Polygon updates, Kintsugi testnet live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #276 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 20th of december 2021 right everyone let's get into it so a new space new room i'm all set up in my new office well i shouldn't say all set up there's still plenty left to do but as you can see i have much more space now than i did uh this is kind of like more than double i think the space of the previous room that i had it's just amazing having so much room for activities so just been really kind of like hard at work over the last three to four days kind of just moving in you know there's still plenty of stuff left to unbox and everything like i'd never moved before so i didn't realize just

how much work was involved in it it's been a crazy i guess last month right packing everything and then moving in and now kind of like uh unpacking it all so you'll see this room evolve over time but with things added maybe things changed uh i just kind of like set set some stuff up just to get it out there get it out of the garage out of the boxes into the room here but uh yeah i've been i've been quiet obviously over the last few days i haven't really been in the discord very much i've been pretty quiet on twitter but i have tried my best to keep up with everything that's happened and a lot has happened over the last few days it's pretty crazy um you know and the price just seems to be kind of like doing nothing really i mean

i haven't even been checking the price that much but i saw it the other day went to like 4k now it's back to like 37.80 or something like that i haven't really been monitoring it too much but uh but yeah i mean it seems to just kind of be waddling around i guess it's christmas time right everyone's kind of like spending time with friends and family people are just you know traveling doing stuff there's not really much kind of like action going on in the markets but there's definitely a lot of action going on on the fundamental side of things so without further ado there i'm going to jump into the news from the last three days so this will be kind of like friday saturday and sunday so let's go so polygon has a few updates i'm going to go through first one is that

alexis ohanian the co-founder of reddit and polygon have teamed up to invest 200 million dollars in decentralized social media which is really really cool here so you know i remember uh there was kind of an announcement out of the solana conference i think a couple months ago that alexis was going to build something on salina we've got to do with decentralized social media i think that's still going ahead but great to see him not kind of like just sticking to one ecosystem he's actually kind kind of playing with all of them or seems to be wanting to play with all of them which makes a lot of sense right it doesn't make sense for him just to stick to kind of like one ecosystem i mean most people aren't going to be quote-unquote maximalist they're not going to be kind of like married to any

one ecosystem it's good to kind of experiment see what you know what what each one's all about and kind of like come to the conclusion about which one you want to spend the most amount of time on so that's really cool to see but yeah that's a huge kind of like win here for for polygon i mean you guys know i'm an advisor to polygon always really great to see this kind of stuff and especially seeing these kind of like numbers like 200 million dollars nothing that's got that guys like for decentralized social media which is still considered a niche within crypto i would say it's not something that i guess like is something that every investor out there is just scrambling to get in on um i think you know at the moment obviously uh the investment market's pretty hot like in both the

private and public markets because of all the money printing uh or in part because of the money printing but also because there's so many kind of like ideas out there that people don't want to miss out on investing on in them but it's not something like defy or nfts um or kind of like crypto gaming where you know everyone's scrambling to get into these things decentralized social media is kind of this thing that everyone is kind of like thinking okay well what's this going to look like how is it actually going to play out like are we actually going to get something that's usable and that isn't just going to be game by bots a lot of experimentation happening but great to see that another 200 million dollars we're going into that uh kind of like use case there all right next up from polygon is that

the unisop of v3 will be deployed on polygon very soon they said in a few days two days ago or one day ago so i'm assuming it's going to happen this week you know i've been kind of like keeping up with this for you guys being kind of monitoring over the last few days really really awesome to see that the uni swap community will uh has voted to deploy v3 on polygon's pos chain by a pretty large margin here you can say 72 million votes for 503 000 against sorry i mean there's really no competition there it's basically a 99 or 98 yes right there so i'm looking forward to seeing uni swap on polygon um it's funny because unisop's only on arbitrary optimism right now uh and then when they they'll go to polygon and so i'll have three deployments as well as ethereum that obviously so if you count

that it's four um and i'm curious to see where they go next do they deploy to stock net probably not because of the fact that stock net is an evm compatible it's very new it's still in developer only mode there isn't really kind of demand for it yet but do they deploy to something like zk sync i mean zk did a demo of uniswap or an amm i guess you could you could say a fork of uni-swap running on their uh technology so i wouldn't be surprised to to see that play out either but yeah really really cool to see my unisop finally being deployed to the polygon pos chain uh next up speaking of um polygons pos chain you can now look at the um now explore the pos bridge explorer so you can see here that they've announced what's something called the pos bridge explorer which

allows you to kind of like see transactions going to and from that bridge you guys know i've talked a lot about bridges before on the refuel and how how kind of like we need more insight into them especially for user safety and things like that so it's great to see polygon bringing out a tool that allows people to kind of like play around with this sort of stuff so this will be linked to the youtube description for you to check out uh next up from polygon a lot of updates from them today so they have moved nightfall to the robston test net on the ethereum network so polygon nightfall for those of you who don't know is a hybrid zk optimistic roll up for privacy this was developed by ey uh and then kind of like merged with polygon and it's down the polygon kind of polygons kind of wing

here so great to see them go live on tip on test net on the robson test net here maintenance shouldn't be far away and they're aiming to provide low-cost private ethereum transactions sort of like aztec that i spoke about last week which i'm going to speak about again today actually um but yeah good to have more competition in the privacy space i mean i've spoken about privacy plenty of times and i think it's like one of two critical building blocks for this stuff to scale to the world the first is obviously scaling technologies right like roll-ups and all that but uh the second is privacy and i think they go hand-in-hand very well because as you've seen you know polygon nightfall is a scalable private privacy tech like it's a layer two um a private layer two same with aztec same with a few other

kind of ones out there so we're kind of getting the holy grail when it comes to scaling and privacy in one so i'm really really excited about that all right moving on from polygon to optimism so optimism released there or removed i should say their white list last week as i predicted i think i said on one of last week's refuels that i would expect it to happen um last week so yeah the white list has has been gone actually for the last three or four days now so anyone can now deploy to optimism or optimistic ethereum which is really really cool obviously now this puts them basically on equal footing with arbitrary in terms of what developers can do i know that they kind of like differ because optimism has the ovm which is evm equivalent arbitrary has the avm which is it which is like mostly

evm compatible look i'm not a developer i haven't deployed to any of these networks i don't know which approach is better i don't know if developers have actually run into any issues on either network uh so you know it'd be cool to kind of like speak to a developer about this if you are one definitely kind of like chime in the discord channel uh that that's kind of played around with this but yeah i haven't heard anything and it seems like projects can now just deploy to optimism and arbitrary simultaneously right like the funny thing is you don't even have to deploy the main net you can just deploy to optimism and arbitrary and you know and and go on your way you know i've noticed some projects have picked specific ecosystems like for example lyra has picked um optimism i don't um they haven't deployed to

arbitrary maybe they won't deploy to arbitrary uh i'm sorry maybe they will in the future but i'm not sure and then you have premiere which is on arbitrary i'm not on optimism i'm sure that they all have plans to deploy to other kind of like evm compatible networks eventually but it's it's kind of like funny to think about because uh whatever they pick first is going to be where they build a lot of the network effect where they build a lot of their community and are we going to see kind of like layer two maximalism not only in when these layers have tokens but also for the projects on these layer two so people will be like ah you know this project deployed to this other layer to this other layer too well i don't like this project anymore i don't think so because that hasn't really happened with

the ethereum mainnet projects that have deployed to other chains you know for example arves deployed to other chains like avalanche um and a few other projects out there and the ethereum community hasn't shunned them for it or anything like that like it's fine i mean it it it makes sense from a business perspective it's very very easy to do and if there's demand there then the uh it's actually kind of like the project's responsibility to deploy them because if they don't they're kind of like leaving money on the table at the end of the day right so so yeah cool cool to see uh optimism's whitelist finally gone and another related update to this optimism has kind of like leaned in to uh their kind of like name being optimism instead of optimistic ethereum so they're basically just um going

just gonna be referred to as optimism from now on so you know i i know i've kind of like tried to separate it before where i've said there's the optimistic ethereum network then there's optimism that's kind of like building the uh the the kind of network but it's really optimism pbc public goods uh public uh public goods corporation i don't care what the b stands for but it's probably basically like a public public goods funding you know how they kind of like donate all of their revenue um all of their sorry profits from their sequencer to public goods uh and then it's just optimism it just describes kind of like the optimism ecosystem which i think is makes a lot of sense and i think previously it was a bit kind of like tongue tied for people because even with arbitrary for example like arbitrary is

built by off chain labs and arbitrary isn't uh isn't the name of the network it's arbitrary one right because it's going to be arbitrary reddit and then arbitration something else and now between something else um whereas i think with with optimism it'll be kind of like a similar thing but it may be kind of like renames because optimism has already been forked to uh forked a few times like nami and metis i'm pretty sure they're both modified forks of optimism whereas the term optimism we use to just describe the optim optimism ecosystem i've said that word so many times now i'm going to stop but yeah cool to see them leaning into this naming here so uh speaking of arbitrary they put out a blog post over the weekend called optimistic roll-ups the present and future of ethereum scaling i can't load any of these links sorry guys my

internet seems to have cut out here but anyway you can find these links in the youtube description you'll be able to check them out but this speaks to what i was kind of like speaking about i don't know if it was last week or the week before about how i believe that optimistic roll-ups are not a short to medium term solution i've said this before that i think that if everything goes well with zk roloffs then maybe optimistic well ups are a short to medium term only solution but honestly over the last few weeks i've come more around to the fact that um even if z care roll-ups do everything that we dream that they will do there's still drawbacks there's still trade-offs and there's still room for optimistic roll-ups to uh kind of like you know thrive so that's why for me personally i'm not trying to be like i'm

trying really hard not to get stuck into this kind of like l2 maximism which i see a few people kind of doing like i've seen comments from people before saying that um you know polygon has all these teams and so every other kind of like l2 team is worthless and like that's so toxic like that's not how we are in the ethereum community that's something i would expect from like the bitcoin maximalist i would not expect that from people in the ethereum community yes the polygon ecosystem is awesome they have a lot of um layer 2 teams but that doesn't take away from the work that arbitrary and optimism are doing or zk sync are doing or starkware are doing they're all doing amazing work and they all kind of like benefit each other right it is a symbiotic relationship um they're kind of like benefiting each other both on

the research and development side of things so yeah i'm really glad alberton put this blog post out it's a banger as well i enjoyed reading it so i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check it out all right next up in staying on the theme of layer twos consensus has announced that they're launching consensus roll-ups in partnership with mastercard to provide enterprise grade scalability plus address the key challenge of scalable applications on the consensus quorum tech stack this is pretty big you know it's funny whenever you hear these enterprise announcements you always think to yourself okay it's big but like what can i do with it today like does it does it even matter to me does it matter to me as an end user and most of the time or pretty much all the time no it doesn't because these things are not for

you right they're kind of like for the back end of this enterprise systems and they're going to be closed they're going to be permissioned and they've they're kind of like these intranets or kind of internal networks that these uh enterprises use in order to kind of stay on the bleeding edge and kind of like be able to talk to these public networks because i think mastercard visa a few of the other ones out there they're kind of like blockchain innovation hubs they're kind of like pushing the message that blockchains are going to replace all of finance essentially like ethereum is is you know i mean has a very high chance of becoming the new kind of like global sediment layer for all financial transactions to settle on so how do we position ourselves for that that's what they're asking themselves and this is how they do that they get involved with

the bleaching bleeding edge tech they build their own solutions in-house which is fine and then they can kind of like open source it later if they want i mean quorum was uh was built in-house by uh jp morgan and then consensus uh i guess kind of like acquired it or kind of like took it under its wing i was talking before about polygon nightfall which was built in-house by ey and uh you know then polygon took it under its wing so there's plenty of these things that have been developed in kind of like the enterprise setting and then kind of either get open sourced or or kind of like the the team is basically absorbed i mean you look at what happened with polygon maiden uh sorry not modern polygon zero uh no no it was mite and midan sorry um that was the stark based roll-up that they're

doing the guy that's leading that was actually working at kind of like facebook and and kind of like doing um stock stuff at facebook so it's all additive guys like just because you don't kind of like see the enterprise stuff very often or it's not something that you can tangibly use it all adds to everything else like open source is beautiful like that because everyone can just kind of like look at everyone else's work uh study it um you know yes there's copycats and things like that but that the spirit of open source is to study it improve it kind of like come together as a collective and make a you know great pieces of software so from that perspective i'm really glad to see enterprises getting more involved in the uh in the roll-up space here all right so aztec network has announced

a 17 million dollar series a round led by paradigm and now i spoke about aztec last week of course with their launch of um they're kind of like uh zk roller a zkzk uh kind of roll up there where you could do sorry i stick connect i should say uh on there kind of like zika right you could do private transactions from layer two on layer one um which is really really cool uh i do have to disclose i participated in this round of aztec here uh i absolutely love what they're building i mean privacy as i said before is one of the two main pillars that we need to scale to global adoption so i was more than happy to support them in their kind of mission to do that here and they've been around for quite a while aztec like i remember i've talked

i've talked about them for a long time now and they really are i think the first zkzk rollup in production the aztec connect is a mind-blowing i mean being able to do private transactions at layer 2 and have them relayed at layer 1 and still be fully private so you can get to tap into layer 1 liquidity that stuff's mind-blowing guys like i've spoken about this before about kind of um like bridging and arbitrary message relaying and stuff like that but this takes to the next level where you're kind of like okay let's talk to layer one but let's keep it private right let's have a roll up that's designed to do private transactions but also tap into layer one ethereum now it's not gonna just be limited to layer one ethereum by the way they're going to be able to connect to all the other l2s as

well and do the same thing so this is crazy but yeah this uh this round's pretty cool 17 million dollars led by paradigm of course with participation from a bunch of other funds like variant nascent some of the other ones you may have heard of scale a capital here and then a bunch of angels including myself the bankless guys vitalik mariana conti a few others here as well um but yeah if you want to kind of like learn more about what aztec is doing uh what this fundraise means and everything like that this uh link to this thread will be it will be in the youtube description below all right speaking of aztec actually second update here uh element finance announced that uh l2 scaling is coming to element through aztec so lower gas costs have been one of the most awaited features by the element community of course and

they've chosen aztec as their first exploration into l2 scaling solutions this is interesting because i'm pretty sure element is the first project to choose aztec as their scaling provider instead of an arbitrary optimism so that's really cool to see right and as i said guys there's no point being an l2 maximalist because all these l2s are going to have like these apps kind of like deploy to them first but then over time they're going to deploy everywhere like i don't think element is just going to stick on aztec they're obviously going to deploy to other l2s as well but they have to pick one to start with and it's cool to see that aztecs getting some love from from element here and kind of like elements picking them instead of one of the other ones because that's how these networks uh kind of like uh um

grow and thrive they really need to be able to get uh kind of like um these projects onto their networks in order to build uh uh some liquidity and use a user base and all that sort of stuff there so really really cool to see this um so basically uh what this integration means is that element transactions with aztec will be bashed into roll-ups that will be scheduled to run based on the relative demand per asset this means that as the main grows batches will run more frequently and become larger resulting in cheaper gas costs per transaction obviously how roll-ups work after careful analysis element came to the conclusion that the integration with aztec network could bring gas savings ranging from six times to 40 times on average depending on the specific term and asset huge huge savings right especially with

something like element which is um trying to do uh fixed rate yields and uh sorry fixed and variable yield markets which is obviously a very big market so really really cool to see this all right last thing here is a comment from louis uh who's from lewis from starkware here ecosystem lead at starkware he was in a thread with paulinha crypto maxi for other people here but basically lewis said we are 100 focused on ethereum we have enough features and projects for at least over two years i had to tell other layer one project that regardless of the amount of money thrown at us we won't be able to to deploy there so i've been critical of starkware in the past i've been critical of who they took money from in terms of their fundraisers remember 3rs capital and alameda i'm still critical of that but starkware's

tech is amazing they're an amazing team they care deeply about scaling blockchains and with this comment here they seem to still be 100 focused on ethereum even though people i guess like eli have uh basically uh hinted it otherwise like you can see here lewis says eli is a stark maximalist and believe that all chains will adopt stark at some point using uh star wars tech or others this might be the reason some got the perception that we that cycle cares about other l1s i mean i'll be honest maybe that was the reason why i got that perception but i think that by lewis putting this out it's a pretty strong signal to the ecosystem i think that everything starkware has done up until this point makes uh you know it is very ethereum aligned but at the same time it's more about the kind of like long term so

we'll see i mean the funny thing is that there's so many teams now that uh and and i feel like other teams are still going to be deploying their robs to other networks as well and if not they'll just get forked like at the end of the day i think what i am is like a roll-up maxi at this point unless something better comes along because roll-ups are just such an elegant solution to scaling not just zk rollers but aztec uh that's ticket but optimistic rollups as well but uh we'll have to see i have to see how it plays out uh it's it's probably not good to be a maxi of anything in the ecosystem because sometimes you can close your mind with other solutions but for me the way i think about it is that roll-ups took so long to come to fruition it

literally took like what arbitrarium or off-trend labs that built arbitrary they were working on roll-ups i think 2014 they were trying to do it for bitcoin so and it wasn't called roll-ups back then it was something else but you know it all evolved into roll-ups so for something better to come along to scale blockchains i don't know i feel like that's a pretty far away away and if it did come along it was better than roll-ups which were already amazing that'd be even better like so i think for me i'm just like a scalability maximalist and a decentralization maximum so whatever so i guess like a decentralized scalability maximus whatever gets the job done in terms of scaling but doesn't sacrifice the decentralization and security we all enjoy that is what i love to focus on because you can do scaling you know and call yourself a blockchain when in

reality you're just aws with a token right like anyone could i could literally spin up a centralized server on aws right now i could attach a token to it right like i could just fork some code put a token on it and then i could say look i'm a blockchain guys come use my blockchain and here's my token buy it like and then i'd be super scalable because it's you know it's super centralized but like that defeats the whole purpose like why even have a blockchain in that case and the reason why is because you can monetize right even if you aren't decentralized even if you kind of like don't care about that at all you can you can monetize like that so i think that's why we've seen a fair few of those networks kind of pop up but uh but yeah still good to kind of like

keep your eyes open for for different kind of like scaling technologies out there besides roll ups so the kinsey merged test net is now live so this is the long lived test net that i've been talking about over the last few weeks uh it's very easy to join you can test help test the merge at kinsuki.themerge.dev it's got links to everything you need such as the beacon chain explorer each stats the four set the rpc everything so if you want to join this test net you can very easily just go to this link uh click through whatever you need to add the network to minimize all that good stuff and you can join up and help the uh i guess like ethereum developers and researchers test out the long-lived merge test net here which obviously is critically important now this will run until i think mid-january

uh from what i know um so we're gonna see the kind of results of that see if things broke see uh you know how well it went and then we'll probably have more of an idea of when the merge will be as i've said still sticking to my q2 estimate june 2022 seems like a pretty good date to do it but that's me that's my speculation do not take that as gospel and please do not say it do not take that as a to coin desk and be like oh look coin desk we uh you know we got an exclusive date from anthony suzanne i'm not you know i'm not an ethereum called everything like that just following as i said but really cool to see that the uh consortia merge test net is live um and i think no that's it for the merge right

now there was some screenshots that i saw but i figured they maybe weren't as relevant because you can join the testing yourself now and kind of like test it out yourself so no need to kind of stick to the screenshots anyway moving on so phonon dao has or i guess like phone on has officially unveiled itself i've spoken about them before it's not like they've been installed or anything like that but they basically introduced themselves what they are how there's going to be a token salt from grid plus tokens to phonon tokens and their advisors so this is a perfect opportunity for me to say that i am an advisor to phonon i was approached by um the uh some of the good plus guys guys a few months ago i think um and i said yes straight away because as i said my two

pillars that i'm focused on the most are privacy and scaling because i think believe they're the most important so anything got to do with privacy and scaling well maybe not anything but like anything that i think is legit i'm definitely going to to kind of be all in on so i'm very very happy to be an advisor to phonon they're building awesome awesome tech guys like seriously secure like as they describe it here secure hardware hardware for peer-to-peer off-chain transactions which gives any crypto any crypto not just ethereum-based crypto any crypto the properties of physical cash transfers private fast and free i've explained how this work how this has worked before you can go give this blog post a read for a full overview of it links to resources um and all the details about the token and how there's gonna be a token stock with grid good uh

the grid token and all that sort of stuff there so really really cool to see this um i really like how basically it's i mean grid plus is awesome like obviously a few of you guys have the latest one the hardware wallet i mean it's awesome i use it it's just it's so great right it's i mean the people who have used it you'll know what i mean but they had a token grid that they launched a long time ago and it didn't really do anything it was very heavily owned by a few kind of like big um insiders and it was kind of like worthless right it didn't really fit in the picture but now they've kind of like done this thing we're like okay well we have this awesome product called phonon we can hook it up into our lattice one hardware wallets right uh and we have

this kind of like token that's not doing anything so let's just replace it let's just issue a new token let's convert people over and let's start again let's start a fresh dow let's get the community involved let's let's do it from scratch and i love this approach to be honest because you basically have tech debt with old tokens like that uh where essentially you're just kind of like okay well this token i mean especially when it comes to distributions so i think consensus had a major sharing this because good plus was born out of consensus and if you actually want to create a dow you can't have one entity controlling like a huge amount of the token supply so from that perspective what needed to happen was that the grid tokens i think a few of the big ones they burned a lot of their grid tokens and they got like a

lesser share of the phone on token but the logic is is that the grid token wasn't really going anywhere so with the phone on token yes you have a lower share than what you had of grid but phonon's actually going to go somewhere right it's potentially going to go up in value and it's going to have more success than the grid token so i'm really really glad they they did that and they checked that out there but i mean as an advisor obviously i'm compensated in tokens as well so don't take that as me saying go buy the token or anything like that i'm just explaining how the process worked there and how i thought it was pretty cool but yeah definitely go check out the overview blog post here it gives you much more details so dune analytics is raising another round apparently at a 1 billion

valuation that's huge for an analytics company right guys but we all love doing analytics i love it i mean i've been a fan of them for a long time i should disclose that i'm a seed investor in them but i've been using them for a long long time i mean i think since they came out because i used to share a lot of stats on twitter about the growth of things like defy and kind of like other things on ethereum and doom was really the only place tracking it and i really love how anyone can create their own kind of doom analytics dashboards and just kind of like share them out like anyone that knows sql can kind of go go and create them and then kind of like create it for anything on chain so this is a massive kind of kind of race here one billion

dollar evaluation that's huge i mean this is a series b they recently did their series a it seems that uh investors are very hungry for um blockchain analytics and why wouldn't they be i mean on-chain data is going to i mean ancient data is basically the new kind of like um the new oil i mean it's funny because like people said data was the new oil i would say that blockchain data is the new oil to the data i mean maybe that doesn't make sense but i think it's more valuable than your regular data and you know i know it's all open on the internet for everyone to see but the only reason you can see a lot of it is because these tools extract it for you if you wanted to extract the data yourself from the blockchain you would have to spin up your own full and

archival nodes have to spin up your own infrastructure you'd have to build all your supporting infrastructure around it in order to sort through the data and kind of like um display it nicely like eat the scandals and like do analytics does and all that sort of stuff and it would cost you a lot of money to do that that's why we all use these third-party tools and not just not just money but time and effort too because if you don't know what you're doing you have to learn how to do it so i think that uh that's why these investors are hungry for these sorts of um to invest in these sorts of companies and it makes sense because going forward this data is just going to get more and more valuable for everyone not just for us crypto enthusiasts but for literally everyone i mean especially places like

the tax offices they're very interested in this stuff for better or worse guys and as i said like privacy is so important because anything you're doing on layer one ethereum now is not private i mean yes you could have an address that you haven't shared with anyone but if that address ever ever touches a centralized exchange it's cursed forever right because you've obviously ky said on that exchange or if someone figures it out somehow by doing a mapping of addresses and all it takes is once literally all it takes is once for you to do the wrong sent send it somewhere you shouldn't of and you've broken all privacy for that address forever and it's also retroactive everything you've done up until that point that they can now see it if they you know and they can now identify it so i think um it's kind of like a double-edged sword

here where the analytics companies are awesome because they give us all the data that we want to look at but at the same time they also give not i mean the irs isn't bad guy but they also give anyone the data that they want so you know you kind of like lose all the privacy there but still awesome to see this uh kind of like raise coming in from doing analytics here but speaking of data analytics platforms there's also nansen that actually announced that they've raised a 75 million dollar series b which i believe um values the company at 750 million dollars i believe i can't click the um into the announcement because my internet's not on right now um but uh they raised this uh it was led by excel ventures with participation from a16z tiger global fund and a bunch of others

here a bunch of a bunch of angels as well i don't think they list the angels here but uh nansen is another one i mean if i was to pick the top two kind of like data analytics companies right now in ethereum there are other ones like kind of like that focus more on bitcoin but in ethereum it would definitely be dune and nansen um and they're kind of like neck and neck here i mean nancy isn't too far behind at a 750 mil valuation doing not have one bill and he wants 250 million among friends right guys um but uh yeah no congrats to nansen on this raise i mean this is just a rumor by the way i mean not a rumor with doing analytics but it's more of kind of like a not an official thing yet but i'm sure it's reliable because the block

published it but uh this is nancy's actual race so the actual series b and you know the funny thing is i do wonder with these things if they're gonna do a token or not i actually don't know like even though i'm a seed investor and doing analytics i don't know anything about that um they they they tend to keep it kind of like under wraps if there is a and and you know some some teams when you invest early will be like oh well you know here's a a soft a simple agreement for future tokens but like that's uh that's basically saying well if we do a token your echo will be converted into tokens it's not saying that they will do a token so it doesn't even matter if a project you're investing gives you a safe doesn't mean they're going to do a token so you never

really know until they kind of like one day just email the investors and be like okay you know we're we're thinking of tokenizing this is how it's going to go this is kind of like uh your share all that sort of stuff there so i'm curious to see if nansen or dune are going to tokenize i think nansen has been teasing it for quite a while don't think i've seen doon do that before but still i i i mean i don't even know what the token would be would be would it be like an equity token i don't know because these you know dude and nancy not paying customers it's kind of weird when you think about it will it create like will they kind of doubt around it maybe not sure but anyway uh we'll see how that plays out i'm kind of up on time here so i want to get the

last two updates so toby shopify's ceo has kind of like shared this link saying use shopify for your nft drop so it seems you can now do nft drops via shopify you can join their beta program by clicking on this link so you can mint list sell um and sell your own branded nfts with shopify and shopify payments now for those who don't know shopify is like kind of like an e-commerce uh uh a website where what it did was it made anyone let anyone kind of like set up their own storefront right their own digital kind of like storefront without needing to know how to design a website so just made it super simple i've used shopify for it's actually really really simple to use and they have preset themes and the back-end interface they have is

really cool so i think that's what they're trying to do here where they're basically saying well let's do what we did for e-commerce for nfts and it probably will work because they have such a large customer base but at the same and user base not just uh customer i guess yeah customer base because you have to pay to use it but in saying that there was also as we've all seen a lot of kind of i guess blowback against nfts lately right a lot i mean you know it's funny like i've seen the gamers blow back a lot and i actually understand where the gamers are coming from because for them nfts from big aaa companies represent just another cash grab because how many of us have played games you know over the last few years and seen them just become more and more of a cash grab with loot boxes

with um uh kind of like day passes or kind of like i don't know annual passes or something with uh day one dlc right which should have just been included in the base game so i don't actually blame gamers for being angry that uh these it feels like this aaa game uh games are just game companies are just hopping on a bandwagon when it comes to nfts which they probably are to be honest um but at the same time i think what needs to happen is that there needs to be kind of a balance here where these aaa game companies should do nfts but they shouldn't do it in a way that it feels extractive to people they should do it in a way that it actually gives the power to the players and basically says to them hey we're going to do nfts but instead of you having to

buy it you can earn them in-game and you can trade them amongst yourself or something like that right rather than kind of like trying to suck more money out of people which uh you know that's what the game ca video game video game industry has been doing for quite a while because it works you can literally i mean how many times is the same game just being kind of like rehashed and re-brought out uh every year with a different uh kind of like yeah attached to it i know a lot of the sports games really just feel like clones of their previous years but you just kind of slap another year on it and because it's kind of like a quote-unquote staple for console gamers and you know it might even come bundled with the consoles they just sell out and there's just all this

money that gets made so yeah i understand the blowback from gamers against nfts but still cool to see shopify doing an nft market i mean that's just competitive with coinbase i would say in you know even openc i guess all right last up here ethereum.org has launched a new page about ethereum's energy consumption uh basically explaining how ethereum is going to reduce its energy consumption by 99 now as we all know it's going to do this because of the merge right going from proof of work to proof of stake now i don't need to explain it to you guys but you can link this page to anyone that may be asking you you know what you know theories are so much energy is there any uh kind of plan to fix this link on the page it'll explain it all to them you won't have to go through the merge with

them or anything like that they can basically learn it we you know from uh from directly from ethereum.org which i think is really really cool but on that note 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