Staking chat, Farcaster record DAUs and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #721 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delu refuel where C the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony s and it say the 29th of January 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so amongst all the chatter over the last week or so around client diversity on ethereum another topic has come up that I think has been I wouldn't call it divisive but has brought forward a lot of strong opinions on the topic and this is something that I actually wanted to focus on because I think it's pretty important now this topic is solo staking or home staking or just staking generally and basically discussing everything that falls into that and now I'm going to use super fizz's tweet here as a springboard where he said uh you know this com he he's he's got a screenshot that he shared on Twitter

where he said this comment is hella right and basically the comment was someone saying I don't hear many large audience podcast talk about solo staking I see them promoting projects that almost directly incentivizes the use of lsts I think I am the right combination of profiles to be a solo Staker and yet I'm considering quitting who else is going to do it uh and then Super Fe continues with his caption of the screenshot saying I hear maybe uh sassel obviously me promoting solo staking but no one else comes to mind it's because they can't profit from you unless you buy what they're Shilling podcasts don't exist to serve you they exist to profit from your ear so I'm not going to comment on the on the podcast thing there I'm definitely just going to stick to commenting on the staking uh topic here so I wanted to kick off this

discussion by basically describing the role of a node operator within ethereum right so you know they're obviously referred to as you know stakers people who run full nodes you know stakers home stakers whatever you want to call them uh but essentially uh anyone who runs a full node or a full node and validator combo is considered a node operator now for the purpose of this discussion we're obviously going to focus on the people who run a full node as well as a one or more validators because uh they are definitely the um the most important role in the network uh and they are what we call as I said node operators now there are many different ways to be a node operator on the network if you want to go from basically the I guess like

least accessible way to the most accessible way the least accessible way to be a node operator that is someone who runs a full node and a validator is to be a true solo stake up now the reason why I say this is the least accessible way is because you have that massive upfront Capital cost of 32 eth now this is something that I don't know why the community likes to ignore uh but they but they do on on net I see a lot of people ignoring this but essentially the biggest barrier to entry to being a true solo Staker when I say true solo Staker I mean someone who brings the 32 e does all the node operation themselves isn't using any any third party tools like rocket pool for example is just using staking in its purest form and doing it all on their own um then that's

that big and and the biggest barrier to entry is that 32e requirement as I've discussed before 99.99% of the planet will never do that will never be able to bring the 32 eth to the uh and stake it as a solo Staker now in light of that people ask okay well why don't we reduce the minimum eth required why don't we reduce it from 30 to 8 to like 16 e and 8 e and so on and so forth uh we have done that through third parties tools like Rocka pool for example has has um has lowered that to 8 e uh and then there's 2.4 e worth of RPL collateral and then also you have Squad staking via DVT that's currently a minimum of 3.2 e uh and that is different to rocker pool in that with DVT you're all running the same instance of the validator as a

squad like if you have 10 people in your squad you put 3.2 e each in you're all running the same instance of that validator and you're also running you know a full node locally as well so you are technically a node operator but both of those things and any other things that fall off of that or any other projects that that tackle that are not solo staking are not true solo staking because you're using other tools right you're not just doing it purely uh uh using the tools of the ethereum network you're using tools that have been built around it nothing wrong with that but if we're talking in the context of true solo staking number one barrier to entry is still that uh Capital requirement now of course if we lower it at the 168 it would be half of the cost that is now in

Us dolls uh but that would would still be inaccessible to most of the planet and then if the price of eth doubles and obviously we expect the price of eth to go up right when when the price of eth doubles that means that we're back to square one okay well let's reduce it down to 8 eth I'm like okay fine but again even at current prices most people are priced out of that like let's put some hard numbers on it guys 8 eth at even just $2,000 eth that's $116,000 $16,000 how many people do you think have $16,000 lying around to one want to speculate on eth cuz when you buy eth and hold it you're speculating on it right and two uh become a solo Staker with that right even if you drop it down the 40th that the pool of those people is very very small and then after you

