Polygon raises $450mil, FTX integrates Arbitrum - The Daily Gwei Refuel #310 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily grade refuel where recap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's 8th of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so you guys will know by now about these two popular misconceptions when it comes to the merge and i you know i just put this tweet out before so i'm going to just kind of rehash this a little bit today for possibly any new kind of like viewers or listeners out there but i basically put out this tweet where i said there is currently two popular misconceptions surrounding ethereum's transition to proof of stake ak the merge number one is all staked eight is unlocking at the time of the merge and number two is the merged lowest gas fees on layer one both of these narratives are completely false now if long time

delegate refuel kind of listeners and watchers will know exactly what i'm talking about here but just a quick refresh for people who don't the withdrawals for the staked eath on the beacon chain aren't actually being enabled until at least six months after the merge so if the merge happens in june you can expect to see uh the withdrawals enabled november december the earliest they could even push into next year it just depends on a bunch of different things you know i've got to do with the core dev process and the eip process from there and the second thing here here is the m that the merge lowers gas phase on layer one as we all know if we know about the modular ethereum scaling roadmap the merge does not lower gas phase on layer one the the it has nothing to do with gas fees at

all actually right um because uh proof of work proof of stake it doesn't matter these are consensus mechanisms they don't really have anything to do with uh with with um kind of like lowering fees or anything like that despite what you have may have read so yeah the merge is not lowering gas fees on layer one now i wanna talk about more more about point number one because there's a lot of confusion around this point right so right now let's let's take it take a step back all the way back to kind of like the the bare minimum the bare minimum information you need here so right now there is what eight or nine million each staked i can't remember the exact number right now but there's something like that staked on the beacon chain now currently that is a one-way bridge where you stake

your eighth right the eighth gets put into what's called the deposit contract on the ethereum one side or the execution layer side as we're calling it and then it go it basically transfers that across to um oh i guess like burns it on the eat one side and then issues you that eat on the beacon chain side and then you can stake if you want to stack on your own at the 32 minimum if you stake through someone else then uh like a third party they will put that eth into the deposit contract because that's the only way you can enter staking and every single validator that gets spun up has to have 328 at least associated with it doesn't matter if you're staking with a cr an exchange a service provider on your own it's the same thing it's just that the way service providers and exchanges do

it is that they'll allow you to stake less but they pull it together right as a staking pool and they still put that 32 per validator in to get that spun up there so that's that's kind of like how you get into staking now there's uh on top of that and kind of like associated with that is what's called the deposit queue and there's also going to be the withdrawal queue but that's not currently in place because that only comes when we have withdrawals so the deposit queue essentially is a maximum amount of uh kind of like ethel or i guess like validators that can be spun up a day last time i checked it's around thirty thousand eighth that can actually be deposited every 24 hours from the deposit contract into the beacon chain essentially the process i should say is the better word there so

there is a limit you can't it's not like you could stake a million eighth today and then be earning rewards in that million eighth like right away no it doesn't work like that it's limited to about 30 000 eats per day now the same is true for the future withdrawal queue so uh for example obviously when withdrawals are enabled all of that eth is eligible to be unlocked and some of it will be unlocked and unstaked and uh and kind of like withdrawn and maybe sold on an exchange but again only 30 000 eth per day and i actually have to double check on this um because i think the deposit and withdrawal queues are actually shared but i have to double check on this i'm not 100 sure but i guess my main point is that there's still a limit here it's not like that eight or nine million

eight there's probably going to be more by that point but it's not like it can actually just be withdrawn all at once and then uh sold on exchange or whatever and we have like a massive dump that's not gonna happen and the the reason is that q is is is for security reasons like you can imagine how disastrous it would be if all the eighth or even like a large majority of the eighth was able to be withdrawn at once those validators go offline the chain would basically halt if enough went offline so that's done for security reasons uh same with kind of like the deposit contract uh that you have to actually verify you have to let blocks kind of like confirm over time to verify that the everything's everything's working smoothly so there are limits in place so even if the staked eath was

unlocking at the time of the merge it would still be the same situation where there's a limit to how much it can actually be withdrawn each day and thus there's a limit to how how much can actually be sold on the market each day so i think that a lot of people don't understand this and a lot of people think that it's a bear case saying oh yeah we're going to have like a massive run-up to the merge because the narrative and then as soon as the merge happens it's going to dump really hard because all this is going to hit the market when that is just not true at all this isn't even a matter of opinion it's a matter of fact so i think that understanding those dynamics as i was displaying as i was talking about yesterday with regards to um the you know proof of stake and the

merge and how that's extremely bullish for eighth that plays into it as well so that's that's that's point number one and then i briefly mentioned point number two before about the merge not lowering gas fees this is a very perverse narrative i think this is way more damaging than the than the first narrative i think this one's going to persist until the merge and then you know people are going to realize okay well the emergent lower gas fees what is this and they're going to think that it's a scam or think that like they will promise something that they weren't it's it's going to be annoying to deal with i don't think it's you know existential or like a bear case for ethereum or anything like that but it's going to be a bit annoying to deal with it's going to be kind of like dealing with people

who thought eip1559 would lower gas fees even though i personally didn't see a single person ever say that eip1559 would lower gas fees and anyone who did say that was part of the mine part of the minority that it wasn't the consensus opinion none of the serious researchers developers educators in this space ever ever claimed that one five five nine would uh lower gas space at least from what i saw and that's because we all knew that it wouldn't we all knew that the best thing it would do would be smooth out transaction fees which could lead to a slight decrease in gas fees which i think uh ended up being around six or seven percent uh for coinbase for example not not network y but i think coinbase ended up saving six to seven percent because they had better um uh uh better uh i guess transaction um

certainty around getting their transactions in getting their withdrawals processed and things like that but uh but generally yeah it wasn't a kind of like a a block size increase or anything like that i mean okay well technically it was but like we're only using half the block i'm not gonna get into the mechanics of it but i think that that narrative still persists to this day or people say oh we will promise lower gas fees with one five five nine it didn't happen i was like no you weren't and that's why i keep hammering on about the merge not lowering gas phases because no one's promising that no one's serious is promising that do you know who's promising that the bloody clickbait youtubers that are just spreading absolute crappy information all the time that really pisses me off because you know i try to like fight back against

this but obviously the viewership on the daily way is much lower because i don't use clickbait and things like that um and then you have these massive accounts saying stuff like eth2 or the merge is going to lower gas feed blah blah when in reality you already can have cheap fees today go to a layer 2 there you go they're already live today and the kind of like ethereum core protocol roadmap is in is being kind of like architected to make l2s better as we all know so so yeah i just wanted to kind of like rehash a bit on those misconceptions there i hope that you guys keep educating on this as well if you ever see someone uh kind of like bring up these these bad narratives and you feel like correcting them please do so because every little bit helps even if you you know if you're a small

account on twitter even if you've only got like 100 followers it doesn't matter what matters is if we all work together and we all kind of like put this message out there we can counteract the bad information yes it may feel like you know we're not making progress but i i think we are like every single person that we're able to educate is still progress even if it's slower than what other people kind of like spread its progress so i hope you guys kind of like um stick to doing that there but anyway moving on to the next bit of news from last 24 hours was that kpmg canada announced that they have allocate that they have completed an allocation of crypto assets to their corporate treasury and their firm this is their firm's first of its kind investment into the crypto asset class this includes btc

and eth tokens and carbon offsets to maintain a net zero carbon transaction this is pretty cool i mean kpmg is an absolutely massive kind of like uh financial services firm uh i think their revenue i was looking it up before is like 30 billion dollars worldwide uh which is which is obviously not nothing to scoff at there and they are a company that have put uh uh uh eth on their kind of like balance sheet here and btc of course which is which is huge right we saw a lot of this obviously during 2020 and and somewhat in you 2021 with btc but as i said to you guys back then we would be seeing eth on these balance sheets right alongside btc and we have been lately and it just makes sense i mean btc and eth are the two blue chips there's nothing that even

comes close to the same legitimacy um and the same kind of like uh uh of um i guess like ego systems that bdc and ether have i know you guys obviously know that i'm i'm not really bullish on on bitcoin as kind of like an ecosystem but i can't deny that it's a large ecosystem you know just because i'm not bullish on it doesn't mean that other people aren't you know so and obviously it's still the biggest crypto um cryptocurrency it's still the one that a lot of the normies as they call them love because they just don't they don't understand the intricacies of it they just want an asset that they can hold and goes up over time that's it right so um but i think with ether there's a there's a lot more that can be done here obviously with staking and stuff like that the

staking products can be offered to clients and and things like that so there's there's more to it than than just with btc and i guess that's what gets me excited about eth but yeah very very cool to see just such a large kind of like company putting eth on their balance sheet that i guess further signals to other companies that they you know it's safe to do so like obviously i think sailor kick started it originally and he signaled to a lot of other companies and corporates and enterprises that it was safe to put btc on your balance sheet or it was like the cool thing to do i think the same is true for eth i you know i think you know it hasn't materialized as quickly as i thought it would and i kind of like underestimated how slow corporates and enterprises move

even though i shouldn't have because i've worked with one before i know how slow they move but i think they're a lot of the time many of them are chasers so what will happen is they'll feel comfortable doing it when the prices are going up but they'll they won't feel comfortable doing it when the price is going down and you may think that this is what noobs do right noobs to crypto do this where they come in when the price is going up and then they leave and the prices going down but you know at the end of the day these massive kind of companies are run by people and these people aren't experts on crypto they are new to crypto as well so any of the decisions that the company makes are really just decisions that people have made and if these people are kind of

thinking okay well you know the price is going up this asset class is absolutely massive we need to get in because it's already gone up this much it's the same thing guys there's still people at the end of the day and if you think that these people just because they may be smart in one area that you know just because they're maybe maybe there's like they're a really smart um successful executive at kpmg for example doesn't mean they have any context or or kind of like any uh knowledge of crypto right if they're a complete crypto new they're not going to be an expert on it overnight especially when it comes to the assets themselves because as we all know crypto can move very very quickly in a short amount of time and cause an extreme amount of fomo and that affects not just individuals but corporations as

well because those individuals in the corporation are responsible for the decisions that that the corporations uh kind of make here but uh yeah anyway glad to see kpmg do this with btc and eighth looking forward to more companies putting eth onto their balance sheet so you'll have been hearing about dank sharding a lot lately i've been talking about on the refuel paulina has been a very big cheerleader of it um and they put out a great three three a great thread today on twitter kind of describing it um by comparing it to bittorrent so paulie and i said dank sharding is not like existing blockchains it's more like bittorrent but with the ethereum but with ethereum security the more peers you have i more decentralized the faster things get over and above this things keep improving

over time as bandwidth and storage gets cheaper so the reason why this analogy makes sense is because for anyone who's ever used torrenting software the more peers that you have right and the more people that you're connected to the faster your downloads are and obviously this is capped by the bandwidth that you have from your isp but you can get like to the maximum amount that your isp is giving you by having the right amount appears if you've only got one pr then the download is going to be much slower especially because their upload speed might be very might be might be quite slow right so if you have like a many more peers your downloads better than it would be otherwise and this is the same is true for sharding in the ethereum context because as i've explained before with ethereum post merge with validators the more

validators we have the more shards we can have which means the more capacity we have for layer twos uh which gives us obviously the um uh uh the kind of like more more scalability and the cheaper fees there so i think um you know it's a great analogy and then polynomial goes on to say tazo celestia polygonavale are also developing similar solutions there's growing awareness around roll-ups but there's work to be done information about what pushes rollups to being not infinitely scalable with decentralization it's a razor-coded da or data availability proven data layers i see too many very important people still thinking there'll always be a trade-off between decentralization and throughput hence antiquated metaphors like cities and skyscrapers quite the opposite the most decentralized data availability layers will will host the

highest throughput on roll-ups so i mean polynomial is basically telling us that like we need to stop thinking that blockchains are inherently less scalable the the more decentralized they get because we flip that on its head as i've explained to you as before we flip that on its head with the ethereum kind of like modular approach here uh with being able to kind of like scale via layer 2 and keep layer 1 decentralized and the more decentralized it gets the more scalable the layer 2s get which is the biggest breakthrough in i think blockchain since bitcoin was invented to be honest like i think it's that big and i don't think the the implications of that have been uh kind of like understood by most people in the ecosystem everyone chases things like you know layer twos i've been talking about them for so long and now just over

the last maybe two three months people are finally waking up to layer twos on ethereum being like okay well okay these things actually work and that's because they can use them like i totally get it if you're being told of something um something is coming um it's it's completely different to actually being able to use it because think about uh the history of kind of like scaling blockchains bitcoin had had been the bitcoin ecosystem had been promising that the lightning network was going to fix all of the scaling issues since a very long time ago like i can't remember exactly when the lightning was proposed but it might have been 2013 or 2014 and it still hasn't materialized into anything and people actually compare ethereum layer 2 to the lightning network which is obviously a silly comparison it doesn't make any sense to me especially roll ups but

people do that so i think that if you look at the past failures which you know in the lighting network is a massive failure in my eyes at to this point maybe it isn't in the future but to this point it has been people will see that and they say okay well there's this eighth guys talking about layer 2 scaling we've already heard about that from the bitcoin guys for so long um you know we'll kind of like we'll believe it when we see it and that's exactly what happened people are using it they're realizing that it's not just anymore it's actually it's not just it's actually real um and and kind of like i think that's what's changed the narrative there and i think i mentioned this that the two major things that would change the narrative is these things actually going live and and their tokens

essentially and obviously the tokens are coming soon uh i don't know when of course but we'll see how that shakes out there but uh yeah great little analogy from paulinha uh kind of comparing dank sharding to to up to bittorrent here so another major exchange announced support for arbitrary today so ftx now has a deposit and withdrawal support for the albertum one main net i'll be honest guys i did not expect them to do this this quickly like i've actually been blown away by how quick binance and ftx have supported arbitram you know obviously in ethereum layer 2 um when obviously ftx has a major stake in solana they are a huge benefactors and huge ecosystem investors in solana and binance has a huge stake in bsc both

of these networks are ethereum competitors but uh i've been proven wrong here i didn't think it would happen this fast you can probably find a real rear-view episode where i said that i didn't think it would happen this fast and i'm disappointed by coinbase for for not doing it fast i mean they announced back in august late august of 2021 that they were working on integrating ethereum scaling solutions and they haven't even integrated the polygon pos chain yet which is actually easier than the layer twos from a technical and integration standpoint um at least that's how i kind of like um at least i think it is they haven't even integrated that yet so it's been like what six months since then um whereas ftx and binance have both integrated arbitrary one now which i'm sure other um layer twos are coming and there's other major exchanges that have

integrated with arbitrary as well such as buy bit and hobby so yeah i just i really am disappointed that coinbase is dragging their feet here i understand that they are a huge exchange they have a lot of kind of like um technical hurdles to work through maybe they didn't have the right people on board to do this but if it was a priority for them it wouldn't have taken them this long to do it it'll come eventually but if it was actually like on top of their list of priorities yeah it would have been done i think that it's simply because there's just not enough demand yet for it because we don't have people you know that hold tokens and they're not going to go chill with their favorite things to uh to coinbase and stuff like that but i think being a more forward-looking

exchange is how you win and that's exactly why binance and ftx have such large volumes they have a ver they are very forward-looking exchanges barring whatever opinions you have of um of these exchanges and of their leaders they've been at the forefront of crypto for a long time that's why they grew so fast that's why they took market share away from other players because they were able to kind of like evolve much faster some of it was for regulatory reasons obviously coinbase is in the us and they can't move as fast as ftx's non-us exchange and binance's non-us exchange but at the end of the day i there shouldn't really be any regulatory hurdles around supporting ethereum's layer twos or scaling solutions because it's the same thing as supporting a layer one blockchain because you're just withdrawing assets to on chain right at the end of the day

so hopefully they do it soon because honestly i i think coinbase having coinbase on board is a bigger win than ftx and binance at at this point in time just because i think coinbase has more customers especially um more newer and retail customers who are much more sensitive to fees than maybe ftx and finance users are because a lot of them are traders uh but yeah we'll kind of like see how that plays out there but very very awesome to see ftx supporting the arbitrary one mainnet here so speaking of polygon they have announced an absolutely massive fundraiser 450 million dollars led by sequoia which is a huge kind of like web 2 uh vc fund here that um that's been venturing into v3 lately but

yeah these are i mean there's a bunch of investors involved in this round uh there is obviously as i said sequoia which are kind of like led the round sequoia capital india in particular with participation from the soft bank of vision fund to galaxy digital galaxy interactive tiger global republic capital and more prominent investors here and there are also a bunch of uh of other kind of like investors like alameda research which again is funny because they're part of ftx uh anamaka brands which you may have heard of uh union square ventures obviously massive there dragonfly capital uh a bunch of others here i'm not going to read them all out of course so i guess congrats to the polygon on this race this is huge it's it's it's crazy like how far polygon has come i put a tweet out

actually i think today where i said you know matic which was what polygon was before i mean obviously the token is still called matic but like polygon read medic brew banner to polygon but when they were matic network they've been around for a while and all this scrappy ethereum scaling startup no one really knew what they were doing you know people they were kind of like okay they're doing plasma stuff but we don't really understand it you know what can we use what can we do and i'll be honest until i started kind of like getting more involved obviously and coming on board as an advisor i wasn't even aware of like what they what they were really doing but then when they you know kind of saw the polygon vision i was like holy this is going to be massive like i knew it from

back then i knew it was going to be huge because it was just such a beautiful vision for ethereum like a whole scaling suite a whole scaling ecosystem and um the the team i mean they're just like juggernauts really and in my tweet i said that it's like they went from the scrappy little startup that was matic to this absolutely absolute juggernaut that is polygon now raising a ton of money acquiring you know these zk teams for a crap ton of money having a massive market gap all this sort of stuff it's just the biggest glow up ever as i said in the tweet it really is is quite amazing to see how it's all played out and it's not just about kind of like the market cap and the money that they've raised and stuff like that but it's also about the tech that they've brought to

the table i mean the pos chain obviously is um you know is the least interesting thing that they have going for them because it's because just an evm chain but the thing is it's helped us get to a point where you know we had that before we had roll ups so people could experience cheap ethereum on a socially aligned uh kind of like um chain like the pos chain with ethereum instead of going to one of the more hostile kind of like ecosystems out there and uh from as far as i know the polygon pos chain still has the most users out of any evm chain even ethereum layer one at this point in time which is pretty cool uh and then obviously they have all their roll-up solutions coming uh all their kind of zk stuff coming they have their data availability stuff coming they have the

sdk and ah there's so much going on right they have their sovereign chains and side chains and all that sort of stuff so they've just kind of like i mean and and mind you guys they only rebranded or kind of like pivoted to the polygon vision at the start of or i guess like late 2020 early 2021 it has only been a year a year maybe two three months at most and they've done all of this so when you really zoom out and see that that's when stuff gets extremely crazy right and and you know the market is obviously kind of like rewarded that i i believe when i i think uh back then when i signed up between being advised i think the manic token price was like two cents or something like that and now it's what two dollars so obviously the market has

rewarded them for all this growth as well uh and they really set the playbook for l1 incentives too um where uh uh because the l ones or the alt l1 all copied the polygon pos chains incentive program uh for liquidity mining and stuff like that uh but yeah so that was cool to see but yeah congrats on this raise i'm gonna stop it there because you guys know i'm an advisor here i don't want to show you too much on polygon but uh you guys know that you guys know that i'm a big polygon guy have been supporting them for a while now uh and just great to have to see this kind of race yeah it obviously gives them a lot of money they're gonna have runway forever you know they're gonna keep executing on their vision to bring ethereum to the world so an update on the l2 uni swap

liquidity mining proposal from little cohen here that i've spoken out before so the first audit results have been received all minor issues addressed waiting for a final report designs by salor here are done and you can see the kind of designs here uh cardamom alex mcallister here is working on the front end and david mihal is continuing to work on the contracts and and more here so uh sorry i should uh go here down here the headless working group the little column continues the headless working group now even has a logo and a temporary domain at unisopstaking.com uh you can see the l2 2022 logo here these are awesome logos i love these uh and then yeah i i guess like a little ozone say as soon as the app is complete and we have a final audit report we will submit the governance proposal on chen hopefully

kick off the liquidity mining so this is the liquidity mining for uh unisop on l2s which is obviously going to be a very very big deal get a lot of liquidity on there and we're going to tr you know hopefully we can really kickstart l2 2022 and get the flywheel going without the native token incentives from the actual l2s themselves so so yeah there's an update on what's happening with that all right so a new kind of project out of the arva ecosystem today that they've been teasing for quite a while called lens protocol now lens protocol describes itself as a permissionless composable and decentralized social graph that makes building a web3 social platform easy from the team that bought you the rv protocol so lens protocol is trying to be decentralized social media but they're not trying to be something

like we've seen in the past where it's a monolithic architecture they're going for a modular architecture where you can plug and play and do a bunch of different things with it so all the details are in this thread i'm not going to dive deep into it here because you can learn all about it here but they're actually blending a bunch of different kind of like things together and i should say this is actually going to be on the polygon pos chain it's currently live on the mumbai test net and the polygon mumbai testnet but it will be on the main net relatively soon but yeah they're blending um nfts together here dowels together here um for profiles and stuff like that they're doing a lot of a lot of cool things they're using ipfs there's actually a lot going on here and that's why i can't

really summarize it in a couple of minutes on on the refuel i want you guys to go and read it and to kind of like really take in all of this because i mentioned yesterday how i thought that every attempt at decentralized social media up until this point has been pretty shitty and hasn't actually worked this is the first attempt after reading about it that i'm actually excited about and that i think actually can work because of the modular approach it means that you're not locked into any one kind of like website or any one kind of like i guess like um interface or anything like that uh everything is modular like your profiles modular the uh uh your poster modular your pictures music videos all that sort of stuff uh your profiles all that all that kind of like stuff there and because of that you can

you can bring that to wherever you want to bring it to and that i think is the true kind of like vision for decentralized social media for web3 and things like that as well so definitely go give all the documentation a read you can sign an open letter at lens.dev.let letter to show your support for it and everything like that and as i said it is live on the polygon mumbai test net which uh with um it going live on mainnet uh uh in an alpha capacity uh soon so very much looking forward to playing around with it on on main as well and and and definitely been playing around with it on uh on the test net works quite well so far but uh yeah this is really cool i'm you know as i said i want to see i've truly just decentralized social media play out

and actually work and i think this is the uh the best attempt so far at it i mean early days still but this is the one that i'm most excited for right now especially because it's being backed by the rv protocol team who obviously you know they ship they they make great products they you know have a lot of um a lot of faith in them and obviously this is being built as a community project too so we're going to see how that all shakes out there all right so another great thread from bartek from the l2b team here today about bridges so obviously you're not going to read out the thread but you can go check it out for yourself i've spoken about bridges so much on the refuel the last few months it's very important to always understand i guess like the risks

and have a risk framework for assessing bridges and i think this threat actually gives you a really great breakdown i know i said that l2b are working on getting like a kind of like pages set up for bridges on their website and that's still coming but you can use this thread right now as a way to kind of like form a risk framework in your head around what bridges to use what are the risks you know how to protect yourself all that sort of stuff there so i just wanted to highlight this thread and definitely go check it out it'll be linked in the youtube description below alright final update here so set protocol announced today that they have released their perpetual protocol integration uh on optimism so this uh this follows obviously the recent optimism deployment that said did and and plans to enable innovative

structured products on layer two ecosystems so you can go here there's a kind of like blog post that's been posted here uh with set protocol kind of like integrating with perpetual protocol and all the details about that obviously you know perpetual protocol is has been very popular in the past and so so has sets and uh i'm biased maybe because i've worked i worked at set but yeah if you want all the information about that definitely go check out the the blog post here uh because there's kind of i guess like links to different things going on and and all that sort of stuff as well and then you've also got kind of like an index that was launched called the soluna avax index which is funny because this is an l1 index that's on uh l2 uh and you know and it's being um uh uh

sorry it's being powered by galion dao and beverage finance as well so there's a lot of different integrations going on here a lot of partnerships happening i love to see this stuff happening on layer two as well because obviously it's all about getting more and more people to l2 getting more and more projects on there getting more and more composability going on as well so i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone