Market talk, Optimism hiring spree and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #329 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where you cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony desano and today's the 7th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so actually before we get into i just wanted to give a quick shout out here that i am going to be as i say here leaving my cave to attend and speak at uh blockchain australia's blockchain week on tuesday the 22nd of march in sydney and wednesday the 23rd of march in melbourne now you can hit this link uh that'll be in the description below to register for the event virtually unfortunately all of the in-person tickets are sold out at this stage uh and apparently it's very hard to get a ticket right now but i'm sure some of you have already gotten your tickets or

i'll probably see some of you there so very much looking forward to this uh this will be my first conference uh since 8th denver 2020 um which is you know wild but uh hope to see as many of you there as possible i believe the um the event in melbourne is at marble stadium i'm not sure where the sydney one is i should check on that since i have to attend but um marvel stadiums are awesome in melbourne for those of you who haven't been there before it's it should be a really good really good day and now and there's um as i said i'll be speaking uh as well about just anything ethereum really i mean i i think i've been given an open mic only a couple of the days there so very much looking forward to this looking forward to seeing as many

of you there as possible uh and of course i'm still planning to head to amsterdam and next month so if i don't see you at blockchain week in australia i'll definitely see you at amsterdam i mean if you're going there right but yeah seriously do register virtually for the event as well just um just because there's going to be a lot of great talks and a lot of um a lot of different people talking as well and you'll probably get a lot out of it and learn a lot from it uh from it there too all right so the markets guys they've been right really really uh and i mean i think we all know why i mean we've had just a string of bad news the crypto markets came up a really big high from from last year and we need to come down i mean you know what i'm

surprised that either still around 2 500 given the amount of bad news there is i mean let's be real here for a second guys there's a war going on in the world right now and not just uh you know any war it's a kind of like a war in europe that people you know are theorizing or are kind of like uncertain about it spilling over into other parts of of europe other than just ukraine so there's a lot of uncertainty out there but uh i think you know crypto front ran this i mean we had the fed uh high uh the fed rate hike uncertainty we had the evergreen stuff i mean there's just been so much stuff and also as i said like just the general downtrend because we kind of came off such a stupid bull market i mean it's the it's the dumbest

crypto ever got to be honest uh so i kind of like put out a few bear tweets today guys i i want to reiterate these bear tweets that i put out a pure posting uh i'm never bearish on eth ever like even in the depths of the bear market last time at 80 bucks i was not bearish on eighth i was still buying around that price level so don't take any of those tweets seriously um but one tweet in particular that i put out today where i said you know the current sentiment price action feels like june july 2018 and then i and then i ship posted by saying probably not going to play out the same way but don't be surprised to see another 80 draw down on both ethan btc i mean i personally don't expect that to happen but the first part

is kind of true i remember i remember distinctly kind of like mid-2018 and if you go look at the chart it was basically around the time where i think eighth was like six seven hundred dollars probably a little bit less than that and we had come off obviously fourteen hundred dollars we had we already dumped a lot and then people were like you know this is it six hundred bucks you know it's fair we're gonna be fine we're gonna go back into a bull market soon and of course the exact opposite happened eighth crashed really hard from there and continued down to 80 bucks by the end of the year now as i said this isn't me saying that from here we're going to crash down to like a thousand dollars or something like that i don't believe that's gonna happen i mean it could have happened right this

like anything can happen at this stage but i don't believe that's gonna happen but the sentiment the the general kind of like price action um just what i'm what i'm kind of like feeling um is is very similar to back then and as i said yeah yeah it's okay it's almost four years ago but i do definitely remember what i felt back then um because it was a scary time because as i said like the price started falling really quickly after that and no one knew where the bottom was that i mean no one ever knows where the bottom is but like people are saying okay okay 300 is the bottom right and for a longest time people thought 300 was the bottom i truly believed it was because 300 dollars acted as um some pretty kind of like i guess i guess stiff resistance or kind of like

as a 8th hang around in 2017 for quite a while before continuing up to 1400 from there but obviously that didn't work out and then people are like oh okay well you know 200 that didn't work out and then obviously we hit 80 which was a price that no one saw coming like i didn't see anyone at the time thinking that eighth would go back to double digits except arthur hayes who famously penned the piece ether double-digit coin but i'm not sure if he actually believed that rather than him just trying to kind of like on eighth because back then he was a very hardcore bitcoin maximalist and obviously he was running bitmex which uh i guess benefited a lot from just people getting liquidated and people blowing themselves up right especially during its heyday um but i guess yeah the settlement is definitely

in the in the gutter right there's hardly any people around you know most people have left at this point uh i think you know the one sector that was doing well nfts is also kind of like in a pretty brutal bear market now and i think there's going to be a massive washout in nfts guys like as as i've mentioned before nfts are distinctly different to the i guess like normal kind of like fungible tokens because with nfts at least for the vast majority of them you need to find a buyer right like with uh you know fungible tokens a lot of the time there's just like a passive pool you can sell into on on one of these amms and there's a little there's a little bit of liquidity there you can't do that with nfts what you have to do is you have to put kind of like your nft up

for sale on openc or another marketplace and then a buyer has to come in and actually physically kind of like purchase it um so it's a very different dynamic and the prices of nfts can fall much much quicker uh because of that and they can obviously rise much quicker because of that as well but during kind of like nft bear markets these things go down 90 in like a week they they go down so so quickly um and and especially because a lot of the nft people uh first cyclers or new people to crypto they have absolutely no idea how these markets work and how brutal they can be uh and then it's just like kind of like a race to the bottom from there so i think i'm gonna see a lot of pain play out there there's already been a lot of pain in the fungible token market i mean

most things are down 80 to 90 percent you know some down 95 plus percent there are people leaving projects abandoning projects i mean we saw yesterday uh andre and anton uh basically have left defy uh they've kind of like stopped working in crypto altogether so there's there's kind of like that aspect to it um and just in general like a lot of projects uh i guess have have been shown to have no clothes right like i've mentioned to you guys before bull markets give projects a false sense of security and and the projects think oh well we have product market fit but in reality it's just the bull market um then when kind of like all that money flows out you're left with essentially just like a small group of people and you really see which pro products and services actually provide value and

which don't and we're seeing a lot of these kind of like other l ones just out the alt l1s just completely lose any sense of community that they had their usage is going down um you know and to be fair so is ethereum l1 and the l2s but i think obviously they have a much much more long-term future than the old tower ones but but yeah that's kind of like i guess a lot of what's going on right now i know a lot of you probably feeling kind of like down in the dumps about this or maybe some of you are really positive about it and you're like wow yeah i get to buy some some cheaper wreath that's a good outlook to have as well don't get me wrong um but i did want to kind of like before i move on from from this did

want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the fact that just because the market is the way it is right now doesn't mean anything is kind of like fundamentally changed for ethereum this was true in the last bear market as well and this is what kept me going right so think of all the things we still have to look forward to obviously there's the merge i don't have to repeat myself there then there is the layer 2 rollout which is you know seriously just getting started again don't have to repeat myself there there's all the stuff happening on like i i guess kind of like the app the application layout still tons of stuff happening in d5 guys there's a lot of innovations happening there they're just very quiet right now they're not in your face like think like things like the frog nation were because

as i said the in your face things are usually just the bull market look what happens to the frog nation look how into all those projects completely gone at this point like completely down in the dumps and that was i mean pretty obvious to me that was gonna happen i had no doubt that was gonna happen because i've seen it all before um but uh you know there's a lot of d5 innovation still going on a lot of really cool stuff happening in the dow space a lot of stuff still happening in the nft space if you look and just see and kind of like focus on the real builders the ones actually building long-term products and they don't really care about the short-term stuff that's where a lot of the value is being created right now and as i said you know we've got the biggest

upgrade in ethereum's history coming up which is going to be funny if that goes through you know and in june or july whenever it happens it's still like it is today it's going to be relatively quiet which i actually think is is a good thing like my actual my actual worst fear about the merge was that what would happen is that the eighth price would run up to like 20k or something or 30k because it was still a bull market and then everyone would sell the merge and the ether price would just dump really really hard the best case scenario in my mind is that the eighth price does nothing or just continues sideways between like kind of now and and the merch essentially right uh and even post merge and then over time as the bull market comes back it starts to go up but but it gives more

people to kind of like purchase ethan to buy into without the fear of it kind of like getting massively sold off so i think all of that put together very very positive outlook for ethereum going forward i'm super bullish i'm super excited i may not hear it in my voice right now i'm actually quite tired today but i am definitely very very bullish going forward um but i think that just just generally focus on the builders focus on all the positive stuff still coming out for ethereum specifically i don't know about the other ecosystems maybe they have stuff going on but as you guys know i don't really pay much attention to those things um and just be aware that you know the markets right now it's kind of like a scary time to buy and looking outside of the crypto kind of ecosystem the macro economic

conditions are not great either like i know there's a lot of talk about recessions and things like that and look to be honest i mean things are getting way more expensive inflation's out of control rates are already basically at zero you know what it's kind of like there is going to be pain somewhere right in the macro environment there already is a lot of pain for people there's going to probably be more pain to come and it's going to be tricky to know how that affects crypto because uh as far as i'm can can tell crypto has not existed during a crisis like this i mean the biggest crisis that crypto existed in was covered and that obviously was very very good for crypto because of all the money printing and because everyone stayed home more people kind of like getting involved and and i think crypto

was already ready to go bullish from there so it's just very very hard to tell no one i don't think there's anyone in the world right now that could actually give you an accurate kind of like prediction of where the markets are going to go from here both inside and outside of crypto but uh at the end of the day things do will get better over time i think things will get more peaceful over time um but yeah i'm not sure exactly how long it's going to take or anything like that but i remain very as bullish on ethereum as i have been in in the past that's for sure all right we have a fresh all core devs call summary from tim biko so this happened last friday as they usually do so this one was packed full of merge and shanghai update so this is a rather long

thread as uh tim biker usually puts these together and then you know while he's doing the call so definitely i just wanted to kind of point this out for you guys to go give this a read as i've mentioned before shanghai is the first uh kind of like network upgrade going live after the merge i think at this point in time it's probably going to be 2023 early 2023 but that's when withdrawals will be enabled for uh staked eighth that's when um you know some of these eip these popular erps like erp 4488 is scheduled to go in and a bunch of other ones out there as well that are really going to help l2 so definitely give this kind of recap thread a read for more context around this but very very exciting things happening on the core dev end of things and i'm sure they're pretty happy that

the market has quieted down as well because of the fact that quieter markets means it's easier to build it's easier to kind of like get stuff done it's easy to concentrate and yeah i'm sure they're loving that but i'll link this in the youtube description for you to check out and you can also watch the stream if you want to as well all right so git coin grants round 13 was officially announced with a accompanying blog post here so this is happening march 9th to the 24th it's a couple of days from now i'll remind you guys again once this happens uh they have 1.2 million dollars in matching funds available in the main round and over 1.5 million in matching funds across nine ecosystem funds and three cause rounds this is absolutely massive guys that's almost three million dollars going towards public goods funding here

i'm super excited about this very very excited to donate to my favorite projects again and get my donations matched and this is shaping up to be the biggest git coin grants matching around uh i guess ever and it's only around 13. we know uh it's funny because like i remember doing the first one of this and how small it was and seeing it grow over time has just been absolutely amazing and seeing the amount of money coming to it i mean these kind of like grand surrounds were launched during bear markets obviously during the bear market so obviously it was uh it was very quiet back then there was a lot less money but now there's a lot more money floating around even though the markets have come down there's still a ton of money floating around people made a lot of money and want to give back so

very much looking forward to round 13 going live uh this wednesday all right so dc builder i uh has kind of like put together a public good blockchain development guide resource on github here called devpill.me now i wanted to highlight this because it is quite extensive and i mean you can spend so long reading through everything that dc uh kind of builder has linked to here with whether you're a developer or otherwise you can learn a lot about you know crypto development learn a lot about different things like nft d5 how things work under the hood i mean look at this i'm just scrolling through this right now for you guys it is so extensive and there's links to everything that you need here it's crazy and there's more coming soon as well if you go down to

the bottom there's still a bunch more coming soon um and obviously being on github you can contribute to this if you like as well given it's um it's in the kind of like the the public domain and it is a public good so i guess congrats to dc builder and uh the other people that have worked on this thing on getting this out this is going to be i think a really really great resource for people and you know dc builder has just been killing it over the past i guess like few months putting together a bunch of different resources and things like that they're also quite active in the discord channel and on twitter i love to see young people like this i mean you know he says he's 20 in his bio here but i'd love to see young people like this getting involved and really doing um

kind of like public goods uh things right because at the end of the day this sort of stuff is what adds the most value i think because you think about it like there's going to be tons of people who go to this read through tons of builders that go to this and can you imagine just like as a as an example here there's a a kind of like a new person who wants to build something in crypto and d5 imagine they come to this guide read through it read through everything there is here and then go on to found the next billion dollar d5 protocol or the next uni swap the next maker the next compound imagine that like that's awesome because it basically means that dc builder's guide here was instrumental in creating a billion dollar protocol and it's a public good right it's not

like he's charging for it's not like it's a university thing we have to pay 30 grand a year just to go probably more than that i don't know how much university is for for you guys i know in the u.s it's quite expensive but you know it's none of that you can learn all of it by just even following this following all the stuff that they've linked to um and i think i think it's really really awesome i think that that really is the magic of of industries like crypto and especially just information technology in general is that you don't necessarily have to go to university or school for this sort of stuff you don't have to kind of like spend all these years getting a master's degree or a phd or anything like that you can do that if you want there's nothing wrong with it but if you just

want to kind of i guess like build something within crypto and you want to start from xero you can start from guides like this and work your way up and kind of like build whatever you want because everything's kind of like out in the public and open source so very very cool thing from dc builder here i'll link this in the youtube description for you to check out and speaking of resources there is now a zk apad which is basically a list of resources available for developers to develop on stock net and more generally on cairo you guys know that i've been talking about the stock net ecosystem a lot lately it's huge and it's growing really quickly and they actually know how to do marketing and business development quite well i'm seeing a lot of different people kind of i guess talk about stock net talk about how good

their um i guess awareness campaigns have been and how good their kind of like developer documentation is and getting onboarded into it and how cool it is to develop on it because at the end of the day as i said plenty of times stock net is different to uh i guess like another to the other l2s because it doesn't use solidity it doesn't use the evm it uses cairo and um and starkware's own technology here so developers are all you know definitely do like trying out different things obviously they like sticking to what they know as well and that's all well and good and as i've said before i think evm and things like stock net are going to go going to basically be working side by side um but you're if you're a aspiring stock net developer this is kind of like another resource for you to

check out on top of dc builders one as well so i'll link this in the youtube description for you to check out as well so diagonal finance has announced that they have raised a 2.5 million dollar pre-seed round to enable crypto native subscriptions on ethereum now disclosure here i participated in this round as an angel investor um because i think this sort of stuff is pretty amazing i mean i think that payments in general is an underrated use case of crypto and an underutilized one even though that i think payments may be kind of like one of the last things that crypto does because for better or worse the existing payments infrastructure works from for most people right like visa mastercard paypal i mean it works it's not ideal

it's still kind of like slow in the back end it's still it's still centralized it's still at risk of kind of like um you know you being censored obviously they have to comply with things like sanctions as i've seen play out and stuff like that but you know a lot of that exists today but the thing is none of that is really programmable none of it is decentralized none of it is really interesting as opposed to things like superfluid which is diagonally built upon and then things like diagonal which are just primitives to do things like uh uh subscriptions right and and i think subscriptions are a big deal especially when we uh especially on layer twos where the fees are basically negligible where you can basically subscribe to all these things and then the funny thing is is that you can and because because it's

composable you can do really crazy stuff like imagine you subscribe to someone and then they've set it up so that they kind of like get your subscription and that automatically goes into like a yield farm to start earning them yield on it and maybe they they they want to give some of that back to their subscribers as well it's like kind of like a kickback be like hey thanks for subscribing to me here's like uh you know 10 of the yield that i'm earning on on on the dollars altogether and everyone kind of gets a share in that so not only do you get to kind of i guess subscribe to this person but you also get to um you know technically invest in in them as well without an additional token right which i which i find very very cool so yeah i guess like congrats

