NFTs on Aave, Match 2.0 now live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #136 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 4th of june 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so there's an interesting tweet from a guy called bobby goodlatte today on twitter and i love that the surname good latte that is an absolutely amazing surname i'm a big coffee person myself so yeah anyway sidetracked uh his tweet reads ethereum will see a 99.95 reduction in energy usage with proof of stake why elon doesn't jump on that makes zero sense to me now obviously over the last 24 hours we had elon musk tweeting about crypto again uh especially bitcoin where he tweeted out a picture uh some meme and he had like bitcoin

with a broken heart there and i'm not going to say that was the reason why the price is dumped a little bit uh you know the timing definitely was there but again it you know i mean the the prices have been kind of like ping-ponging around a certain range for a while now so i'm not going to say it's 100 because of him but he definitely still seems to be trolling crypto or like i don't know what exactly he's doing here and i kind of wrote about it in the delegate newsletter today where i said that i think elon is basically the poster child for the uneducated crypto uh i guess maybe investor or crypto kind of pundit people who have an opinion on crypto that is not based on fact or reality but it's just based on kind of secondhand uh knowledge or or kind of like things that

they're they're seeing kind of play out um you know a lot of people think crypto is just like scams and dog tokens and and food tokens and all this sort of stuff and uh and as i've explained before crypto to a lot of people is really just going on a centralized exchange buying some coins that you've heard about and hoping they go up crypto for us who and people in the ecosystem it's a lot more than that right we we we love to kind of like use the apps especially on ethereum all the d5 apps things like that we see how this thing can change the world but we're the minority when it comes to it really most people are in this industry to speculate on tokens and those outside of it who have a strong opinion on it on the industry being useless or a scam or just like

you know not having kind of like no use to anyone they in my opinion are just uneducated because i've actually seen people go from like harsh cryptocritic to you know full blown believer by just getting educated on it spending some time learning what it's all about learning about things like ethereum and d5 and dows and nfts like actually digging into it rather than just hearing about it secondhand from someone or from some news article and forming like a really strong opinion on it now you know elon is obviously a very busy guy he's you know the richest person in the world runs like four different companies or something at this point but you know and he you know he he still owns bitcoin as part of like tesla's balance sheet here uh but it's just kind of like you know people kind of like try to study what

he's doing with his tweets you know i saw some thread the other day from someone that said that elon's just like playing 5d chess with us and he's actually got like a master plan here of what to do with crypto i don't know i think elon might be a a megalomaniac or an egomaniac where he's just doing this for entertainment i've mentioned this before where and i actually have like a pet theory here that because the sec shut him down from kind of like i guess tweeting about tesla stock or you know because his tweets are moving the markets there and the sec has jurisdiction to to kind of regulate that with crypto he can just ship post about dogecoin and bitcoin and maybe even ethereum and there's not really anything that sec could do uh he's you know even if he if they argue that he's manipulating

markets big bitcoin derision eath and a few other cryptos don't fall under the purview of the sec from from what i know maybe i'm wrong here but you know bitcoin doesn't eat unsecurities so the securities and exchange commission isn't going to be regulating that and i don't think they would be regulating um elon musk tweeting about it because at the end of the day there are literally thousands of people all the time on twitter tweeting about these assets and tweeting about different things here yes elon has a much larger reach than these people but some of these people can actually move markets on the smaller assets so yeah i'm not sure if elon's gonna get pinged for this by some regulatory agency i don't believe he will uh just because i think the regular like it's just still a mess with crypto like

obviously the sec has a very clear mandate to regulate securities trading and that is you know a completely kind of um you know i guess like mature thing where there's a framework in place there's there's precedent there's there's kind of like case law around it and everything like that whereas with crypto there's a lot of kind of messy stuff going on you know it's regulated differently depending where you are um even in the u.s depending on the state that you're in can be it can be regulated differently and things like that so yeah i think just i guess to summarize once i believe once elon learns more about maybe even ethereum and defined things like that and actually sees the value in it i think that he might become one of our greatest allies and it's not just elon it's everyone i think everyone who's uneducated and forms a

