POAP raises $10mil, OpenSea acquires Dharma and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #296 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily grey refuel wary cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony and today's the 19th of january 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so this uh kind of governance proposal that had been posted to uh i guess are there to deploy abba v3 to arbitration one and optimism have both a pass you can see here mark zeller from rv posted that governance has spoken rv v3 will be on arbitrary and optimism so you know i've been saying this for i guess like a few months now really that i expected rvv3 to come to both arbitrary optimism relatively soon uh but now that it's done and gone through governance it means that it can actually kind of like be deployed there i'm not sure like how long until this happens i think it's

going to happen sooner rather than later given how much arva has been teasing v3 and their layer 2 rollout lately so i'm very very very excited for that i think as i mentioned before a key missing piece to uh to optimism and armaturum have been the kind of like missing piece of a money market right like or i mean they have money markets but like one of the popular money markets like are there ones that have like a lot of trust behind them you know the brand awareness all that good stuff there so very much looking forward to seeing other v3 go live on both of these networks hopefully as a simultaneous launch that'd be really cool to see because i think that you know arbitrary optimism as i've mentioned before they're two of the main optimistic roll-up networks i know there's others out there there's

kind of like the forks of optimism like metis and things like that i know that medes has more tvl than optimism right now because they have a token to incentivize that sort of stuff but in terms of like novel tech that's actually been developed by the teams themselves uh optimism and albuterm are kind of like you know the the the two juggernauts here and they're basically uh in a race to i guess kind of like get as much adoption as possible um but at the end of the day you know i've kind of like been seeing this lately where i think the l2s shouldn't be fighting amongst themselves at all and shouldn't be trying to steal market [ __ ] from each other the pie is going to get so much bigger with the amount of people that are going to be on board through these l2s and other things

like that that i think at this point um they should just be focused on kind of like onboarding as many users as possible rather than trying to like poach users from other kind of like l2s if anything we should be poaching users from the alternative l1 because at the end of the day a lot of people are only using these alt l1 because they've got cheaper fees well now that we have cheaper fees with optimism and arbitrary you can come back and kind of like use these things which i think people will do for sure and i think a lot of newer people will do that as well um but also speaking of cheap fees optimism announced today that they've found a way to shave another 30 off the average transaction fees which is pretty cool to see they're saying you know might deploy later and they think

they can get uh the cost to transfer ether on optimism down under a dollar so currently it's a dollar forty three on uh uh and kind of like you can see the comparison between the different networks here uh between like polygon hermes loopering zk sync arbitrary and boba and ethereum l1 so yeah that'd be cool to see them get it under a dollar i'm sure arbitrarium won once they've put in the nitro upgrade they're going to be reducing fees by uh by a nice amount i saw pauline i mentioned today that fear reduction looks to be about 50 from current levels so that would put arbitrarium one you know basically on par with optimism i'm sure they have uh i'm sure they have kind of like other things up their sleeves to get fees down as well so do all the kind of like networks as i've said to you guys before

it's really only the first first iterations that we're seeing of these layer twos they're going to keep working on getting those fees down as much as possible because that really is at the end of the day i mean one of the major things that they're that they're kind of like um sorry that's one of their kind of like main value ads right there's the faster transactions which is which is fine i mean as i said before it's technically not faster transactions because until your transaction is posted to l1 ethereum as a batch it's technically not confirmed uh or you can i guess it's definitely not finalized so it's confirmed but not finalized um but you know the user experience is much better but i think that the real value prop is obviously the cheaper fees so these l2 teams obviously are going to be laser focused on that

along with other kind of like think longer term roadmap things like decentralizing out the uh the sequences and the network in general making sure that the network can you know can stay alive is 99 100 of the time you know we've seen some of the networks go offline before uh due to various race uh various reasons out there but i obviously they're all focused on reducing the fees as much as possible so very cool to see these from optimism can't wait to see you know albuquerque nitro go live and to see how kind of like um much the fees can come down there and you know well i'm very curious to see what the fees are gonna look like in a year for all of these l2 networks so they're gonna come down you know less than 50 cents right for uh for a transfer less than a dollar for a swap

that would be really cool to see we're gonna have to kind of like see how that shakes out but um you know for the time being i think this is pretty good uh it's much better than l1 ethereum of course obviously uh you know things like swaps i guess on l1 ethereum like what 50 60 bucks and i think on optimism and arbitrage there are a few dollars still or something like that so that's an obviously massive improvement uh already but we can get those costs down further and further which i'm expecting you know at least over the next i guess like few years to be honest this stuff's not gonna just be like oh you know we'll work on reducing fees over the next two months and then we're done no this is an ongoing thing and there's always going to be new ways uh that people that these

teams find to reduce fees there's always going to be new mechanisms that they can do there's always going to be new tech coming out so as i said before scaling ethereum or scaling blockchains in general is like a multi-decade thing it is not something that's just going to happen overnight and then we're going to be able to service the world i've mentioned plenty of times that i expect these networks to be doing tens of millions of transactions per second eventually you know in aggregate across all the different networks whether it be layer twos layer one side chains or anything like that uh and to get to that sort of scale and to get to that sort of scale while keeping costs low and keeping these networks live so they don't kind of like fall over from the demand it's going to take a while and

it's going to take the concerted effort of hundreds if not thousands of very very smart people to to kind of um to get these done the funding is there like i don't think money is a bottleneck at all for this sort for this sort of stuff the talent is definitely a bottleneck but money definitely isn't which which helps like it helps a lot right because i think that the i guess like big kind of like funds out there recognize that compute is such an in-demand resource because at the end of the day these blockchains uh these smart contract chains are basically just selling compute right they're selling block space now the demand for this as i've said before is unlimited and is going to just keep expansion exponentially increasing from here and we've seen already like plenty of evidence that people aren't just

going to stick with one you know compute network right they're going to go where the opportunities are they're going to go where they can afford to go as well like you know there are a lot of people who i mean most people can't afford ethereum l1 anymore and and you know we need to offer them cheaper compute that still uh benefits from ethereum l1 security and decentralization which is obviously what l2 is doing but they're also using side chains and other l1 networks because the demand is just incredible right and it doesn't it's not bearish for ethereum that these other kind of like l1 networks have um have gotten traction i don't think so at all and the funny thing is is that ethereum l1 hasn't uh the fees haven't gone down the activity hasn't gone down even though these other networks are getting adoption so the pi

is growing um and and and i think it's it's all going to grow together and it's just a matter of you know in 10 years what does the uh i guess um what does the what does the distribution look like like what are the big winners like what are the top five networks in 10 years are they uh you know ethereum maybe one other l1 chain and the rest l2s i don't know right i'm betting that it's all l2s i don't know if another l1 chain um can actually exist especially in 10 years can even compete with with the l2 ecosystem because these monolithic l1 chains just aren't as scalable inherently so we're going to have to see how that that shakes out there but very cool to see that optimism is reducing fees even further here uh starcraft put out an update yesterday they presented stark net alpha

0.7.0 so new features include contract upgradability which is a huge thing for developers block number and block timestamp events uh and much more so you can go to this blog post here to read this obviously this is for developers not really for um for end users to kind of like worry about too much um but i think that there's a a fear reduction in coming in this as well i remember reading i remember reading something about this uh which is which is really really cool so obviously this is the sort of stuff that needs to be uh i know here we go initial then what's coming next is initial fee mechanism support will be released in a matter of weeks as a subversion of stark net so a fee mark that's going to be kind of introduced there so very cool to see uh see this year as i mentioned you

know yes stock net alpha went live end of november but i said it was a very very early version it was only for developers it's not like end users were going to be getting much kind of like value out of it but there are plenty of apps live today using starcraft's technology that you can go kind of like play around with and not just absolutely like whole ecosystems right like dydx and immutablex and things like that that you can go play around with to get a teaser of um what's coming with starknet but as i've mentioned before as well i've shared with you guys a list of projects building on stock net don't have it handy right now i remember sharing it maybe a couple of weeks ago but it's growing right like all these things as i said the demand for computes block spaces is basically infinite which

means that the demand to deploy kind of like applications to these networks is pretty much infinite as well and you're going to see plenty of stuff get built stuff that isn't even possible to build on layer 1 blockchains which is super super exciting so cleanbase announced yesterday that they have a new partnership with mastercard so this partnership is basically they're touting it as a way to revolutionize the nft purchase experience for customers so essentially a mastercard is going to classify nfts as digital goods which allows a broader group of consumers to purchase nfts and coming soon they'll unlock a new way to pay using mastercard cards here this is pretty a pretty big deal obviously coinbase is making a big move into the nft ecosystem

with plans to kind of launch their own nft marketplace uh now they're partnering with mastercard they're doing a bunch of other things around nfts as well a lot of education around it too and kind of like signaling or doing stuff on twitter from what i've seen look you know the funny thing is i've been thinking about this a lot lately and there was um ftx launched their nft marketplace recently right that hasn't really gone anywhere from what i've seen it seems that the crypto native nft marketplaces that don't come from centralized exchanges seem to be doing much better and you know we saw this with obviously open c now then we saw it looks rare we saw it with a bunch of others like foundation and super rare and things like that the but but the the um centralized exchanges trying to move into the nft

game doesn't seem to be or at least the nfl marketplace game doesn't seem to be making much traction yet doesn't mean it can't in the future but i think i mean i hope what coinbase does is that they actually move into the nft game but act as kind of like an aggregator for things like what's available on openc on looks rare even what's available in l2s like arbitram with um the treasure kind of um marketplace on there magic whatever it's called i think that that might be the better play but at the end of the day i mean i think the nft ecosystem still has a massive amount of room to grow and actually i've got a tweet here i want to talk about um and i think maybe too early to to kind of like write off these centralized exchanges as being a big um

a big kind of like uh driver of nft adoption i think they're still going to be because of the fact they have so many users but they have to play it right as well so we're going to see how that plays out but i put out this tweet today that i wanted to kind of like talk more to where i said the epic amount of hate that the nft ecosystem gets doesn't really matter at all just look at the growth metrics all of them are up and to the right and billion dollar companies are investing heavily in the metaverse random twitter pundits with bad nft takes are irrelevant so i want to spend a little bit of time talking about this because i think it's important to contextualize where we are with regards to nfts and the hate that nfts get and hate this ecosystem gets in general so let's

take a step back and take a step kind of like back in history to bitcoin you know bitcoin in its earliest days still to this day but in its earliest days the popular consensus was that bitcoin was a scam bitcoin was only used by criminals it was only used to buy drugs and it's going to zero that was the popular consensus most people believe this now look at where bitcoin is right the fast forward what eight to ten years or whatever it's or whatever it's been since then bitcoin went from being worth less than a dollar or less than ten dollars to over forty thousand dollars today it it you know at its peak it was worth over a trillion dollars it makes it one of the biggest um kind of like assets in the world by market cap and that's becoming from a place where most

people thought it was legitimately a scam most people thought it was worthless and most people thought it was just [ __ ] right there obviously a lot of people who still think this but you can see my point here those opinions were irrelevant now you kind of like take nfts in context and you apply the same kind of thinking to that all the hate the literal kind of like tens of thousands hundreds of millions of people who absolutely despise nfts for one reason or another the energy use reason they think it's a fraud they think it's a scam whatever i mean i think a lot of these reasons that they come up with uh are basically uh hogwash but you know the hate is there but look at the nft growth look at the nft ecosystems the growth has been explosive 2021 was an absolutely massive year for nfts 2022 is

shaping up to be a big year again looks rare just launched right it's doing incredible volumes openc is still doing incredible volumes they just raised 300 million dollars at a 13 something billion valuation all these billion dollar companies are getting involved in nfts in the metaverse you know yesterday we just saw microsoft purchase activision blizzard for 70 billion dollars and in their press release they mentioned um metaverse prospects we saw facebook rebrand themselves to meta right like that all these kind of like companies are getting very heavily involved so my my overall point is that it's literally irrelevant what these people think because all these people do is talk they don't actually do anything when it comes to uh uh comes to kind of like um

affecting change or or kind of like um acting on their beliefs or what they're talking about all they do is commentate on things they just talk talk talk they hate hate hate and they don't do anything they don't add any kind of like value they don't try to change anything they don't try to make anything a better experience for people they just love to hate and as i as i use the bitcoin example um and even the ethereum example if europe suffered the same thing for a while and there's so many examples of this it just didn't matter at all and i don't think it's going to matter for nft so i think whenever you see these bad takes on on twitter and you might be and other places and you may be getting frustrated by it that the popular consensus is that like it's all worthless and if these are

scams it's you know it's killing the planet all these sorts of stuff just remember that while you can't win a narrative war uh as in you know you can't fight back against this because it's like it's a very popular kind of narrative the the thing is is that if something actually has true value to a large number of people doesn't matter what anyone says unless it's like outright banned like by global governments everywhere it's going to keep growing it's going to keep getting traction it's going to keep providing value to people it doesn't matter what others say you know it's funny i remember reading kind of like and still to this day if you go outside the crypto bubble and you read about crypto not nfts but like other kind of like crypto things like bitcoin and ethereum outside of the bubble there are still plenty of people who think

that it's either a get which quick get rich quick scheme or is a scam or is providing no value to people or is using too much energy which to be fair i mean obviously it's using a lot of energy right and ethereum is guilty of that too but we're moving to proof of stake can't wait for that day but when you really kind of like take this all in context you re you realize that um all of this doesn't matter right people people can talk as much as they want but what really matters is the reality of the situation and the reality is that nfts are not going anywhere ever massive billion dollar companies uh multi i mean you know hundred plus billion dollar companies trillion dollar microsoft's a trillion dollar company these companies are getting heavily heavily involved in this industry because they see the

future they see and they're taking action they're not just talking about it they're taking action whereas the people who hate nfts they take no action they do nothing they put together twitter threads they hate on everyone trying to do nfts um you know whether it's warranted or not most of the time it's not warranted and from that perspective i would say just ignore them they're irrelevant don't don't listen to them just keep doing what you're doing whether you're involved in an nft project whether you're thinking of minting your own nfts to to do stuff i mean you know we we mentioned their delegate and of t's and we donated uh most of the proceeds to eighth core devs there's a lot of good that comes out of this stuff and i think that people will realize that over time i think that the sentiment will shift over time but it's

just we have to keep building we have to keep doing these things and the nft people and the entity ecosystem is building they're not just talking about it they're building the future that they want to see and if people adopt it they adopt it people are allowed to do whatever they want with their money and their time like the fact that some people think they can control what other people do is quite crazy to me but that's the kind of like world we live in but uh yeah i'll leave it at that but that's just kind of some some i guess like nft and context talk that i wanted to kind of bring up there uh and last thing about nfts was that openc today announced that they have acquired dharma so this is pretty pretty big i think dama's been around for quite a while now uh they were an ethereum

wallet from very early on that tried to do a lot of d5 stuff i think from 2018 they've been around so um now they're joining kind of like the open c family i'm sure open c is going to tap into dahmer's kind of like wallet and mobile wallet experience here too i guess um uh i kind of like bring that to the openc uh app and things like that i believe uh dahmer's ceo is actually becoming or this the cto of open c which is pretty cool so it's basically an aqua hire i don't think it was uh disclosed how much this kind of like aquahya was for um but i'm sure i'm sure it was for a decent amount here because as i said dumb has been around for quite a while they've been doing a lot of really great stuff and now they're joining the opencv

family so you can kind of see a bit of a thread and a blog post about this if you want to read more info and dive deeper into this i'll link this in the youtube description below so po-op announced today that they have raised 10 million dollars in a seed funding round now of course full disclosure here i participated in this round as a strategic angel investor and i mean how couldn't i right like pop-up is one of my favorite projects in the crypto ecosystem i've talked about them lots of times before i'm sure all of you have at least one po up i'm sure many of you have lots of them i mean especially the people uh that are big uh kind of like rocker pool fans and rocker pool community members i know you guys are really big fans of pull-ups and um you

guys created one for me when i jumped in there with my when you guys found out that my i had an issue with my validator that was just like a really silly issue um so so yeah but no this is this is really awesome i'm going i'm scrolling down here to uh uh to the information about the raise uh yeah the round the round was basically led by uh archetype and sapphire sport llc uh with participation from a bunch of other web 3 native funds like 1kx and 6 man ventures and delphi digital a capital here and then uh around 50 strategic angels participated as well they're not named here but as i said i invested as part of this round now what i like about this blog post is most of it focuses on what pop is the vision for what they want to be

how they're going to get there uh you know what what what they what they kind of like see being the most value out of pop and everything like that rather than the fundraise itself so this is really really cool i really really love this i really love that they focused on this sort of stuff and focused on kind of like the value add rather than just like the money that they raised because obviously the money that they raise is awesome like 10 million is going to give them a lot of runway to do what they want to do and to build what they want to build but the real kind of like um the really important thing is focusing on the actual products that they're building right the actual value that they're adding to the ecosystem to end users and there's a lot of value here i

mean i think identity in general is going to become a very big deal going forward and i've talked i've spoken about this before with projects like signing with ethereum and cismo and and and get coins doing a lot of stuff here but basically on chain identity is still a relatively unsolved kind of like um problem and it's something that needs to to have a lot of focus on it because if we're all going to live online which we do already but if we're going to live in kind of like this metaverse whether it be you know actually in the metaverse with vr goggles or whether it's just kind of like existing online um we need a way to kind of like have this identity where we protect our identity but still have an online kind of like presence like that but you know still have

privacy and all that sorts of stuff there and pop is playing a big big role there because of things like you know i mean pop stands for as you guys know proof of attendance protocol and just like the basic primitive of being able to kind of like prove that you were somewhere or prove that you attended the attended an event or prove something through an nft through a pop-up is awesome and you could even kind of i guess um you can you can kind of like extend this with um with sismo where essentially if you have pull ups on on a wallet that you don't want to be public but you want to prove to people that you have this pop-up well you can use sismo to do this because then you can basically say okay well here's a zero-knowledge proof that i actually own this pop-up on another

address that i own but i'm not going to tell you what the address is because i want to keep that private but here's you know cryptographic proof that i actually own it so all of these things are blending together and we're actually going to get i think to a point where we actually build out the full identity stack in a really nice decentralized proper way uh using the tools that have been around for a while as i said like poep signing with ethereum sismo there's a few others out there like um that they come under the bitcoin umbrella or at least not a part of bitcoin but like work with git coin like proof of humanity and stuff like that and i think once we kind of like solve that it just like opens the floodgates to to everything else so yeah once again congrats to pop on this

raise very happy to be part of this myself as well and i'm very much looking forward to seeing what they do going forward so speaking of rocketpool just before uh they put out some stats today so a busy two weeks for rockapool the re supply has grown by eight point six nine percent which is a 226 percent annualized growth rate node operator count has grown by about the same amount almost nine percent the mini pool count has grown by about the same amount there and the effective rpl staked has grown by about 9.2 percent so very very nice to see this you know i was having a brief discussion in the discord channel today about staking on your own and staking as a kind of like rocketpool node and i think um tom decent i think i think his name

is was uh was saying that you can earn a lot more staking through rocketpool than you can kind of like sticking on your own validator uh because you get the kind of like rpl on top of it now i was kind of saying that it's kind of an apples to origins comparison comparison because there is extra risk by using rocker pool instead of staking on your own um but the thing is is that you know is how how how big is the risk like for me personally the risk is still too large just just just for me personally and and but the fact is like i have the 32 necessary to to stake on my own so for me it's a bit of a different kind of like um thing to think about but if you don't have the 32 if necessary to stake and you only have the uh uh just to kind

of like um the stake in your own then rocker pool's obviously the solution uh for you but i think um what tom was was comparing uh was 32 eighth in in both scenarios where with the rocker pool one you would stake sixteen eighth and then 16th worth of um with a rocker pool i believe and then you get kind of like you make more money from doing that but you also take on the extra risk and this is not to say that rockapool is a risky project or is a bad bad project or you're going to lose all your money or anything like that but anytime you introduced any new kind of like mechanisms or contracts or anything you do take on the additional risk so just you just need to be aware of that but i mean the amount of i can't remember the exact numbers off the top

of my head but the amount of difference between staking on your own is taking with rocketpool right now is quite large so it will definitely make sense if you're looking uh to stake to to go through rocker pools so jumping to i can't remember what channel was in the discord channel probably the e3 channel or something like that um probably jump into there and find the conversation uh to see the numbers around that's but uh yeah it's been it's been great to see rocketpool continue to grow here and uh openings decentralized staking up to a much wider set of participants not just those who who can kind of like uh afford it with the 32 ether requirement there so david mihal announced yesterday that he is building a a new kind of i guess like website or a new service called crypto stats so he's building this here

with um uh mike uh and crypto what crypto set is aiming to be is an aggregate uh it's aiming to aggregate data for every useful crypto measure metric ensure the data is trustworthy and make it available to all now you guys will probably be aware of david i've talked about him a few times on the refuel he's the guy behind crypto fees dot info and a bunch of other websites like l2fs.info and moneymovers.info very popular websites i use them all the time and now he's launching the crypto starts with mike and basically as i said like cryptostats is aiming to aggregate data data for all useful crypto metrics you can kind of like uh jump into the blog post here for more details about what they're trying to do but essentially this is kind of like the stack right you have blockchains and protocols uh uh like ethereum and

bitcoin and polygon then you have indexes like um zero on uh the graph coin metrics then you have uh uh the normalization of this kind of like data uh with crypto stats and then uh that that's kind of like where they sit and then this data can be presented as part of kind of like you know crypto fees or bloomberg or wherever else wherever else so basically just giving a really easy way for all the uh for anyone to tap into but basically all these different various crypto metrics which i think is really really cool so uh if you want to kind of like get started with this or i mean because it's live today and you're kind of like a developer you can go check this out they've already got a um an sdk going as i said it's already live and they've

got a bunch of different metrics that you can tap into and there's resources and a discord channel all that good stuff in the blog post so i'll link this in the youtube description and you can go check it out for yourself but i guess congrats to david and mike here for uh for launching this very very excited to see where they go with this and finally arbitram uh put out a tweet today saying that they are hiring so i just wanted to give a quick shout out here that uh i mean technically off chain labs is hiring the team behind arbitram but you can go here uh to jobs.leaver.comchainlabs and check out all the positions of course this will be linked in the youtube description there seems to be something for everyone here or at least for most people so you can see here they're looking for a partnerships

manager in the business development uh field here and they're looking for a bunch of engineers so any type of like software security engineers devops engineer and even a web developer so if you fit into any of these kind of roles here definitely apply because i mean who wouldn't want to work for an l2 team right like i think you know the funny thing is i think if i wasn't uh doing what i'm doing and i was kind of like wanting to work within the uh you know work a normal job within kind of like the web 3 crypto ethereum ecosystem i would definitely land an at a layer 2 kind of like team that i mean i i think that would kind of like be the coolest place to work because you're on like the bleeding edge of one of the biggest i guess like issues that need to

be solved within the ethereum ecosystem and you get to kind of like provide a crap ton of value to people because at the end of the day most people are going to i mean all everyone is going to be on boarding on on layer twos and you're going to have a direct impact on people and people's experiences using that infrastructure so yeah anyway definitely go check out all of these roles you can apply on on this website here but i think that's going to be it for today so thank you 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