it's not great all the time it's not bad all the time it's like middle right you have some really good moments you have some really you know really high moments you have times when you're launching a major product and people are using it and you're getting all this coverage and people talking about it and it feels really good then there are low times where you've built a product and maybe no one's using it and no one's really talking about it and there's competitors coming online and you're watching them get more kind of activity than you are and you get you know you get kind of depressing and depressed about it and then you know you keep working because you really believe in what you're building but you know there are bad times but if you really think about it that's just

life like i don't i don't really understand john's point of this thread where he basically illuminates i guess like he tries to illuminate what actually happens in in startups in general but in the end he just really illuminates what happens in life there are good times and bad times that is that is the the point of this thing and you know depending on what you're doing you know there are there can be really shitty times or they could be really good times as i said when token price is going up times are good when token price is going down times are bad this is like crypto 101 or markets 101 um you know the bear market for ethereum was was pretty shitty right um ethereum was was hated in 2018 and 2019 by a lot of people because 8th was just falling down so much

it was getting derided by so many people so many people lost interest because the price was going down and now the price has gone up so much everyone loves ethereum right and inevitably if the price goes down and stays down for quite a while i'm sure there'll be people that don't like ethereum again and will lose lots of community members that's just how crypto works so i don't think that you should jump into a crypto job thinking that it's going to solve every problem that you have in your life and it's going to give you eternal happiness but i don't think you should assume that about anything in life that's just not how it works like there's going to be ups and downs you have to learn to deal with them right as you as you go through life and obviously i'm not like a a life coach

here or trying to give you any kind of like i guess self-help advice or but just generally i when i see these kind of things i'm just like you know talking about it as if it just applies to crypto just doesn't go go over well with me but anyway those are my opinions on that there i'll move on from that for now i do suggest going and reading the thread as i say he does have some good points in here but um you know just just kind of looking at it at it in a vacuum and looking at it as it just applies to crypto um i think is is really just like going the wrong way about it so the ethereum foundation announced today that uh their executive i guess director ar um executive director yeah ar at the ethereum foundation

um is is heading up a new ethereum foundation fellowship program uh which is essentially as you as as you can see a fellowship program for the ethereum ecosystem here so she goes over essentially kind of like the ethereum foundation's role in this initiative and kind of like what they'll be doing with that and the ef fellowship program has i guess like different kind of chapters in different uh continents here so obviously north america south america you have africa here and um asia over here no australian representation that's a bit sad but i mean it's not unexpected given australia is just like this weird little island um you know weird little content that everyone forgets about but anyway um so what the ethereum foundation fellowship program is it's a pilot program that has been launched by

a a initiative called next billion uh sorry a team called next billion which is a team at the af that focuses on seeking opportunities in emerging economies okay well that explains why australia is not listed here because australia is not an emerging economy so i'm assuming that um these people will be uh definitely uh go uh obviously are paying sorry obviously spending time in emerging economies like africa south america and kind of asia here and things like that so that's really cool to see um so yeah these are the people that are basically um uh heading it up here so you can read more about them and their backgrounds here if you want um and you can stay informed by signing up here now i think i guess like what i wanted to talk about with this is that

when you kind of look at crypto and look at ethereum look at like everything that we're building here really we're not just building it for the first world right like really the people who get the most out of access to financial services is going to be these developing countries and and third world countries that just do not have access to the judicial finance system that we have that we kind of like you know we think is really bad it's a hundred times or a thousand times less efficient than um than the crypto ecosystem and defined all that sort of stuff but at least we have access to it a lot of these developing kind of economies and third world countries don't have access to this they don't they don't get to have access to a bank right they don't get to have access to mortgages

and things like that and and their economies are are unstable so i think that this technology is is definitely going to benefit them the most because a lot of these um i guess like countries and a lot of these regions have internet access and that's all you need with for ethereum you just need internet access you get yourself an ethereum wallet and then you have access to the entire ethereum network now of course fees are high and right now ethereum is definitely not for these emerging economies but obviously we're working on that with layer 2 and sort of stuff like that as well so i won't go into that obviously because i've spoken about that a lot already but i think it's really great for the ethereum foundation to be doing programs like this as i mentioned the other day they have an over a billion dollar war

chest to pluck from so they definitely have the capital to to kind of like work on these initiatives and hopefully they work with local governments as well to to kind of like get the ball rolling here so yeah kudos to the ef for launching this program so hayden adams is uh basically pumping out some i guess like tweets about uni v3 lately which is really really cool so this tweet here shows that um it uh there's only 21 million dollars of liquidity in the usdc usd pool and you can currently sell 13 million dollars of usdt for usdc with only 0.25 percent slippage now obviously there's been a lot of debate around unisof v3 versus curve what's more efficient is univ3 the curve killer blah blah blah

i mean i don't think it is and i think curve is working on their v2 as i've mentioned before but it's still cool to see that there's you know some really great capital efficiency already coming out of uni v3 and as hayden has in his other tweet here it's only been i mean it's been more than 24 hours since launch now i think it's been maybe 36 48 hours something like that but but basically in the first 24 hours uh the the the 24 hour volume was 150 million dollars with only 300 million dollars of tvl so the volume tbl efficiency is at 50 um and and you can see here compared to v2 there it has been 24 hour volumes of 1.1 billion 8.1 billion tvl and only a volume tvl ratio of a 13 efficiency ratio of 13 here so already

the capital efficiency is rearing its its head here i think this is as i've said before in the past this is going to be the major theme of v3 that capital efficiency from the concentrated liquidity feature that they have and i really can't wait to see the liquidity uh sorry the i'll grow here um for other pairs and for the liquidity to grow alongside it so really exciting things coming out of v3 here so speaking of amms sushi swap announced that they have started a liquidity mining program on polygon here so these rewards will obviously be used to bootstrap liquidity for for all of the sushi products not only their sushi swap product but also kashi bento and miso on on polygons so if you're a polygon user and you've been using it uh

because the fears on ethereum have been too high for you definitely get involved with this you can earn some sushi rewards i think the liquidity mining on polygon right now for various products is actually quite ludicrous i know ava's got one as well it's quite high because there's matic rewards on on arve2 so yeah if you're interested in that sort of stuff definitely go check it out there's more information in this blog post here of course that'll be linked in the youtube description so you can go check it out below so alex vanderson one of the original team members of uh at ethereum here i worked at the ethereum foundation as early as 2014 put out a tweet uh where he basically shared some pictures of what the ethereum genesis launch event looked like in 2015. so it looked really cool right like you look

at this just a bunch of hackers right getting together to build ethereum a platform that they think uh that they thought was going to change the world and it has right i really do believe it has now a lot of these people here have gone on to to do other things right you can see in the corner there vlad um vlad zamfir i don't think he works at the ethereum foundation anymore um he's he's definitely uh maybe he does but he's been kind of like i guess like outside the ecosystem a bit and working on other things in the middle there you can see gavin wood um who was obviously the founder of parody and now working on polka dot and all that web 3 foundation stuff there and there's a bunch of other people i won't name them all but you know a lot

of these people essentially have stayed in the ecosystem but but moved on to other projects whether that be in the ethereum ecosystem or outside of it um so that's that's cool to see uh you know you can see here gavin hacking away here um and then yeah just another picture there now what this tweet was actually in reply to it was quote tweeting the dfinity uh kind of like uh launch launch here where they've got like a gif of uh showing the stage of how dfinity is going to launch and it's basically some like super kind of like i guess high um high uh i guess uh god the words escaping me right now basically super high production uh launch event where they've got like a stage set up with cameras all around and like fancy chairs and things like that um and you know i'm not gonna say that i

think dfinity is trash or anything like that but dfinity's marketing has been like really aggressive like super aggressive i'm sure you've all seen that video that has like 200 million views on it on you on twitter of kind of like just this really aggressive marketing going on um paid marketing too of like uni of them saying dfinity is going to change the world right it's going to be like the new internet computer and all this sort of stuff i don't know if it's going to be that or not right i don't know too much about their tech all i've ever heard from them is marketing speak and like pretty aggressive marketing speak and they've delayed their launch for years now but apparently they're launching soon so i guess we'll see how that pans out but the stark contrast between this high production on stage fancy chair

launch event and this kind of like group of hackers who were just like you know launching it and and believing that they would change the world and hardly anyone knew about ethereum back then there was no as far as i know there was no aggressive marketing campaigns and things like that there was just a bunch of really um you know ambitious hackers wanting to launch this thing so just a bit of a stark difference there and something to i guess reminisce on like i wasn't around here obviously i wasn't in this photo but i wasn't around the ethereum ecosystem back then but these photos are oddly nostalgic right i kind of look at these i'm just like that was ethereum right that was the theorem in the beginning and yeah just a little bit of nostalgia for something i didn't experience it's a bit weird right

so speaking of over-hyped things in the crypto ecosystem i just wanted to quickly touch on this because this this speaks to what i was talking about at the start about market movements and hype and marketing and narratives so i was on the cheer website last night because apparently this new crypto launched and i was going through the faq and essentially they have a a kind of a question here which says what is chia and they have a sentence or a couple of sentences here in in the paragraph that says chia is the first enterprise grade digital money chia is used uh using the first new nakamoto consensus algorithm since bitcoin it's called proof of space and time it was created by bram cohen the best network protocol engineer alive and the inventor of bittorrent i mean i'm impressed that they've been able to fit in so much into one

into one paragraph here right and i'll just straight up say it's what is what is enterprise grade digital money like what what is that like i don't even i define that for me right it is not anything it's marketing speak right and then they're saying they're using the first new nakamoto consensus algorithm since bitcoin i mean yeah okay maybe they've got a new algorithm but and then and you know they've called it proof of space and time um and as far as i know um and from looking into it briefly it's a hardware arms race where the more hardware you have the the better you know rewards you get and all this sort of stuff and and kind of like it centralizes because of that i haven't looked too deeply into that but again just something weird there uh and then you know it will say they're saying here

it was created by this guy called bram cohen and they're claiming that he is the best network protocol engineer alive and the inventor of bittorrent he is the inventor of bittorrent but he's not the best network protocol engineer alive that statement right there is honestly i mean i i i consider that scam marketing to be honest like you can't claim he's the best network protocol engineer alive without anything to back that up at all just because he invented bittorrent doesn't mean he's the best network like have you have you met every single network protocol engineer in the world all right have you have you kind of compared their um intelligence or compared their kind of progress against bram cohen so yeah as i said i'm surprised and amazed and and very kind of like impressed that they were able to fit so much

marketing speak into one paragraph and this goes back to what i was saying before much of the crypto ecosystem is marketing narratives scam marketing pumping um you know just on i don't care if i'm swearing right it really is that and i think you know it gets my point across really well here so yeah if you see lots of this stuff and you see these kind of glams claims of like grand things going on within these projects i would kind of look at that and be like be very skeptical of it at the end of the day here so yeah i'll leave it at that for now i don't know too much about cheer as a project but when i see this kind of speak i just stay away from these projects to be honest because to me yeah okay maybe you can make money

on it speculating on it but it's not something that i want to spend my time in i don't want to spend my time with projects that say stuff like this in their in their kind of it's not even this isn't even like their marketing material this is the faq so yeah i mean to me it just looks like uh a very kind of pumpy marketing kind of speak here i i personally am not a fan of that so uh the last thing i wanted to talk about and this has a bit to do with the markets as well so um this isn't i guess like specific to crypto but you'll see headlines like this and people will say oh this is good for crypto so i wanted to explain why now this then a new report came out today that was basically the jobs report in

the us that showed that the us added only 266 000 jobs in april um when the expected job new jobs being added was 1 million so obviously this is you know incredibly under uh underperforming what that people thought it would be and unemployment rose to 6.1 percent now why this is ironically bullish for crypto is because when the economy is weak interest rates stay low now you don't want interest rates to rise because when interest rates rise people go risk off because treasury yields rise so what that means is that investors can get like a higher yield on these treasury bonds and it's a very safe yield rather than plowing into these kind of like more speculative things like crypto and tech stocks that may not give be giving a yield or a dividend or

anything like that so low interest rates are really good for capital markets as well as well because of the fact that money is cheap right um you know people can just borrow as much money as they want like and basically pay essentially nothing for it and that kind of like boost that puts money into the economy and on top of that the money printer goes bro right like more money gets printed so yeah if you want something that's good for crypto this is it unfortunately um a weak economy apparently is good for crypto right who would have thought that it's kind of counterintuitive but when you think about it and get like get into the weeds of it it makes sense but that's just how the the fiat based economy works it has worked for hundreds of years um or at least maybe a hundred years in

the us but uh yeah so just a little bit of an explanation there if you see people talking about this today on on twitter or in general on twitter i think that um as i said it's counter-intuitive but makes sense when you dig into the reasons why all right that's it for today's episode everyone thank you again 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 next week thanks everyone