to diagonal on on raising this um this should give them some some runway for a while to build out their primitive pr uh and i'm very very uh excited to be uh be on board as part of an angel as well as an angel as well but definitely go check out the blog post for more details on this and a full list of uh their investors here all right so jasper the friendly ghost a rocker pool maxi and a frequent person uh that is in the discord channel has put together this uh blog post and thread called called one pull to rule them all which is all about the uh the kind of like our eth pull uh on on curve i believe here and he kind of like goes into detail about what this is so it's the r8 sorry it's the one that i mentioned last week the r8 uh

dash wst curve pool um and you know he's comparing comparing the numbers here so if you compare just the curve pools the r8 wst pairing offers 2.1 percent higher yield from 100 staking exposure this alone covers 99 of the incentives added on to the lido uh pool this is savings worth millions usd each month so any goes into detail about how this all works yeah so definitely go check out this blog post and his thread for more information on this um as i've said before i think like these staking yield burgers are going to be quite tasty especially in like a post-merge world where fees are being collected and mav is being collected by uh eth2 stake is here or i guess like ethereum stakes just in general uh and then kind of like adding

more incentives to providing liquidity to different pools especially um knowing permanent loss pools there's obviously additional risk here but you know you got you guys you guys definitely get what i'm saying uh it means your yield could potentially be up to 20 plus percent on staking your eighth and maybe even in like the more bullish periods it could go higher than that i mean at the end of the day like i think this the sky's the limit here obviously the more kind of like yield burgers the i guess the more ingredients you add to this yield yield burger the more kind of i guess risk happens here and you know if you put your kind of like into a pool that's paired with um st which is part of lighter which isn't decentralized you kind of like lose out on those properties as well so it's a

bit more a bit more centralized but you do get the better yield so you get the reward for the extra risk that you're taking which is the way it should be you shouldn't be have you shouldn't take more risk for equal or less reward because then there's literally no a point taking that extra risk right and i think a lot of people don't realize that is that you kind of like have to measure the risk that you're taking and make sure that if you're taking you know even even slightly more additional risk you should be having slightly more additional reward if you're taking a lot more risk there should be obviously a lot more reward there which is i think what this pool is trying to do as well so definitely go give this blog post i read i'll link it in the youtube description below

so sequence uh is a service that lets you pay for transaction fees in a variety of tokens so you don't need eth or for mainnet or matic for polygon you can pay for your fees with usdc diet or whatever else you have i think this is really cool and i think people get the wrong idea about services like this they kind of think to themselves well if i can pay in stable coins on ethereum then what's the point of eight why would i hold eighth it's like okay guys like let's take a step back here for a second eighth is my is used for much more than paying gas fees right and you being able to pay stab um paper fees in stable coins doesn't mean that it's not eight is still not being used in the background because of the fact that the way the ethereum gas fee

market works is that the base fee uh still requires eth to be paid and that is burned so ether's always paid and he's always the settlement currency for for fees paid it's just that this sits on top as kind of like a layer to abstract that away from the users um but okay on top of that yeah i mean it has much more use cases than just being used as fees right it's d5 collateral it's staking it's money it's story value it's all that good stuff there it's money for nfts and stuff like that so whenever people say oh it's pointless if you don't if you can't pay fees in it i say it's not like it's literally not we have objective kind of like reasons for why it's not and it's always funny when people say that but i think these services are basically going

to be the way people interact with this stuff mainstream adoption is not going to happen by requiring people to have eth for every transaction in their wallet like being able to abstract it away and if you still ultimately paid as a settlement currency is fine like even at layer two say you're at layer two you pay in stable coins that is still how that still has to be paid and settled in east because each still needs to be paid to layer one to secure the layer two so it's still eighth all the way down eighth is still being burned either still being used but it's just abstracted away from the end user so that it just gives a better user experience which is what actually what we should be striving for at the end of the day like the value accrual for eth should happen in the background uh and

should happen you know it should happen like don't get me wrong we'd be doing something wrong if we're not accruing value to eat which is obviously securing the whole thing but i don't and other kind of like tokens for uh for for kind of like layer one side chains layer twos and all that sort of stuff um but it should definitely not be like so in your face to to the user that they're kind of like forced to use the tokens that uh that i don't want to so so yeah cool little service here from from sequence for sure all right so optimism has been on a hiring spree lately and in this thread they detail and they i guess go over all the new full-time optimists that have joined their team so if you're interested in who's working for optimism or i guess like who's joined recently

you can go check out this thread and they go through kind of like all the people i mean there's tons of people here and kind of like their background where they've come from what they're working on now very very cool to see this as i said before guys like all these teams have so much money they're still hiring they're going to be able to weather the bear market easily easily like they're going to last years and years and years especially the layer 2 teams so if you're looking for a job in crypto you know go look at the layer two teams go look at what positions they're hiring for but don't just look there right look in the d5 staff and the dows and nfts like and all these teams have enough money to last for ages it's not like the 2018-19 bear market where

so many companies got flushed out so many projects got flushed out people lost their jobs i remember consensus doing massive layoffs it's not like that these these days guys there is billions upon billions upon billions of dollars floating around ready to pay you to work in this ecosystem and not just pay you a salary but also give you equity or give you future token shares as well which is where i guess like you want to be you want to join an early stage startup that becomes a billion dollar protocol and you want to have a share in that because that is uh one of the best ways to make money in this industry i mean the thing is is that you know i think a lot of people miss that it's like you you can do all of it you can join a crypto startup work in crypto you can

get equity tokens in that in that startup and you can invest in liquid crypto tokens and you can even do angel investing if you're if you meet the requirements for that if you can get access to those deals so you can do a bit of everything which is i mean there's not other many other industries that allow you to do this even the traditional startup industry or kind of like in tech doesn't really allow you to do this to this extent so i've told people before that that's the way you kind of like make it i know i had a thread during the week where i went over the fact that you didn't really want to make it but you wanted to turn making it into a perpetual process i'm i'm not going to go over that thread today but essentially this this is really where

the most kind of like you know social capital and economic capital is made is by doing that so i i don't know how many times i could say guys if you're not working in crypto yet and you want to work in crypto now is the best time to do it like there is there has never been a better time to work in this industry that's for sure all right so i mentioned this last week uh ethereumnodes.com from david mihal here this website uh and the reason i mentioned it last week allows you to see all of the rpcs that are alternatives to kind of like infuria so you can see here there are pcs obviously from alchemy myetherwallet mycrypto flashbots and a bunch of others that are down right now um but you know there are tons that are up still so if you don't want to use

inferior and you want to use something else that yes okay centralized but is an inferior you can use one of these alternatives all you have to do is go to your metamask go you know add the new network add the new rpc in and away you go now i think um in saying that all of these are centralized um pretty much and you know they're probably going to be subject to the same kind of like rules and regulations and and sanctions that they have to kind of i guess adhere to that inferior is we need decentralized alternatives which we have in in limited fashion with pocket network which is a pretty popular one and you can run your own node as well which i know a lot of people don't really want to do and i went over this last week so i'm not going to rehash it today but i mean yeah

i just wanted to kind of like highlight this as an alternative um you can kind of like change from inferior but don't expect these kind of like services to not block certain things either because they're centralized right into the day so best thing to do is run your own node or you know run flashbots uh sorry or connect the flashbots or use a decentralized relay out such as pocket network all right and finally here there is a thread on all of the events accepting currently accepting applications at devconnect which is obviously the uh event happening in amsterdam so if you're interested in kind of attending a lot of these events you can definitely go check out this thread and and kind of like apply to to go to them i'm gonna have this feeling i mean i have this feeling that pretty much all

of these are going to be completely packed and oversold and booked out like absolutely because there's just not going to be that much room for them i think that a lot of them are going to be like 500 people capacity which is definitely not going to be enough uh but there's so many events you don't have to go to all them i obviously am not going to be going to all of them i'm definitely just going to be hanging around a lot in amsterdam hanging around the events they're all going to be in kind of like the same place and amsterdam is a relatively small city as well so i'm sure there's just going to be crypto people everywhere everyone's going to be running into each other so it's fine but if you have specific events you want to go to make sure you secure your spot early because there's

no guarantee you'll be able to get in on the day and obviously a lot of these things will be recorded and stuff like that uh and that's all well and good but you definitely want to secure your spot now rather than waiting so just wanted to give you guys a heads up on that one but i think on that note that's it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone