OpenSea Raises $23mil, Dune Analytics v2 out & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #81 - 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 sozano and today is the 19th of march 2021 all right let's get into it everyone so there was a proposal to prioritize that the merger after london posted last night last night so i'll kind of just code this for for you guys so the merger basically refers to the eth1 to eth2 merger that's going to be happening you know hopefully i guess sooner rather than later uh and this proposal here is is saying that we should prioritize the merge and get it and get it done after the london network upgrade or hard fork which is scheduled for july and you know as you may be aware that's when eip1559 is going to be

going into the network so there is actually another hard fork after london uh called shanghai that hasn't got like a schedule or anything like that but that was scheduled to go after london um but now people are saying we should do the merger before shanghai um and after london obviously which would mean that we may get the merger by end of this year now i mean there's obviously a lot of people in favor of it there's not too much discussion uh discussion going on here uh yet but i i did see some discussions in other kind of threads and you know it definitely would mean that shanghai the next kind of upgrade for for uh eth1 would get delayed until sometime next year um and it comes with a bunch of upgrades as well people are excited about so

you know that would mean that those people would have to wait but i think you know most of the ecosystem is at a point now where we we kind of like agree that the merge just needs to be done right there was the drama with the miners and everything like that you know we're paying so much for proof of work issuance there's the energy use of proof of work which is coming under scrutin scrutiny now and you know having two kind of i guess networks up and running when we only need to have one and we can fulfill the full proof of stake vision uh you know sooner rather than later i think is definitely the path forward here so yeah i mean i'm all in favor of getting the merge done as soon as possible it's a pretty i mean i wouldn't say it's

an easy thing to do but like it's been specked out you know there's lots of people working on it lots of people um kind of like uh coming up with you know ways to do it knowing i've gone through vitalex proposals before about like executable beacon chains and things like that so yeah i don't there hasn't been a decision yet i i don't think whether we would do the merge after london or not at this stage so i'll keep you guys updated on that but i think it's it's the prudent approach i definitely think that we can't wait you know uh too much longer to to merge here not just because of the environmental concerns from proof of work but also because it's just like it's kind of like why not do the merge if we can do it sort of thing right if we can do it safely and securely and

the researchers and developers are confident in this then let's just get it done let's get ethereum to that kind of like proof-of-stake vision let's get rid of proof-of-work um and miners and you know miners are going to be stakers too and everything like that but i just think that proof of work ethereum is pretty much on its last legs for a variety of reasons uh and you know let's just rip the band-aid off essentially so looking forward to seeing where this kind of um this prioritization goes here so open c the popular nft platform announced a 23 million dollar series a today led by uh andreessen horowitz or a16z so this is quite a large round here and i mean it's not very surprising to me considering the hype nfts have right now right and open c is definitely one of

the leading uh marketplaces for nfts right now but yeah so they raised this money from from a160 as a lead and then they had a bunch of people kind of join on board like naval rubber mark mark cuban tim ferriss i mean there's there's tons of people here alexis ohanian which is a reddit co-founder bellagi of course everyone knows who he is and there's like a bunch of other people in here um with with some funds joining again uh you know as part of this round like one confirmation and and blockchain capital and things like that so yeah a nice list of names there of investors i mean this is huge and you know i don't even know what's going to happen is openstack going to have a token i mean i would assume so it's funny because like you know there's a lot of fundraisers going on right now

and i'm i'm i i kind of get like some some decks across across my my desk and i look at them and you know i think a lot of investors now looking at and being like okay if it has a token you know you know we all want to be in it right because everyone wants once a token so it's hard to tell what's going to be like pure equity investment versus a token investment i would say you know almost everything is going to have a token eventually um you know and that's not necessarily a bad thing because a token can just represent equity in the in the system right like open c as a business can be generating revenue and um that could go to token holders right and it's just like a classic kind of equity there so or or a stock you may you know um or

like how a stock is a dividend right that gets paid out to stocks so i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing but there is a kind of bias here where it's like okay well tokens like go up you know and down like they're really really volatile but tokens tend to basically like go up a lot in value because it it you get access to such a wide and global consumer base right like if you were to launch on the us stock market you know uh that that takes a lot longer there's a i mean there's huge regulatory hurdles there to get it done you know it takes a long a long time uh to get into the right place to do it and then uh you have to bar a lot of people right whereas if you if you just launch a token pretty much anyone in the world

can access this instantly like it's just on unisop or something like that right so i think that's a big reason why as well um and it's just better i think tokens in general just better for for capital formation if done right like i i'm seeing a trend right now where a lot of tokens are launching with like super low circulating supplies and i don't think that's good because what it ends up doing especially if it's a hyped up token is that the fully diluted evaluation of these networks end up being like really really high um and then over time they kind of like bleed out because of the fact that more tokens are coming to market uh and this isn't just like on ethereum um this is very prevalent on other networks i've noticed where the fully diluted values of the projects are so so high like tens of billions um and

what i mean for one the project is nowhere near worth that much um but the second point is that like it just has a lot really low circulating supply and you know a lot of tokens are usually locked in staking and things like that it's just it's pretty crazy to see so i mean that's another reason why it happens but you know when tokens are done right i think they add a lot a lot of value to a lot of people um and let a lot of people kind of be part of this right get get like a a dividend or or kind of like be part of the network or if it's a decentralized kind of like uh protocol be part of the protocols governance and things like that so yeah i mean congrats to opencl on their race here but i would not be surprised to see a

token from from them uh you know sooner rather than later so rari capital uh officially launched their fuse app today so this has been teased for quite a while now and they're doing a safeguarded launch which i thought was was was pretty cool where uh basically i think there's like a tv l cap on this but essentially uh what fuse is it's like a money market where you can basically you know do the same thing you do with other other money markets like put up collateral kind of like borrow against it and it's funny they have like you can put socks up as collateral so uni socks uppers cloud rule and borrow some some die against them and go yield farm using your socks as clutter which i thought was was actually pretty cool because you know you can imagine that compound and avail are

probably i mean maybe they add it sometime in the future but you know not for a long time like i i maybe maybe arvid does i don't know about compound they they don't seem to add kind of collateral assets very often but in general uh you know i i guess there's like an opportunity here right for other platforms to capture these kind of i guess long tail assets uh for for lending and borrowing here so really cool to see that but yeah this was hyped up for ages uh you know i guess like the last few months or maybe a couple of months or something like that and uh you know it's always funny because i'm not saying that the rari capital team did this or anything like that but they were hyping it up because they were excited about it but you know i've spoken about how this

whole space runs on narratives and you know the rari token kind of pumped up on on kind of like the anticipation of this launch and then i checked it today after they launched and it dumped like 30 or something like that um because usually what happens is that people buy up the news right they buy up the narratives or they buy up the the hype and then they sell sell the news sorry not buy up news they end up selling the news like when it gets released like okay it's released now you know the the hype of it coming soon is gone uh let's let's sell and that's not kind of like long-term investors those are just speculators but it happens right and this happens like all across like crypto all the time i mean it's actually bad if you deliver something in crypto which is just insane

to me because you can build a really really kind of like strong narrative really strong hype behind you know your your upcoming kind of product or upcoming release but then when you actually release it you have to deliver right because it you know and this is this is what happens a lot in the investing space too is that teams will sell a narrative right especially if they're they're at the earlier stage of their project their pre-product they're just raising capital in a seed round they've got to sell a story and sell a narrative and to get investors on board now what ends up happening is that you know as long as you're selling a story and selling a narrative and you don't have to be doing this maliciously but the the the investors kind of like can let their mind run wild right you because there's no

there's no reality to look at it's just all imagination because you're like okay well this product is coming soon you know if x x and x happens and then you know y y and y happens maybe z will happen right and then you know what ends up happening is that people buy an anticipation of this kind of product launch they buy on the hype they borrow the narratives and then when the product goes live inevitably it kind of dumps because like you know people either you know sell the news because they're like oh i thought you know someone else is going to sell so i better front run them and sell or they're like maybe newbie investors where they bought into the hype and they realize that maybe the hype doesn't match reality and i'm not saying that this this is just you know i mean this is what

happened with rarity capital or anything like that but it's always funny to see the same kind of thing play out and you know i know i go on a lot about it but like i think cardano is like a perfect example here with their smart contracts thing where they you know they've been hyping up smart contracts for so long and they've been hyping up you know as soon as smart contracts go live ethereum's going to die all ethereum developers are going to come over to cardano and it's going to be you know fine and they're not the only project doing this mind you but the funny thing is is that you know the token price keeps going up its market cap is ridiculous for what it is um you know it's worth 20 of ethereum it doesn't have any smart contracts and but the thing is is that it's just all

hype and narratives at the end of the day but once they actually deliver smart contracts sometime in the future i don't know when it's going to be i haven't kept up with it but when they actually deliver this because this is a major feature right and then people see that developers aren't suddenly flocking to the network right the network isn't getting more activity from from smart contracts being live and all this stuff isn't happening they're like oh okay wow maybe it's not going to kill ethereum right maybe this is what maybe this was all right and then the price never inevitably dumps so so much of this going on and something to keep in mind um you know and i just i know i've got off a little bit of a tangent there but you know basically i saw it happen with rari capital so i

thought it was uh was prudent to kind of point out but yeah if you're interested in like collateralizing with different exotic assets like unisocks definitely go check out fuse um and they're going gonna be on layer two as well i think they've been teasing on optimism integration for quite a quite a while now so it's gonna be really cool to see and guess what happens here so loopering put out this tweet today which actually prompted my tweet uh which is the next tweet here but i'll read out what loot brings said so they basically say roll ups pay for peace of mind in each and roll ups being uh the layer scaling technology ethereum security is not cheap that's the point uh loopering is thus not just an exchange it's a vault and they kind of put a screenshot saying kind of like how much loopering

has spent on gas in eighth to secure themselves to ethereum layer one they've spent 555 each which at current prices is you know almost a million dollars right um two layer one just one app just one layer two to secure themselves which is awesome and that's what prompted this tweet from me when i said in the future uh ethereum l1 will be generating billions of dollars in fee revenue per day but these fees will not be paid by individual users they'll be paid by ethereum l2s and with eip1559 a lot of these fees will be burned thus ethics ultrasound money now this is a new meme that came out of the justin drake and i explained it yesterday so i won't go over it again but essentially you know today the ethereum network is generating on

average 20 to 30 million dollars in fees a day right and this is with capped kind of i guess scalability because we've reached a ceiling at this point where new users really aren't coming in anymore because they're just priced out that's just the reality of it so because of that we have layer twos coming on live coming online soon and they basically act as a user wrapper so you'll have like millions of potentially billions of users in these layer twos one day and they're going to be generating their own revenue and part of that revenue will have a cost of securing themselves on eighth one and that's what they'll be paying in eighth fees and that'll be what's getting burned so we will get to a point you know if ethereum six ages we all think it will uh where the l1 is generating billions

of dollars in fee revenue every day which is insane because of the fee burn right imagine burning billions of dollars of eath per day like even if eth is worth trillions of dollars say we get to a point where eth is somehow worth like 10 trillion dollars right and you have an annual burn rate of you know say there it's only a billion dollars a fees per day you have an annual burn uh burn rate of potentially 365 billion dollars and okay don't get me wrong not the whole base fee is going to be burned here um that there's going to be just a portion of it but the thing is is that like even if only half of it is burned right that's still like a 100 oh god my mouth here is going to suck but 160 170 um

or 180 sorry a billion dollars worth of of fee fees being burned every year just if the fees are a billion dollars a day which are actually going to be more than that right and if if eight is ten trillion dollars already i mean that means eight is like a hundred thousand dollars you know uh but i think that east would have to be kind of like worth that much if if the l1 is generating that many uh that much fee revenue basically because that means you've kind of scaled to like the worldwide scale and where you know ethereum is the dominant financial system essentially um but yeah from from that point of view you can imagine like you know that's just insane right like let's just say for simplicity's sake it browns up to 200 billion dollars of fees being burned every year that's in five years you'll

burn a trillion dollars worth of fees right uh that's just crazy right that just puts constant upward pressure on the price of eighth because not only do these l2s have to have to pay in eighth uh for security right they have to buy that eth first and you're actually going to see i reckon a lot of companies especially the l2 operators or at least the um um the l2 kind of like treasuries having an eighth reserve right because they're gonna need it because they're gonna need to pay these fees to the network so why not buy it cheaper and why not buy it now to have a reserve for later rather than buying it when it is much more expensive because you get both the upside and you get to basically lock in a nice deal today you know when it's ten thousand dollars you're gonna regret not

buying more at you know eighteen hundred dollars um so i think you know individuals can do that too right and and stockpile i don't think people really think about that about stockpiling kind of eth because you know the price is just gonna inevitably go up because of all the usage that's happening and then the fun thing is is that you know a lot of it is burned right in the end which is just it's just insane i mean i guess for me when more people understand this at a deeper level uh that's when eth really kind of i guess starts uh starts shining because i mean i've gone on about it a lot it's monetary policy to me when it's when when the merge happens and when 1559 is in is amazing and probably the best monetary policy in all of crypto um i i don't think a hardcap is the best

thing we can do i think a perpetual issuance to stake is plus fee burn making a deflationary supply aka ultrasound money is the one of the best if not the best ways to secure a network and to add value to the the economic asset of that network so yeah something to think about i'm going to put some actual numbers to this i think you know in terms of growth rate for ethereum l1 and stuff like that and and kind of do a kind of do a breakdown here because i mean this is just like insane right and ethereum's worth 200 billion dollars today and i really do truly believe that if ethereum succeeds 10 trillion dollar market cap is going to be a reality which is almost a hundred thousand dollars per each which you might might sound insane today right you might think i'm insane

but you know if eth goes to bitcoin's market cap of a trillion dollars right now it would be like nine thousand dollars or something uh so you know bitcoins already showed the way it showed us the way and and if bitcoin keeps going up it's going to keep going up too but i do think ethel will go up on its own merits as well you know the eighth bitcoin ratio seems to you know love to just like um it's like what i like to call the maximum pain chart you look at it and you're like okay you know when's 8th going to go up against bitcoin i think this plays into it when eth is understood as this extremely powerful economic asset that is going to you know be used in staking be used to pay fees those fees are going to be burned be used as like

extremely um good trustless collateral right extremely liquid i mean there's so many benefits here and i've spoken about it so much i'm not gonna not gonna shield too much here but i think this is the i guess gospel that we should be preaching to people when we're talking about ether as an asset and kind of getting them to realize why it's valuable and just how valuable it can continue to be into the future speaking of of eth uh coin gecko put together a really cool page here where they say where they've got uh basically listing which uh treasuries or corporate treasuries hold each on their balance sheet now obviously i spoke about my two yesterday that have about 50 million dollars worth of ethno on their balance sheet but i did forget to mention that they're not the first publicly traded company to do this

ethcap is or ether capital is the first publicly traded um uh kind of like company to put ether on their balance sheet here and i mean i don't know how much each they have i think maybe they have i think maybe once i saw it um they might have 60 or 70 million dollars worth of eighth so more than more than my two here but i spoke about also or at least in the newsletter yesterday i spoke about how grayscale was also um gobbling up each rather another institution gobbling up eath they have uh billions of dollars worth of eth at this point i think in their um in their kind of like uh in their vault i guess you could call it or in their in their possession um and then there's a ethereum etf that's being filed for in canada and canada already has a bitcoin etf so this

is not like the us where they're going to keep saying no canada has already said yes to this bitcoin etf so you could imagine that um you know eth is going to going to be there as well um as an etf and you know more companies i think are just going to be putting eth on their balance sheet in general i mean my two actually said um in their statement that they they bought a uh for kind of future use of the network so they're doing that stockpiling that i'm talking about for gas and we're going to see more and more of that because as i said like no one wants to buy you know eighth later on for gas when they could have bought earlier so you know maybe something for you guys to do as well i mean i i buy if anyway it's

just like a no-brainer investment for me i'm always buying eth no matter what the price is i don't really care whenever i've got money i buy eth but this is just another investment thesis to kind of like think about and that's not investment advice but i mean it's pretty obvious right now that you know i think buying it is a good idea for for the long term of course um like i don't i think that should be obvious right um but i think you know more and more companies doing a public company is doing it just sends us such a great signal such a strong signal to the market that eth is here to stay as an asset it is an asset that um companies expect to appreciate alongside bitcoin maybe even outperform bitcoin which i'm betting on for sure uh so yeah definitely cool to see this

page from coingecko and i can't wait to see how it populates there's only one there two technically if you if you um count ether capital here uh i think we can get to like you know 10 20 30 before we even know it so yeah looking forward to that so dune analytics had their biggest release ever today which is dune v2 so it comes with a bunch of really cool features they have automatic and reliable query refreshing so for those of you who have used doom before the querying in the in the past could be a little bit slower a little bit clunky so they've basically fixed a lot of that um they've they've prettied up the site as well i checked it out before it looks really really cool uh and there's a bunch of other improvements as well that they've kind of detailed in this blog post here

um basically they go into i guess like detail here i mean i mean a lot of it's got to do with making it faster as well uh i love this they kind of say here super fast experience the dune application is now many times faster than it was before that's it that's the paragraph i mean yeah it's it's much faster i mean i noticed that when i was using it before which i thought was really cool so yeah definitely go check this out if you haven't yet and i disclose you here i'm an investor in in dune so i just want to put that out there but i mean i invested in them because i love their product and i've used their product so many times i mean you will have definitely seen me using their charts and kind of shilling their charts on on twitter over the

years so uh yeah definitely um go check it out if you haven't already uh my favorite dashboard is is the decentralized exchange dashboard from doing analytics so you can just google that and it's one that i cover in the daily grade data pump as well so yeah definitely go check that one out so an interesting tweet here from dan romero where he said wikipedia should fundraise by selling nfts for every page and i mean that just i mean today i just like when i saw that tweet i was just like wow okay why didn't i think of this already this is such an obvious use case because you know obviously wikipedia is one of the biggest websites in the world but they have no monetization strategy they don't have ads you know they don't collect user data none of that stuff and you know from

time to time they'll run like a fundraising campaign where they bug you to donate to them right to pay for server costs to pay for staff and all that sort of good stuff um but imagine how much money they could make and how they could fundraise by selling nft for every single page you know imagine owning an nft for some of the most popular pages on wikipedia i don't know what the most popular pages are but imagine owning that nft and they could do it in such a way where they'll get a portion of the resale like every single time it's sold right they could say that okay well there's 10 royalties on all of these nfts every time it's traded we're going to take 10 percent and that's how we're going to that's what we're going to use to fundraise this is just such a no-brainer

idea to me like i i honestly like i i was actually mind blown by this that i hadn't even thought of this and this is something that i think a lot a lot of people have thought about nfts as well i mean me included obviously is that it goes far beyond just art and collectibles and in-game items anything that is unique right can be turned into an nft and this uh for like the web in general goes goes beyond wikipedia too right and it goes it goes beyond like music streaming as well i've seen like tokenizing songs and audio and all that sort of stuff and tokenizing videos and and turning them into nfts it goes beyond that it goes like i mean there's a project called mirror uh doing this right now where

you know they're doing like tokenizing of publishing you know turning uh uh published like kind of blog posts and pieces into nfts and things like that that's another use case there you know tokenizing you know real world kind of things like property rights and stuff like that obviously it'll still exist in the legal system but making it into an nft is just like moving a lot of the friction right making it easier to trade and everything like that i mean there's a project called realty that already does kind of real estate on the blockchain but i'm not sure if they kind of like have nfts that you can basic i think they do for some of their properties where you can like buy and buy and sell the different things to different people but there's kyc as well involved um which is just like an unfortunate side effect of course but

yeah i mean i think we've just scratched the surface of what we can do with nfts um and it's just going to be a really powerful fundraising vehicle i think in general a really powerful vehicle for for monetizing different things and and feeding the value back to creators at the end of the day because you know as a creator you want to get paid for your work you want to get guaranteed pay for your work you want you know if you want royalties on your work then having them on a kind of like nft is just a streamlined process and an easy way to do that so yeah really really interesting tweet from from danielle so arthur xerox pointed out uh this article from coindesk that where bank of america basically uh says that they think defy is potentially more disruptive than bitcoin

um yeah i mean it is like like there's no kind of hiding that right bitcoin is good for what it does and you know what it does it's just digital gold right people like it to hold it and it number go up and you know protect your wealth from from government state nation state control that's fine right btc does that eth does that too and i think eth does that better but i won't you know kind of dig too deep into that one but basically um defy and i mean not just d5 but like a lot of the use cases on ethereum are definitely more disruptive than bitcoin it disrupts entire industries bitcoin maybe disrupts like you know i guess they're going for a sovereign kind of fiat currencies but i don't think we're gonna get to the point where bitcoin disrupts like

that sort of stuff it's definitely disrupting gold you know it's worth like 10 of gold right now which is pretty crazy but digital gold is such a niche thing and such a it's just like not very interesting right you know bitcoin is actually go as far as to consider bitcoin the bitcoin network actually just waste that secures btc so really the bitcoin network is not something that the bitcoin is interested in kind of i guess working with whereas ethereum is completely different you know ethereum the ethereum network can do so much more you do d5 you do nfts right and these things are disrupting like entire industries obviously d5 isn't disrupting finance the biggest industry you know in the history of humanity um but you know nfts themselves are disrupting tons of industries right gaming

collectibles are you know how how kind of like even platforms like instagram monetize because if everyone kind of like gets off instagram and goes to another platform uh because they're able to monetize their uh you know that that you know that's the disruption there um you know daos of course and stuff like dao's i mean dallas can't have the potential to disrupt like organizations in general but i think that dao's uh at least in the maybe short to medium term i'm more going to be about finding new ways to coordinate rather than kind of like disrupting the existing ways so i mean that's really cool but yeah i mean it's fun to see kind of like banks say this especially bank of america which is is obviously one of the biggest banks in the us um because of the fact that uh they're the people that defy is disrupting

and i've said this before where uh on the refuel where i think that i don't think banks are going to fight this i think banks are going to see this and be like okay well this is the next stage of finance how do we get involved right how do we add value here how do we extract value of course because they're banks um and they're going to do what i guess a lot of um a lot of websites did when the internet came out a lot of businesses sorry i did when the internet came out it's like okay well we need to be online let's build a website right let's see what we can do and they grew their businesses by doing that it's the same with with banks banks are going to see defy right and ethereum be okay how do we get a piece

of this right all right let's tap into d fight let's tap into yield farming right let's let's put some stable coins in curve like they're going to be doing this maybe not anytime soon but they're going to do it because they know if they don't they're going to be disrupted i think the internet in general made a lot of businesses very sensitive to disruption and they probably have like entire teams looking at emerging technologies and making sure that they spot these trends before they kind of take off so that they're at less of a risk of being disrupted which is just really great in general for for the i guess the world right for innovation for competition so yeah very interesting to see back of america say this so superfluid is a is a money streaming protocol that i've spoken about before

but uh to celebrate their launch they're basically auctioning off five unique nft which i thought was a pretty cool um kind of way to do i guess launch here and actually doing it with the first ever streaming auction uh leveraging their programmable cash flow protocol which is which is super fluid here so basically all the details are in this post here which i'll link in the youtube description for you but uh basically um there's a bunch of uh five different unique nfts here which i thought was really cool so you know i guess like they're in the gif here at the top uh you know there you can see them there and obviously you can see them in the blog post as well uh but i did want to talk about how um they're doing this on xdi and and polygon so xli and polygon

are kind of other networks that are scaling ethereum but as i've discussed before they're not layer twos so to speak they're kind of like side chain's a crappy word i hate using it but they're kind of just like um you know alternative systems to ethereum where you can kind of offload activity to those networks um so yeah they're leveraging this because obviously doing this kind of like streaming stuff where it's low value amounts or minting nfts on ethereum l1 is is super expensive and it's kind of like priced at a lot of people at this stage but um yeah i just thought it was a really cool way to do a launch because you don't really see people doing this usually a launch is basically do a twitter thread you know i'll do a press release uh contact some influencers you know do do some launches in some

newsletters and get the word out but you know uh doing nft stuff is is really innovative here because it's catching on to a trend um it's giving uh people like i guess a piece of of kind of like uh the protocol's history so to speak right which i thought was was really cool as well so yeah kudos to the superfluid team for doing this all right everyone that's it for today thank you again for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to that channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up join the discord channel subscribe to the newsletter and i'll catch you all next weekend have a great one guys see ya