strong opinion on things uh once they become educated or at least most people they kind of you know unless they they really want to dig their heels in but from what i from my experience if i educate someone on on these sorts of things they come around to it i mean i recently oh not recently back like a few months now or something like that i had a conversation with someone who you know straight up came up to me and said oh it's all a scam it's all going to zero and i'm like okay well why do you why do you think this and you know they said i heard about this this and this i'm like okay well have you done any research on it i wasn't trying to be like you know a dick or anything but i was asking like you know have you done any research on

it do you know what it's all about do you know what it's enabling and they didn't and you know i spent like a little bit of time educating them on this and and maybe obviously because they knew me you they they kind of like um you know listened to me and respected what i had to say and after that i i wouldn't say they were a believer or anything like that but they def i i i got the the feeling that they definitely didn't uh kind of hold the same opinion that they did maybe an hour prior where they thought crypto was just a massive scam and you know governments were going to shut it down and it was all like play money uh especially after i told them you know i can take my i take money out from crypto all the time like i pay

myself through crypto through yield farming um you know and it goes to my bank account and once i told them that they didn't even know that you could do that this person didn't even realize that you could get the money out they thought it was just you put the money in you play with it on there and then you know no one gets money out so we're still at that kind of phase i think for a lot of people where they really do think it's just some kind of like online kind of like scam thing that people get involved in and things go up and down and whatever and you know i guess if you are completely uneducated and you don't follow this space and literally all you look at are some articles on mainstream media websites you'd be forgiven for thinking that because the

mainstream media coverage of crypto is still insanely bad it is so bad i actually yesterday i know i talked about the the wall street journal um article on defy and ethereum i actually went back and read that like i had skimmed through it because i just seen it before the refuels but i wanted to give a shout out there but i went back and skimmed through it and there was some pretty bad reporting in there they were calling things like blockfy um defy and i was like okay maybe i shouldn't have kind of praised this article as much as i did once i read it closer so we're still at that point where where i think like a lot of coverage is just really bad and you know people can be forgiven if they just see this and you know i i really do think that if

if you give me uh some someone like me and there's a bunch of other people in the industry but if if you give me an hour with anyone i will convince them that ethereum and d5 is the future i don't i don't need more than that to do it maybe not even an hour i could do it much quick much quicker than that um but that's all it is at the end of the day just people getting the wrong information from the the wrong sources and once they have the right information in front of them and once it's explained in a language that they understand i truly do believe that most people come around to this and that's why i've dedicated my life to educating because i do believe that if you have the the education the tools the knowledge and you are yourself with

it you can you can win at life generally i think that you know you just look at generally what happens in in countries developing countries that have more education for their population generally the quality of life goes way up because of that and that's all it is at the end of the day like the more educated your kind of like i guess populous is the better off your country is because you know for a number of reasons and i'm not going to go into them i know i've spoken about a lot sorry i've spoken for a while about this already um but i just thought it was very important to realize that most critics of crypto and d5 and maybe even someone like elon musk and just generally um maybe just uneducated i i truly believe that once you educate them uh most of them will come around anyway

i'll leave it at that moving on to the next update uh umbra is now live on on mainnet i think here uh so essentially umbra is a privacy preserving stealth payments protocol on ethereum and this is kind of like i guess following the trend that we've been seeing maybe over the last few months of privacy becoming you know more and more important on ethereum and d5 we've had aztec protocol go live with zk.money which was there um uh they're kind of like uh i guess proof of concept for their layer two roll up uh which is really really cool they also had um zk wrapped assets so zero knowledge wrapped assets on uh layer one as well uh i think we're seeing a lot of d5 projects talk about this more often now and kind of like

look you know how they can kind of um make it more private and things like that and make their kind of protocols more private and stuff um but yeah i i think that uh generally privacy is the i mean so actually they may take a step back here i think there's two core things that need to happen for ethereum and d5 to go mainstream and before these things happen i don't think it can i think privacy and scaling are those two things we have scaling coming in a big way obviously um with with uh roll-ups going live things like arbitrary and stuff like that obviously polygons getting a lot of growth as well and and stuff like that but privacy is still uh very immature right now we have a couple of projects as i said there's umbra now there's aztec i think there's a few couple of others out there

that i'm forgetting like tornado cash i should say um but it's not seamless privacy it is not privacy by default it's not something most people use it's still expensive too you know using tornado cache isn't exactly um cheap and it's it's also uh not very user friendly for like the everyday user yes for power users whatever it's fine but even tornado cache is just washing your ether it's not it's it's it's kind of like a tumbling service it is not privacy where you can basically interact with d5 protocols uh in a private kind of way here so i think that uh you know something like umbra uh from from my understanding uh definitely is just a uh not just but like he's definitely focused on payments and and kind of like doing stealth payments on layer one something like the zero knowledge

wrapped assets from aztec protocol here so if you want to try this out you can go to app.umbra.cache here excuse me here and connect your kind of like wallet and everything like that and kind of like try this out now i do i i will say that this is beta software as they're kind of like are saying up here so definitely any funds that you kind of like choose to use um make sure that they're funds that you're okay with kind of losing in the worst case scenario so maybe just play around with it a small a small amount of funds here but still cool to see another privacy uh protocol going live on the ethereum main net here so mcdex or mcdex or i don't know how to say this i said this last time i haven't figured out how to say this yet i'm just

gonna say uh monte carlo decks because that's what they're called in their twitter handle yeah but anyway this is a decentralized exchange that's be that's building on arbitrary they've been hyping themselves up for a little while um they're live on arbitrary now on the mainnet uh they'll go public in the next few weeks when arbitrary goes live on for users obviously they're live for developers right now uh so they're hyping this up as you know obviously fast and smooth transactions low transaction fees uh market leading liquidity and you can get up to 20 times leverage here as well now mcdex here is live on layer one as well but as i've mentioned before the centralized exchanges like this especially ones that are kind of like based on perpetual products do not work very well on layer one they work very well at layer two as we've seen with

dydx and i'm gonna talk about diy decks towards the end of today's refuel but you know they obviously need um kind of like uh layer two cr so i'm i'm really happy to see mcdex get on to arbitram uh arbitrary's main net and be ready for i guess like end users when they come in the next few weeks uh and speaking of arbitrary tracer uh finance here put out a really great guide of how to get started with arbitram or learning arbitrary in under 10 minutes um and trace is obviously going to be building on arbor trim as well here but essentially this is pretty this is quite i wouldn't say it's technical but it's definitely something for developers so if you're a developer and you're interested in how a project went from like xero to deployed to arbitram this is something you should definitely check out

so i'll leave this linked in the youtube description you can check it out there i won't dive too deep into this because it is definitely geared towards developers uh but yeah you can go check it out yourself there so stani from arve is uh teasing an nft market on on ave here so he's basically saying that nfts as collateral is coming to aver obviously as part of its own market here they haven't said what nfts will uh i guess like um uh be supported here i'm assuming it'll be some of the most popular ones like uh crypto punks and me bits and those board apes and things like that or maybe it'll be nfts that aren't even kind of the the collectibles or whatever maybe it'll be nfts like i don't know um insurance products we've seen kind of things like that play out uh maybe you

could use that as collateral i don't know what this is exactly going to look like but stein is obviously teasing this and ave delivers they don't just tease things and let it sit for like months and months at a time they definitely deliver here so i'm really excited to see this i mean could you imagine being able to use your crypto punches collateral yes the prices are a little bit volatile to say the least but so are crypto prices in general so if i could use my crypto punk as clutter i definitely would and it'd be really cool to kind of add that to my yield farming stock where i can draw a little bit more stable coins and and start yield farming kind of elsewhere there so yeah really really cool that this is coming not much information yet but i'm going to keep

tabs on this for all of you and let you know kind of when this kind of uh gets into production here so token terminal put out a really cool gif here that basically showed the daily trading volumes on decentralized exchanges and how they've been kind of increasing over i guess the last few months now i spoke about this on yesterday's refuel about how decentralized exchange volume has absolutely gone you know parabolic and you can see exactly that playing out in this um in this graph here look at look at that look at that gif like look look at that trading volume where i kind of went off the chart there the unit kind of uni swap and you can see it towards the end here i went absolutely crazy on this uh on this give here but yeah i mean this is just continuing the

trend of decentralized exchanges growing rapidly on on ethereum here i think that this is a trend that's not going to slow down obviously there's going to be periods where it's slower if the market's quieter that's just the name of the game but i think what you should be doing when you're you're comparing decentralized exchange volumes um to you should be comparing them to centralized exchanges and you should be doing a relative comparison because centralized exchange volumes are also going to be uh you know hotter during bull markets and colder during bear markets so you know it's the same thing on every kind of exchange doesn't matter if it's if it's decentralized or centralized it's still going to be um you know quiet during bear market so i think comparing relatively here i mean uh decentralized exchanges um i i i looked at coinbase's volume

i think it was coinbase's volume for last month was like 700 billion decentralized exchanges was 175 billion so we're still a little bit away from from kind of i guess like overtaking coinbase for the entire month but i think with layer twos we will but something like binance is still a pretty far far way away i think binance did 4.7 trillion dollars of volume last month so um you know but but obviously comparing decentralized exchanges in their current state to decentralize exchanges it's amazing that they even can compete because centralized exchanges obviously don't have scalability limitations and they can service much more users and they've got fiat on-ramps and all this sort of stuff but dex is win long term in my opinion so it's really good to see this growth and i'll link this gif in the youtube description you can go check it out for

yourself so matcha basically uh the decentralized exchange aggregator from the xerox project is um has a massive massive upgrade that went live sorry over the last 24 hours and they're calling it matcha 2.0 you can now use matcha on polygon awesome there's going to be unified multi-chain trading there is a fiat on-ramp with moonpay matcha over-the-counter trades can be done now this token watch lists have been added wallet value tracker has been added and finally dark mode as well this is a massive update i use match um you know a lot i use a bunch of different decentralized exchange aggregators there's matcha um slingshot one inch atomic blue i mean they're all really

cool but matcha in terms of like its interface is probably one of the best if not the best in terms of how normally friendly it is it definitely feels like i'm using a kind of like fintech app something like robinhood or something or something like that when i'm using matcha but i'm able to access basically you know any asset on the ethereum network here which is really really awesome so go check out matcha 2.0 if you haven't yet there's a lot going on uh you know and if you're on polygon you can check it out on there as well which is really awesome and speaking of polygon okay coin announced that they've integrated polygons so you can now do deposits and withdrawals i think uh through the kind of this integration here and you'll basically be able to go to polygon and save on transaction fees when you withdraw

ethereum based assets from ok coin into polygon here so obviously in addition to eth this also includes 12 different tokens different tokens like uni comp wi-fi and stable coins like ustt dye and usdc now i think the staple kind of the stable coins are the highlight here because i think uh you know so maybe i'll take a little bit of a step back here and explain what i think these scalability solutions are targeting i think they're targeting um the the oh sorry they're obviously targeting the smaller users the ones that are more fee sensitive and i think these users are some of those who want to kind of play around with defy do a couple of token swaps and also yield farm with their dollars now obviously on ethereum you're farming with only a thousand dollars is probably not worth it a lot of the time because

you end up having to pay maybe 50 in fees just to get into a yield farm and if you're only making like oh not only but if you're making like 10 well you've already just spent five percent so it will take you six months to get your your your kind of like gas fees back then you would start being in profit um and that's that's kind of assuming that that 10 rate lasts the whole year as well so i think uh polygon is very good for those things because polygon fees on polygon are obviously i'm very very cheap for those who have used that you'll know what i mean here but this is just even better where you don't even have to bridge from ethereum into polygon you can go directly to polygon from uh okay coin if that's an exchange that you use uh i think okay coin is maybe a an asian

exchange i haven't personally used it before but i think they're they're they're pretty big here so i guess this just follows something like ok x that integrated with arbitrarily uh i think all the exchanges are going to eventually integrate with all the decentralized exchange sorry all the scalability solutions to offer seamless onboarding and off-boarding to them so really cool to see okay coin doing this so mahal mihailo from uh polygonic yeah basically put out a tweet that said that there is currently two unicorns live on polygon being uh ave with eight billion dollars locked and quick swap decks with i think a billion dollars locked here um and uh sorry and sushi sushi swap as well i think with a billion plus tbr so three unicorns yeah three unicorns here uh and

he expects the fourth unicorn maybe even this week here so and he's calling for polygon d5 summer i think that's what's that's kind of like actually happened here where essentially as i was saying like the face sensitive users are going to polygon um and also polygon has like some some really lucrative yield planning opportunities right now too and they're kind of going there and they're embracing these uh kind of like cheaper fees faster transactions um due to kind of like pulling polygon being a scaling solution here um and i think this is just like a kind of i guess um i guess bearer of what's to come with layer twos like arbitrary and kind of like other scalability solutions uh optimism obviously zkc stuff like that i think you know and people keep

asking me is this going to be like a zero something there's only gonna be one winner i think it's too early to tell who's gonna win who's gonna lose i think right now there's basically five competing projects in terms of like generalized evm compatibility uh and that is uh as i've mentioned lots of times before polygon arbitrary optimism zk sync and starkware they are the five main ones there are other projects out there of course like aztec protocol with the privacy focus zk roller there is hermes network they're also doing evm compatibility but i think they uh you know they're pretty far behind right now i wouldn't say far behind in terms of like technology but i think in terms of like adoption and awareness they're definitely behind those five that i've mentioned there um and there's a few others out there

that i haven't spoken about yet uh loopering of course building their own ecosystem but i think if you're talking about like generalized evm compatible solutions those are the five that are that are kind of there but in saying that that doesn't mean that it's bearish for the other solutions like i i'm very bullish on the looping ecosystem i think that what they're building is is very smart i think you know the fact that they're going to be able to bridge into these other solutions is very smart but yeah as i said it's too it's too way too early to pick any kind of winner i think it's going to be a power law distribution where we're going to have a handful of winners and they're going to win really big and then we're going to have a bunch of smaller ones filling like niche use use

cases and stuff like that which is fine and i think ethereum is obviously going to be the biggest winner out of all of them uh in terms of like i mean obviously ethereum layer 1 is not like a scaling solution but i think ethereum layer 1 is going to be the biggest winner because really you know they're all basically using ethereum for security i mean even the polygon pos chain which people will argue is not a true layer to you know doesn't inherit ethereum security still pays ethereum for checkpointing pays for it to manage the staking logic logic and everything like that um and kind of like people are bridging across and stuff like that so i would argue that that polygon is definitely um you know one of the strongest scaling solutions out there right now i mean they are the strongest in terms of like

tvl and activity but as i said they're kind of like a flag bearer of what's to come with other solutions and i'm looking forward to to polygon releasing their roll-up solutions as well because polygon is not just the pos chain they're a suite of scaling solutions and there's going to be kind of competition between all of these solutions and may the best one win really at the end of the day i mean may the best hand for win i'm rooting for all of them of course but if you you know if you're like a builder here and you're competing in this arena i mean you need to come to terms with the fact that like uh in in business i mean it's a business at the end of the day in business not everyone wins um and not everyone wins big like if you want to be

the next if you want to be the layer 2 that handles trillions of value like dollars of value on your layer 2 if not more than that if you want to be the layer 2 that most of the world uses well you have to crush the competition you have to be better than the competition i don't mean crush it by like uh basically attack it or fight it or whatever but you need to be better you need to out build the competition think about something like apple owning most of apple and samsung for instance owning most of the kind of smartphone i guess market share all the smaller ones still make money but they're much much much smaller than apple and samsung i think the same thing is going to play out with the layer 2 space where you're going to have a handful maybe maybe maybe there's five

that are really big but i doubt it i think there's going to be maybe two or three so avm compatible solutions here that are going to be absolutely massive like seriously account for like 90 of the activity and then you're going to have 10 being a bunch of other ones but that's not bearish at all i think the 10 is still like a huge pie because if you think about how big this stuff can get that's huge like that's still potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of kind of value flowing across these these networks here so yeah that's kind of like my general view on that and i see a lot of people asking me but again my my answer really is it's too early to tell who the winners are going to be definitely they are all in competition but i think the pie

is big enough for basically all of them to succeed in the long run but i think that there's only going to be a handful maybe two or three that win really really big and become the leaders here and i think we're already seeing that play out in a small way but still way too early to tell way too early to tell at this point in time so i guess speaking of winners and kind of things winning ethereum just keeps flipping bitcoin so much on like every conceivable metric here uh so the documenting ethereum account posted a screenshot of stablecoin value being settled on ethereum has flipped btc value settled on bitcoin now this may be a little bit of a funny metric to kind of i guess compare because bitcoin obviously can't settle um stable coins the only stable coins that were technically settled on bitcoin

back in the day was usdt via omni so it wasn't on kind of like bitcoin like itself it was on omni which is i mean i don't understand technically how omni worked but i believe it basically kind of committed itself to bitcoin or like um what basically uh like committed hashes to bitcoin or something like that i'm not going to go into the technical details but um you know essentially usdt on omni is like non-existent these days it's basically all on ethereum um and and tron believe it or not um but yeah i i still think this is just fun to kind of like compare that ethereum is really just to become like or it already is like the settlement layout for the crypto space where it settles like hundreds of billions trillions of dollars of value kind of like a year here

and this is just another metric to kind of compare so yeah really interesting to see this i i think i mean i mentioned this the other day i think at this point it's maybe a fool's errand to compare ethereum to bitcoin anymore because we've already kind of like crushed bitcoin on everything like most metrics so let's just start comparing it to traditional finance let's see if ethereum can settle more value than the entire traditional finance system let's say if ethereum can set up more value volume than things like fed wire or swift or stuff like that i don't even know if that's public but if it is let's see if ethereum can do that because i believe it can and i believe it's going to go way way beyond that i think ethereum is going to be settling one day hundreds of trillions of dollars of value a year

and and one day up to quadrillion dollars of of value a year in um uh in settlement value so yeah i'm gonna keep an eye on that for sure we'll see maybe it takes 10 years i don't know i'm here for the long game uh finally i wanted to talk about dydx now i've been talking about diy dx a lot and i have said uh i think a few weeks ago that i wish that they had like a metrics dashboard to track their growth they finally do so this is their layer two dashboard tracking all of their volumes tracking their um kind of weekly uh kind of uh volume their weekly revenue uh the users antique kind of like tvl and stuff like that uh but you know i'm gonna cover this probably more in depth on the daily grade data pump that uh that is going to go live

this weekend so i won't go into too much detail here but still very very cool to see that they finally got this dashboard out now you can see obviously as i was saying the volumes are going to be highly dependent on what the market's doing so the market's been quiet over the last you know i guess two weeks or so uh and obviously the volumes have come down uh now what during that big crash the volume was was really high remember that big crash on may 19 where and and uh dydxes layer 2 alone did 160 million dollars of daily volume here which is really really cool to see and they were kind of like getting some really nice volumes there because the market was hot but if as the market goes down so will the volumes but anyway i'll go into more depth about that on

the daily gray data pump which probably gonna go live sunday at this at this stage so definitely keep an eye out for that and subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet um so you don't miss that but i think that is everything for today so yeah 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 next week thanks everyone