discussed the coupal requirement and and after we talk about that because as I said that is the biggest barrier to entry then you can talk about the technical aspect to it but first and foremost the biggest barrier to entry to True solar staking is always the capital requirement and yes I talk a lot about solar staking on the refilling about how you should do it if you are able but that if you are able that I use means that if you have the 32 e right or if you have the means to acquire 3 to e and you're comfortable with speculating on eth and then you're comfortable learning how to do the technical side of it now of course there are easier ways to solo stake you don't have to just use the command line you can use uh goys like d node for example but again doesn't

matter how easy we make solo staking doesn't matter if it was literally one click and you don't have to worry about anything else you still need to bring that 32 eth and that is still the biggest barrier to entry here so that I think is the is the is the preface and that is the Baseline of where we should start from now we can move on to discussing the other options that I talked about versus uh something something like Rocka pool now when you spin up a rock when you become a Rocka pool note operator you not only have to bring the 8 e but you also have to bring the RPL collateral and then keep yourself above a minimum collateral threshold in order to claim rewards so that again it lowers the barrier for entry but then it has its own barriers that come into it it has its own things

that people may not want to do such as speculating on the RPL token now I know in the future there are plans to remove or possibly remove that requirement so that it's just pure eth but that again just introduces other other kind of barriers there even though it's lowered the the capital requirement one there and Rocket pool's great I believe that the rocket pool node uh the sorry the software that rockol uses the smart node stack uh is really is really really great it's easier than pure solo staking VI a command line you've got a nice little user interface there obviously I've run a rock I've been a rockol node operator for a while now uh it's really really great so no obviously shade there but if we're discussing kind of like barriers to entry here to becoming a I guess like home Staker because I I I

mentioned before how I believe that a true solo Staker is someone who just doesn't use any of these third party tools and just does it on their own completely but if we're talking about like a note operator or a Home node operator home Staker then rocker pool falls into that uh people using DVT for Squad staking fall into that any of these other future services that are coming online fall into that now some of these services will have lsts that go to the note operator with Rocka poool it's different where with with Rocka poool there is no LST you don't get AR as a node operator you you basically uh you know are providing the um the the validators or providing the node operating services for arth to exist and that goes to people who deposit eth into the deposit pool that matches with the

eth that you bring as a note operator it's it's I mean it sounds more complex than it is but essentially you don't get that LST when you put your eth up to be a note operator there uh same is true for Squad staking with uh with obal for example with DVT there is no LST you're basically spinning up a what I would consider a true solo state node but using obal software in order to split the cost up to up to 10 ways 3.2 e each right which obviously as I said lowers the barrier to entry but still that's not what I what I would consider true solo staking it's still home staking but it's not true solo staking because you are uh sharing the load there but I do think it is the gold standard because it means that everyone's running the validators and the full node so I think

that's really cool I think that's a really great way to increase the number of Noe operators on the network because I don't think I mentioned this before but the most important metric for ethereum's decentralization is the number number of node operators on the network and it's not just about the number of node operators that are also uh that are running both full nodes and validators it's also about people who are running full nodes and you know people discuss okay well if the capital requirement is so high to be a solar state car why are the hardware requirements so low because the hardware requirements aren't just low for validators or it it's also low for people who just want to run a full node because you don't get any rewards for running a full node running a full node is an altruistic Endeavor uh I mean

there are really two reasons there's a few reasons why you run a full node but two main reasons I would say the the first reason is obviously to verify the chain for yourself right and verify everything's fine for yourself and then you can use it as like your own RPC and things like that and you get better uh better guarantees sensorship resistance and all that you basically get the full power of the ethereum network in your hand but then there's the other reason which is basically just wanting to be an alterist and wanting to uh increase the number of full nodes that are live on the ethereum network and increase ethereum's decentralization across the board but those are really the two main reasons you're not getting rewarded for it but if you attach validators to it you of course are getting rewarded for it and as I explained there are multiple

different ways to do this so overall I guess my point here is that there are multiple different ways to be a home Staker whether that's true solo staking whether that's a Rocka pool note operator using DVT um and whether they include lsts or not that go to other people or go to you I think that it's just much more multifaceted than saying that everyone should should solo Stak right and and everyone should uh the gold standard is is solo staking it is but also that comes with a high barrier to entry and the last thing I will talk about on this topic is the topic of profitability now let's do a hypothetical scenario where solo staking true solo staking I should say is it has only a minimum of one e right you only have to bring one e to uh to stake on

the network let's just say e is $2,000 just for argument sake yeah so that's a $2,000 entry fee now throw in the hardware cost which is relatively cheap I think you can get away with $400 to $500 US Dollars it depends on where you are in the world but let's just say a nice kind of like $500 it's probably less than that but just to round it off so that's a 2500 initial capital investment uh on you know to to get started here okay so what's the return on E right now in terms of the APR it's around 4% you know it could go up in the bull market when me kind of picks up and stuff like that but on average over the year it's been about 4% right so 4% of $2,000 because you're not getting 4% on the hardware cost you're only getting it

on the eth right 4% of $2,000 I believe ma head math is $80 so you're earning $80 a year for an initial capital investment of $2,500 now let's assume that eth is just not is just going sideways for that period you're not even close to covering the hardware cost like I'm not talking about the eth cost cu the hardware cost is an actual cost the eth cost is not a I mean e can obviously be sold uh at uh at a later date for less than you bought it for or more than you bought it for uh but with Hardware it's pretty much always going to be sold for less than you bought it for there is no way that someone is is going to buy that Hardware off you for more than you bought it for for especially after it's been in use that's just not the way you know

computer parts work right they're always going to go it's like a used it's it's like a car soon as you buy a brand new car and you drive it off the lot it's already worth less than what you bought it for so same same kind of thing applies here so how many people would realistically go through all of the hassle not just the hassle of uh of of technical hassle but you know putting together the hardware um you know making sure that they've got the internet that can I'm not even talking about internet cost by the way making sure they've got the internet that is reliable making sure they've got the the right internet plan making sure they got electricity all that stuff there for $80 a year how many people you think are going to do that versus the person that has one e

just going with an LST just buying an LST just going with something like Queen base so we have to be realistic here about the pool of people that are actually going to become the home stakers and home stakers of course are the gold standard they B bat way above their average right cuz I used an example in the daily grade Discord channel the other day where I said that think about coinbase as a as a Staker on the network or as a note operator on the network they one node operator on the network as an entity they are one they have 15% of the validators which is 130,000 validators or something like that right so but but there's still one node operator now Solo stakers or home stakers account for I think the last estimates I saw was about 6% of the network and this includes Rocka pool

node operators so when we do that uh and then we look at the amount of unique node operators it's in the thousands so you have one node operator with 15% share but then you have thousands of node operators with only 6% share in my mind that the the 6% share has way more power than than the 15% because there are way more voices and there are way more note operators so they have way more power in ethereum and and and and they have way more weight in ethereum even though they're a less percentage of the network right and and same goes for something like lato obviously they have like 38 node operators but same thing compared to thousands very different here so you have to look at it from from that perspective in terms of if you want to look at decentralization but going back to what I was saying about the kind

of incentives here the the the reality is is that like you're going to want to get a decent return on your kind of investment here and $80 a year is not enough to cover the hardware so even if you expect eth not to go up very much when you buy it right you're still not earning anywhere near enough to cover the hardware cost and you know to get to break even would take quite a while from there Take 5 years to get to break even or more than that six years uh or or or or or or more depending on what you got the hardware for here so when we take all that and we be realistic about it there is a flaw of of eth at the end of the day there is a certain number of eth that that will be that will be Min minimally required in

order to make solo staking like true solo staking worth it and it's way higher than one eth guys like you can do the math on this you can assume different eth prices you can assume different aprs but it is always going to be pretty high uh and that's just the nature of things and because that's the nature of things because we understand that's the nature of things these LST projects have spun up and these other staking Services have spun up to meet the market where it is basically and there's nothing wrong with that at all nothing wrong with it at all and I and I and I encourage the community to be uh mindful about this when talking about solo staking or true solo staking uh versus home staking generally versus staking with a with a service provider because as I said the capital requirement is always the number one

thing and and the expected return on Capital the technical stuff is secondary in my in my opinion because the technical stuff I mean if you don't even have the 32 eth to put up in the first place then there the technical stuff is completely irrelevant to you you're not even going to go through those Hoops because you don't have the eth that's required here but if you do right for True Sol staking then you're more likely to to go through the through the Hoops here in in my opinion and then last thing I'll say on the profitability topic is that people will argue that okay well you know as a solo Staker my profitability may be around the same as as an LST but I'm not getting the added benefits of like potential air drops and things like that and to that I just say

that well at the end of the day that is not part of of the ethereum protocol design if the ethereum protocol can't know when people are going to get aird drops or not it can't really design around that it's really up to the projects and it's up to you guys to encourage the projects to air drop more to Solo stakers or air drop more to home stakers generally that includes rocker pool note operators to encourage more of that but at the end of the day in terms of percentage of the overall Network home stakers or or Sol stakers are always going to be the minority in terms of percentage but because they represent thousands of node operators they have much more weight in governance discussions much more weight in the ethereum community than and and they're much more engaged than even the biggest providers like coinbase for example is

pretty engaged in the ethereum community but they're engaged in different ways right like they're very engaged with with the L layer 2 stuff with the scaling stuff but they're not so much engaged in kind of core protocol work around censorship resistance around uh meev PBS stuff right around State you know solo staking and and making that or or making that better making that more efficient making that uh kind of uh I guess like a better in terms of the issuance curve of eth like they're not involved in those discussions whereas a lot of people in the theme Community who are Solo stakers or Rocka pool not operators or or what have you they are very involved so they have more say they have more weight they have more Merit in the in the ecosystem so it's good to keep that in in mind there but anyway I

spent like the majority of this episode talking about that because I did mention here in a reply to Super Fe that I had a lot of thoughts on this topic and and obviously I just went through them all so hopefully you enjoyed that but there is a bunch of other stuff to get through today and continue the conversation with me if you want in the daily gr Discord Channel I mean you can comment on YouTube as well but I'm it's much easier to reply on the Discord channel so continue the discussion there and let me know if you agree or disagree with me I think my thinking around this is pretty sound it's something that I've thought about a lot because I am a true solar Staker I am a rocker pool note operator I am he heavily involved with a lot of these LST protocols as an advisor or an

investor so I I pretty much have my hand in every pie here but it does like for me I'm not trying to be biased to anyone solution I'm just trying to give the facts and then people can make their own decisions about what they want to do here so as I said gold standard is true solo staking gold and gold standard is home staking but you have to be realistic about the total pool of people that are actually going to be able to do that and that total pool is always going to be relatively small just due to the fact that there's economic incentives at play and those economic incentives um require you to require there to be a relatively High upfront cost here anyway I'm going to leave that one at that for today moving on so honey Abu shared this um new website that actually was shared

in the Discord dailyo Discord Channel by TGK here uh it's a website that covers ethereum's road map now you can click into each each of these sections here the merge The Surge The Scourge all of them and it'll basically break down each of the road map road map items and if they've been completed or not and make more information about them so essentially you can see here that if you if you click on like something like single slot finality which is in ongoing research it tells you that tells you a summary of it and it gives you a couple of resources to go research more about it so this is a really really great website I think the only feedback I have is this background image definitely gets in the way of things like the eth logo maybe just have the background like black or something or or reduce the um

opacity of the um of the uh sorry reduce the kind of brightness or opacity whatever you call it of the logo in the background there but the actual information is really really great so so yeah you should definitely bookmark this it's at eth roadmap.com I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out but it has yeah as I said a lot of information about ethereum's row map it even has timelines on on denune uh and and Petra I mean these are estimates obviously uh the timelines here on these things uh and then it has links to like key organizations the client teams other teams and more information here so really really great to see this and big shout out to TGK for developing this and thanks to honey aru for sharing this on Twitter uh it's great to see that something like this

exists speaking of ethereum resources the ethereum.org quarterly road map has been published so this is the road map for q1 2024 everything that they're going to uh uh be focusing on in 2024 they being the ethereum.org team you can go check this out and get involved if you want as I've said before ethereum.org is completely open source which means that you can get involved directly you don't have to be part of the main team or anything like that you can just get involved as a contributor if you would like to so yeah you can go check this out I'll link it in in the YouTube description uh below but a lot of great updates here a lot of great road map items here and very excited to see all of this be executed on uh during q1 and maybe into Q2 as well well all right so uh I want to talk a

bit about layer 2os I think for the rest of the episode it's pretty much going to be mainly about layer twos uh but first off I came across this uh basically this Meme here which I thought was really cool where uh pipe. e shared this and basically has a picture of um it's uh it's it's uh what's his name the one of the original the original Spider-Man in the Sony movies uh put taking the having his glasses off and then he's seeing all these logos on the right hand side he got the eth logo there it's got um it's got the op logo mutable logo stet logo basically everything got to do with l2s and then uh Peter Parker puts the glasses on and he can see just all eth logos right and there's obviously Bitcoin there as well uh now the purpose of this meme is to basically say that

it's all ethereum right when it comes to l2s they are ethereum and anyone who tells you otherwise is being disingenuous because yes some of these things are centralized right uh I mean most of them are centralized they have training wheels on on them none of them uh none of the the the actual ones that have any traction are at stage two yet right but they will be in the future but they aren't yet and uh various I mean they have different constructions as well but still they are ethereum this is how ethereum is scaling you guys know ethereum has a rollup Centric road map it's how ethereum is scaling so to say that these layer twos aren't ethereum or to ignore these layer twos to begin with is to be disingenuous and I actually see leaders from other ecosystems completely ignoring layer tws when talking about

metrics such as D5 volume traded like I saw one just today I was like you know this is crazy I was going to then I'm like you know what I don't want to get involved with these fights anymore like it's just it's so tiring but I saw that and it's like okay well this is only you're only comparing this chain to your chain uh your favorite chain whatever it is to ethereum layer one you should be comparing it to layer twos and ethereum layer one like together because layer twos is how ethereum is scaling like if we were scaling ethereum at layer one then for sure compare it just to layer one but that's not how ethereum is scaling and these people know this right they're not oblivious to this but they're just being disingenuous and they would rather spread read this false information essentially that uh or at

least misleading information essentially uh that these other chains are doing more volume or better looking better metric-wise than ethereum or that ethereum is stagnating while ignoring the fact that there's been explosive growth across these layer 2os and they continues to be more and more growth I mean we're really at only at the starting point of these layer twos right uh whether they be rollups or validium or what have you really just at the starting point here so it is really crazy to me that people will omit this information or just ignore it when uh it should be included here and I really do wish a lot of these um metric tracking websites would uh would have an option to basically have it so that you basically have ethereum and then you can kind of like expand ethereum out and would have all the l2s there so it

Aggregates all of the all of the metrics together like something like defi Lama should do this in my opinion where essentially uh the defi trading volume you know fee Revenue so on and so forth should all be aggregated under the ethereum umbrella and then you can expanded and see which of the L2 chains uh sorry see the individual L2 chains metrics I think that would be a good way to display this data so maybe that happens eventually but yeah anyway it's all ethereum guys it's definitely all ethereum here now keep keeping on the LA 2 topic here I came across a great tweet from Ryan burkman's over the weekend where he said one of the most bullish things that I've seen recently is the rise of major l2s partnering with each other to deploy their l3s on each other's l2s Stark net settled on op Etc

these relationships will motivate new cross L2 Tech independencies web of change web of chains rooted on ethereum so obviously there's been a bit of I guess like poking fun out or fud spread around the term L3 on Twitter and I think I warned about this like at least a year ago that I said the L3 term is just going to be so easy to make fun of but regardless of that when it comes to the actual technology this is the bull case basically where all of these chains whether they be l2s l3s or even l4s whatever they whatever that is all settling onto each other all sharing kind of um Tech with each other all being inter interoperable with each other and depending on each other and creating this of symbiotic relationship is extremely bullish for the rollup

Centric road map because as Ryan says here it's rooted all on ethereum like it all settles down to ethereum so essentially we have ethereum as this Ultra secure reliable uh settlement layout and then we have all of these other chains building on top of it inheriting that when constructed correctly obviously hopefully most of them make it the stage two in the foreseeable future or in the near future right um and and then they're all just basically rooting uh on onto ethereum rooted on ethereum as that as that settlement layer there and they have their own sediment layer as well because realistically if you settle an L3 onto an L2 as I've described before the L3 is riing on the L2 and then the L2 obviously is relying on L1 whereas if the L2 goes offline then the l3s go offline right so the L3 is indifferent

to L1 because it needs the L2 to survive but this is just like a tech implementation thing or this is just like a a technical concern right this is not really concerned and a settlement concern or settlement guarantee concern for these things but typically l3s are going to be uh things that don't require like in my opinion like super high security or anything like that they're going to be things that may not even be blockchains they may just be uh things that kind of uh resemble uh just microservices stuff like that right that you see in web 2 so there's still a kind of world of experimentation to happen here but the most bullish thing is that they are able to settle on each other there's a lot of shared stuff going on here that creates a symbiotic relationship and then it's all rooted on

ethereum which means that it all flows back to ethereum and just strength strengthens the entire ethereum ecosystem and basically makes the meme that I just showed you guys uh you know more true each and every day so just a really great tweet here from Ryan so kudos to him for putting that out now speaking of metrics for tracking L2 usage grow thexyz has added a new metric I think or have highlighted one of their one of their recent metrics here which is a sanki diagram or of uh the layer 2 activity as measured by total fees paid by chain and category in the last 30 days so in the GIF you can actually see this happening you can see on the left hand side the what the L2 is in the middle what the actual um category is so whether it's defi or otherwise and then

basically seeing on the right hand side here uh the the expanded category or the subcategory essentially and there is links to this I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to see them I think I can open them up here and hopefully it'll just load for me so I can show you guys uh more in depth of what this looks like uh yeah so you can see just for example on the left hand side you've got arbitrum and then you you highlight arbitrum and then you can see there is 4 .3 million of fees paid in the last 30 days okay that was that's to ethereum uh uh oh sorry that's the total fees paid on arbitrum not just to ethereum but just like what arbitrum took in generally and then you can see where these went to obviously defi dominates here in purple then if you

highlight defi you can then see uh what the majority of the defi uh uh kind of volumes went to and it went to like lending staking you have derivative exchange and and decentralized exchange and then you can I mean you can play around with this yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but just great to see another metric here from grow the p in order to keep track of what's happening on ethereum layer 2s all right last up on the layer two topic just wanted to mention a tweet that I puted out over the weekend where I said a lot of layer 2os on ethereum will end up like the long list of layer ones failed experiments that gained little to no traction just because something as an L2 does not guarantee any sort of success and a lot of the l2s launching lately are just jumping on a

bandwagon now I've talked about this on the refu plenty of times before but I just wanted to reiterate this fact that an L2 is like any other thing that gets built in crypto it's going to succeed or die based on if it finds product Market fit or not and you know Kevin auki here from gitcoin basically replied to me and said you know rip the public goods Network and I replied to him saying you know the gitcoin guys did it right with public goods Network by ending the experiment once it was clear product Market fit was not found too many projects just exist as zombies in this industry and if you actually go and and look at the list of the layer one that are still around as zombies today and these layer ones are really old guys like I'm talking 2017 and earlier sort

of thing but they're still around and they're still acting like they're relevant because they just want to exist as a zombie because there is still some economic uh uh Worth to their token right they still got like a market cap in the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars they still want to keep it relevant so that maybe when the bull market comes around the token price goes up and they can sell whatever bags they're holding on to right um but re realistically these things are zombie projects they're not going anywhere they've they died a long time ago but yeah there's there's those those incentives at play the monetary incentives the same is going to be true for layer twos there's going to be layer twos that exist for a long time that are going absolutely nowhere and the thing is is that keeping a layer 2 alive is

less expensive than keeping a layer One Alive because with a layer two the uh the expense is really just like the data expense and the proof expense whereas with a layer one the expense is paying out the issuance to the validators to secure the network basically or to keep the network running so the player twos some of them will exist as zombies for a very long time and it's going to be I'm going to be curious to see which ones do exist like that uh but in saying that there are obviously a lot of successful l2s already I mean Arbitron one I think to date is is the most successful L2 but the other ones aren't far behind and there's more and more of these that are kind of coming online that will be a success but at the same time there'll be plenty of them that will just fail a lot

of them will will probably fail ungracefully where they'll exist as zombies or they'll refuse to admit that they failed some of them will uh basically shut down gracefully like the public goods Network and again a huge crito to the gitcoin team for doing that um but yeah as I said just because something is an L2 does not guarantee any sort of success uh it's the same as any other product within this ecosystem it needs to find product Market fit uh or else it will just exist either as a zombie or it'll just fade away or and get shut down but anyway enough on that topic just the last thing I wanted to mention here was that there was a record daily active users on farcaster yesterday so on on Saturday not yesterday as in Sunday on Saturday first time above 10,000 so this data is coming

from Dan Romero the the the founder of farasa so it is definitely very very reliable here um but why I wanted to mention this is because I think farcaster out of all of C of the non-speculative crypto apps and I'm talking like pure non-speculative crypto apps I think farcaster is the one that is currently on top by a country mild to be honest because if you think about why farcaster is non-speculative someone mentioned in the de a Discord channel that is that people air drop farming it I'm like people are air drop farming everything it doesn't matter if it's speculative or not they're air drop farming everything so I think that there are obviously some people farming any potential kind of token uh that that farter might do in the future uh but at the same time I go on faras and I mean I

haven't been on over the last couple of months but I went on today there is so much organic activity happening on there now there is so many interesting conversations happening I was just scrolling through today looking through it all in uh seeing all the conversations happening and being like wow you know this is genuine activity this isn't just people air drop farming right this is genuine activity this isn't just people being Deens this is genuine non-speculative activity and I love seeing this because you guys know what I'm all about in this industry is sustainability I am very very uh uh uh excited about seeing anything that can be sustainable outside of any kind of like token incentives or any kind of speculation because speculation is fine there's nothing wrong with it but it is not generally sustainable right I actually liken a lot of the speculation

to something like a like a company town right the company town for those of you who who don't know is the concept of a town that literally just gets built around a company that is doing something in the area so a lot of them are built around like mining uh mining facilities for example like they're called mining towns right um a lot of them were built around like oil fields right and then once the resources is depleted those towns basically cease to exist right so the same is true for a lot of the speculative activity that happens whether they be meme coins or there's kind of some incentives or there's some farming going on here once the incentives run out once the the speculation runs out the the people leave basically so it's the same kind of concept here if we're using the analogy of a company town and that's not

sustainable right that is very uh unsustainable and that does not lead itself to a sustainable ecosystem so if you are trying to create a sustainable ecosystem then you don't want these people there you don't want to optimize just for that short-term gain you want to optimize for the long-term game and then from there hopefully get that that non-speculative uh users there and then maybe later on the speculative stuff come by that point you have a good base to work off of so yeah congrats to uh farcaster for this I'm going to I know I've said this a bunch of times but I'm really trying to spend more time on farcaster it's just hard because I've actually tried to spend less time on Twitter on just social media generally I've actually tried to spend less time on my computer generally uh because I just spent so much time on it and

Twitter like you guys know my opinion on Twitter it just it can be so toxic and there's just so much crap on there I'm only doing it these days honestly to keep up with the refuel and to get content for the refuel um but I was really really impressed by the quality of conversations that I saw on farcaster today and I'm using the warp class client um so yeah I'm going to try and make a concerted effort to be on there a bit more but I think on that note that's going to be it for today's episode so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone