Thoughts on L2 tokens, Connext Grants Program & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #249 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony cesano and today the 10th of november 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i've been noticing over the last 24-48 hours this kind of trend of shaming people for selling their airdrops so i put out this tweet today saying you know this trend of shaming people for selling their airdrops needs to stop now i think that just shaming people for selling anything in general is is really silly like unless these people are kind of like scamming other people then of course right you should call it out and and shaming them is justified but generally if it's like an airdrop that someone has gotten or if it's kind of like an asset that they've gotten up on their public address and they've sold it

you shouldn't shame them for that i mean why is it shameful to take profits like the ens airdrop for example has been kind of like life-changing money for for a lot of people i mean even on the low end if you if you've got 250 tokens at the current price of ens it's it's what i think it's like 50 or something like that that's a lot of money right for for a lot of people and then you go on the higher end and it becomes like a very sizable airdrop like the people who got 800 or so or like a thousand ens that's like 50 grand right there uh for basically just having an e s name so why should they be shamed for selling i don't think they should and also there's people who just simply need to sell to uh sell some to pay taxes as well

because when you claim the airdrop in the us in australia and parts of europe it's treated as kind of like regular income and uh at the claim time the price that you've claimed it at you need to kind of like cover that as part of income tax and that's why some people have sold some as well there's a lot of that stuff going on and just generally i don't know i'm just not a very big believer um sorry i'm a very big believer in not shaming people for for doing these sorts of things because at the end of the day you can't expect everyone just to hold everything forever right they're going to sell they're going to take profits that's the whole reason i mean that most people invest in things that they expect it's going to go up in the future and they're going to take profits on it but

when you get air drops it becomes an even more pronounced thing where you're like okay well i just got all this essentially free money airdrop to me that i wasn't expecting and it's just an insane you know insane amount of money why wouldn't a lot of these people sell of course they're going to sell and you know with ens one it's kind of become especially egregious because of the fact that you there's enos names tied to these addresses right people can see that and they can be like wow this person dumped all their ens tokens let's shame them um and it's kind of like what why why like i i just really don't understand why you're doing this and the funny thing is a lot of the people um you know shaming them usually are the ones that are just selling themselves as well it's kind of like this projecting

that they're doing so i'm just really not a fan of this kind of trend that i'm seeing pop up here and i would encourage all of you to not listen to any of this sort of stuff that people say sell if you want to sell like i'm not trying to give investment advice or but like for your personal kind of like position if you want to sell if you want to take profits you you do it right it's up to you it's your decision it doesn't matter what anyone when anyone else says it doesn't matter if kind of like the price goes up after you've sold you've made the conscious decision to to sell and take profits and you should be happy with that now i mean there's a whole other discussion to be had about people selling too early and then regretting it late late uh we're getting it later but

that's a different discussion i believe if you are comfortable taking profits and you you know you you've made this the conscious decision yourself you haven't let anyone else inform your decision and then uh you know that you should kind of like stick with that and go with that you shouldn't kind of listen to other people who are saying oh you know shame on you for selling you know you're selling the future of kind of like the domain name system in the in the world like ans is amazing and yes ens is amazing um but the thing is you got an airdrop and you're not expected to participate in governance like there's there's a no strings attached to airdrop it's like there's social signaling that people can do but there's no technical thing built into ens that basically says you have to delegate it like obviously

when you go through the claims process it delegates it for you but the thing is um there's nothing stopping you from from selling it if they wanted to construct it like that they could have put vesting on the airdrop for example and they didn't do that so you shouldn't feel bad at all for doing this and you know i i i think that goes for any air drop not just the ens one but i think the ens one was was was especially kind of like uh a bad because it was tied to e s names people kind of like could see that and shame people and and do whatever like that and um you know it's funny for me like as i said i don't i don't plan to sell my kind of like ens tokens on on saswa.etha i haven't even claimed them yet because i'm still waiting for gas to

go down a bit maybe it'll go down on the weekend but as i said i didn't feel like a need or a rush to to claim them but um essentially like i uh you know for me i i guess like i'm not scared that anyone's gonna shame me and that's not the reason why i wouldn't sell i just personally don't want to sell i just personally want to keep it and that's not not not got to do with any kind of investment decision it's just like i want to have some ens tokens i want to be able to delegate and have like a small say in the governance process uh and i'm happy keeping them in my wallet to do that but you know i personally got like uh i mean you know many of you know i kind of like large um git coin airdrop

and i sold 25 of that airdrop early on and i documented the whole thing in the discord channel and you know no one has shamed me for that because no one really looked at my address uh but you know people i'm sure people kind of like were paying attention maybe some people would try to shame me for that and say why are you dumping you know these tokens um but again like not just myself but like it applies to everyone just don't feel shame uh for dumping for dumping for selling for taking profits right don't feel shameful unless you're trying to scan someone then yes you should feel shame but if you're just a regular kind of person you you kind of like got an airdrop then it's up to you what you do with it no one else controls what you do with it um and if the team that does the

airdrop wanted to kind of like prevent people from selling it straight away well they would put investing with and they did it right for e s and that i mean most air drops don't have vesting on them so from that point of view it kind of makes sense to to kind of like just do what you want with it because um you know if if the creators didn't want you to do that they would have put vesting on it but anyway i'm going to move on to the next kind of updates here so little cohen uh i mentioned yesterday how he had a kind of like temperature check for unisop liquidity uh intentionalization or liquidity mining on optimism and arbitram and unfortunately in uh minutes before the vote would have passed uh the temperature check there was a single no voter with 200k votes which was a

massive amount of votes that blocked the proposal now you can see here that there was 23 uh over 23 000 votes for yes and then someone came in with over 200 000 votes and just like voted no and blocked this proposal now this is very unfortunate you can see here who the person was uh it was this person bought triple four and he responded by saying hey sorry my my vote made you frustrated that wasn't my intention and sorry for not leaving any comments you were correct i should have joined the discussion first and cast my votes and then uh he goes on to say in short i don't think that artificially incentivizing usage of l2 is going to change much saving 100 in fears and every swap is good enough financial incentive in itself but as you say l2 is still not getting deserved traction why

is that uh and then little colon goes on to say which i agree with artificially incentivizing usage is crypto's killer app that's how d5 and l1 grew to where it is today and that's how other l1s are growing and that's how products in web 2 have been growing referrals sign up bonuses et cetera at some point it becomes organic and sustainable but since you have blocked this and you're a unity delegate you must have other ideas on how to make uni on l2 a success i'll listen and then boar goes on to say i think a smaller financial incentive such as gas refund program for bridging to l2 and executing a swap would have like higher leverage long long term and then ludicrous says i'll wait for your action or actionable proposal to make it happen you get my votes now this is going to be part of a longer

discussion i have today with a tweet from scott lewis as well but what i want to kind of focus on here is just this point from boar where he says you know doing like a gas refund program for bridging to l2 i actually like that right i disagree with his first tweet where he basically says that artificial internalizing usage isn't going to change much i actually think it would change a lot like i actually think it would be a massive boost to uni swap on both optimism and arbitrary but as he says there's other ways to do it you can do a gas refund program and you know what i i'd vote for that like i'd i'd amplify that i'd basically uh tell people that this is a good idea but at the same time i think that's still a small part of it i really think that

when you kind of so when you kind of look at liquidity in general in the kind of i guess defy space most of it belongs to the bigger players and these bigger players don't necessarily care about the gas fees because they have so much money they just they're happy to pay it um and those bigger players will move uh more quickly to these layer twos if there is kind of liquidity there to uh sorry if there's kind of like tokens and rewards there to be farm now what they do with them those tokens is up to them of course you know they may they may dump it whatever but the thing is it gets more liquidity there and then eventually when you get more sticky liquidity you get more more kind of like end users coming across even if the bridge fees are high uh so i mean i read about this

in the newsletter today as well but uh this goes pretty deep when it comes to like bootstrapping ecosystems and i think that kind of like anyone who says that it's not going to make a big difference just hasn't really studied how token incentives have basically changed the entire game over the last i guess probably 18 months since d5 summer started um ethereum itself didn't have kind of native token incentives like the ethereum foundation didn't do like an eighth liquidity mining program for example but we had compound kickstart defy summer with the complicity mining launch and then we had like more and more of them come along and then people got better at them and people do and like ever it's pretty much like all the protocols either launch with like an airdrop or a liquidity mining program now and there's a lot of sticky liquidity

tvl in in ethereum defies is way over 100 billion at this point there's tons of volume there's a there's very strong infrastructure there's very strong network effects around that there's lots of kind of like bots set up to keep all the prices in check across the liquidity pools which obviously adds to the usage of the network and obviously the gas space on the network as well so yeah i think it's kind of short-sighted to say that it wouldn't have any effect and that brings me to kind of like the the second related tweet which was from scott lewis here where he said all open public roll ups and need to release tokens as soon as it is feasible it is all fun and good to see if unsubsidized rollups can compete with heavily subsidized adoption programs from other layer ones but once the subsidies create moats it may be too

late this is the crux of the issue in that yeah okay it's noble and it's fun and cool if you want to see how far we can get like the unsubsidized roll-ups like without a token how far we can grow them how much of a moat they can kind of like have for themselves and how many users actually come to them but you're competing with uh the other ecosystems which which are doing the incentives so you're essentially giving the user a choice hey come use uni swap and and all these other apps uh like on arbitrary optimism um and they may or may not pay you their own tokens but you know come use it because you get cheaper fees and that's that's a that's a pretty good carrot right it's a pretty good thing for people to follow but then on the other side of it you have all these kind

of like other chains and a lot of them are just the evm side chains that i've talked about before that basically are saying hey guys come here we have cheap fees and we also have like all these liquidity incentives for you and we have like all this money that we're going to rain down upon you what do you think the average end user is going to choose like i already know and especially because the bridging fees of getting onto l2 um are just just as expensive or about the same as getting onto a side chain so if you're bridging from ethereum to one of these side chains and they they're kind of like making up for those bridging fees by giving you all these massive rewards then it's just it it's a different incentive and incentives rule the world at the end of the day right so

we should be pushing optimism arbitrary all the generalized l2s to be doing liquidity native liquidity incentive programs as soon as possible because i'm a strong believer that the kind of like main reason or the only reason a lot of these other l1s have gotten traction is because of those programs it doesn't really have anything to do it doesn't have a lot to do with kind of like the cheap fees i'm convinced that um people are happy to pay the fees if they're getting something for it now is that long-term sustainable no of course not uh for a number of different reasons obviously we need cheap fees and i i kind of like was thinking about it today i think that for most users as they exist today are happy to pay up to a dollar in fees to do what they want to do on chain that really doesn't make a

huge difference to uh a lot of people i guess the in the um in the western world and things like that the people that we have today and there's not many people in in this ecosystem today but obviously we need to get fees much cheaper than that as time goes on to essentially i mean long term it's going to be free for the end user i mean it already is on some of these kind of like l2s like dydx and immutable x they pay for their l1 gas fees by charging marketplace fees and the hell the funny thing is the marketplace fees can sometimes be higher than what the gas fee would be because of the fact that it's like a flat percentage so for example in dydx it's like a flat percentage depending on how many you know if you've got any dydx tokens you get discounts but it's like a

flat percentage on your trades and then dydx generates revenue through that on their roll up and then they pay the l1 gas fees by using that and they have to pay it in eighth of course same goes for immutable x uh when they're kind of like posting their proofs to layer one they're using the revenue they're generating from the marketplace fees and from kind of like minting and trading fees on on immutable x so and that's how they're able to offer end users very cheap fees but in terms of the generalized platforms like arbitrary optimism i really do believe like most of the users as they exist today uh i have you know i find paying a dollar two dollars in fees like it's when it obviously gets like the 50 mark it becomes much much different but like dollar two dollars for for most users

that that exist today i think um a lot of them will actually be fine with that and i've spoken to a lot of these users as well and they say yeah okay like a dollar two dollars is fine like that's that's that's especially if they're kind of like um depending what they're doing on the network right as well um but like when it gets to 50 100 and this is just for like simple swaps adding liquidity can can be a few hundred dollars depending on when the network is what's happening with the network that is obviously much worse than than just a few dollars there so from that perspective uh these layer twos already compete on on the fee side of things even though they're not as cheap as these other kind of like centralized evm chains whatever um they're still very cheap and they

inherit ethereum security of course but they don't have the incentive programs that these other l1s do and i'm telling you right now if arbitrary optimism both had tokens and had token incentive programs their tvl would absolutely skyrocket there are so many aetherians that have so much money because they bought each really early on that would move to these layer twos in a heartbeat if there was liquidity incentives there um and you know i'm speaking from kind of like personal experience as well like i would be more likely to move a lot of my funds over to l2 um you know even though i i i kind of like don't mind paying the l1 gas fees but that's just me like i'm i'm obviously like an exception there there's not many of us but for me like uh i would move a lot of my liquidity

there and that from there kind of brings network effect right brings more liquidity into the system gets more people kind of involved there and then you get like the the other users coming in and playing with it so i don't see any downsides to this really and i mean i know that these things are going to have tokens like it's not even just like an if for me they they're pretty much going to have to have tokens like if they don't they're going to lose if they don't do liquidity mining programs they're going to lose long term i believe to these other ecosystems that do simply because the incentives for users is just not there now maybe it is on their roadmap already and they're just focusing on getting kind of like the technical upgrades out like ovm 2.0 is happening today or tomorrow i believe uh and arbitrary

nitro is happening soon there's no date on that yet but i'm sure it's soon and then from there maybe they you know they do tokens in the new year new year or something like that but i think it needs to happen sooner rather than later i wrote a bit more about this in the newsletter today but definitely needs to happen we already know it works and we already know kind of like at least how to do it in a in a decent way not in like the perfect way but how to do it in such a way where it's not you know detrimental to the project and to the token itself but also works to bootstrap this entirely new ecosystem and bootstrap it really quickly because when you think about it you can bootstrap a new ecosystem with no token incentives but by adding a token

incentive you essentially supercharge it and you bring forward so much growth because for example you could say that all right well in five years the layer twos are gonna be like ubiquitous everyone's gonna be using them they're gonna be great there's gonna be you know hundreds of billions of um tbr in them that's all well and good but if you want to bring all that growth to today you can you just use liquidity incentives and you use token incentives to get people on there and you build a moat for these things so something for these teams to think about i definitely think that they will do it but the pressure's on they need to do it sooner rather than later i believe all right so zk sync announced that ok x the centralized exchange is offering direct fiat on-ramps and off-ramps to uh zk syncs layer 2 network here now

obviously uh zk sync is working on a bunch of different things like zk porter and zk evm which is their generalized uh solutions for ethereum layer 2 scaling but right now they kind of like have a couple of different things on on um their layer two they've got the bitcoin donations of course they've got the um uh they've got the uh sorry the bitcoin donations and they've got some some nft stuff happening uh but essentially yeah i mean whenever i see a centralized exchange bridge into an l2 i get really really excited because this coupled with like a liquidity incentive program oh my god like the growth that you would see would be insane imagine arbitrary optimism as generalized platforms just because of the only generalized platforms live today um as a layer two obviously we had

the polygon pos chain but they already did an incentive program i don't think they're gonna do another one and they were actually able to get like a lot of users there and a good moat and people that are just using it because they've been exposed to it because they had like a had like an incentive to get exposed to it but um with arbitrary optimism they haven't done one yet but imagine they had bridges in from coinbase they had token incentives there they had all the you know most popular apps on there people would would bridge in and they would stay there they would they would use it and they would skip l1 ethereum entirely and the hilarious thing is they may not even realize that they're using ethereum especially if they're a new newer user and they'd be like wow albuquerque optimism this is awesome and

they were and they'll be like oh i got all these apps you know it was really expensive to use this on ethereum now i can use this really cheaply and that's exactly what they're thinking when they go to these other chains so we need to keep that in the kind of like a theorem family and that's how we do it through through these l2 kind of on-ramps from centralized exchanges so super excited to see this i hope to see more and more of these centralized exchanges support not just um you know one l2 but like all the l2s of course so a tweet here from josh uh basically tweeting out coinbase's q3 earnings so i spoke about coinbase's q2 earnings last time and about how the ethereum trading volume had surpassed btc volume and uh back then and has passed it again so eth had 22 percent of the volume on coinbase

versus btc at 19 now you can see here that they're actually both continuing to lose their market share to other crypto assets and that's only natural because coinbase started listing a lot more assets over the last few months and i think q3 was was probably uh you know somewhat dominated as well by uh uh by shib as well i think or maybe that maybe not not so much because i think shib was in october and that's part of q4 but there was definitely a lot of stuff on there that wasn't on there in q2 that contributed to this kind of like other crypto asset trading volume going up you can see here that since um last year same time last year there's been a nine percent increase in other crypto asset trading and there's been a pretty big decrease in bitcoin trading since the same time last year

it's been a 13 kind of decrease but whereas ethereum has actually been a four percent increase since this time last year so btc is not only losing trading volume to other crypto assets but it's also losing it to eth as well so just i mean this is this is a shift right like as josh says this is this is a shift in the markets and you can see it playing out the the btc ratio continues to go up over time usually in q4 it's supposed to be a kind of weak quarter for for um eth against bitcoin and bitcoin's supposed to be very very strong but not not so not not yet i mean we're kind of like what 10th of november we've got 50 days left of q4 could still happen right but but usually it happens it's happened by you know in the last few

weeks and it just hasn't happened the same this year so times are changing that's for sure all right another tweet i put out today was one about kind of like communities and i said uh there's a very basic tweet where i basically just said real and lasting communities are built during bear markets now i'm not going to go on a tangent about this and i just wanted to kind of like point out and detail a bit more what i meant by this essentially the reason why ethereum has such a strong community is because it was built during the 2018-2019 bear market ethereum's community in 2017 was tiny in terms of like people who actually cared about ethereum itself rather than caring about icos because 2017 for those who were around was absolutely dominated by icos there

was very very few people who cared about anything else got to do with ethereum now in 2021 the ethereum network is actually dominated by people who care about the network itself they care about the major upgrades like the merge and 1559 and the whole kind of like general e2 effort and things like that right rather than caring about like all these cash grabs and ponzi's and stuff like that whereas uh that could only have happened because the real community was built during a bear market there were people who stuck around who weren't here for the money because the bear market obviously there's not there's basically no money to be made in a bear market really unless you're a really really good trader good luck what you do in a bear market is you dollar cost average in dr as much as you can and and just

wait that's all you can do there's nothing else you get there's there's none of these opportunities like there are right now where you can just like throw money at something and it'll go up like 10x in a few months um there's none of that right now right and there was no none of these massive air drops either i don't even remember if there actually were any air drops back then i don't think they actually actually were i think um the airdrops only started in d5 summer but um and they wouldn't have been worth much anyway the like the valuations were very low i mean it's funny looking back on it now eats market cap at for for a long time it was like it was about a hundred dollars its market cap was 10 billion dollars its market cap is now over 500 billion dollars and that's just in a

couple of years the difference there so when you kind of like look at that and look at and that that's eighth right 10 billion like and think about all the other kind of assets that were much lower than that back then um it just it was extremely hard to make any money in the bear market so everyone was kind of just investing for the long term everyone cared about the technology but um care deeply about it wanted to keep building and say you know yes it's a bear market but if we keep building we're going to build towards a better world we're eventually going to get like more people interested again and eventually the market's going to going to turn around and you know as strongly as we actually believed it back then uh we didn't know for sure right we didn't know like we you know a lot of the time we

thought ourselves crazy for what we were doing we were like you know are we actually just wasting our time here um but that was in the depths of the kind of like bear market i think for me for most of it i felt like this was just so obvious to me and i had always had conviction but a lot of people didn't and you know obviously because the there wasn't much money to be made it basically didn't attract any of the quote unquote moon boys or very speculative people and you attracted the actual builders and the people who cared about the technology that's why ethereum has such a strong community now there's all these other kind of like networks that are spinning up today and they've only seen a bull market and their communities have only seen a bull market those communities i'm like if we go into

another kind of like proper i guess bear market that maybe lasts a year or something like that i don't know like as i said i don't believe we're gonna have like the long-term bear markets again but if it happens and we go into a longer term thing i guarantee you over 90 of the people will be gone they're not going to stick around they're only here for the money and that's fine like there's nothing wrong with being here for the money i spoke about this the other day but it's very obvious to me because it's the same thing happens every single time it even happened um after the may crash in a in a limited fashion where a lot of people kind of left and and and the ecosystem was very very quiet um and it's just obvious why why they left and why they come so

from that perspective don't look at a community as it exists today and think that that's real and lasting because as soon as the easy money stops as soon as people stop making money as soon as the the bull market kind of like subsides or the market goes quiet those people are gone and the only people left are the builders and the true believers and most of them are pretty much concentrated in ethereum these days so uh yeah that's why i kind of put out this tweet here but as i said i'm not going to spend too much time on that one a bunch of other stuff to get through here so uh connects announced today at ecosystem grants program so so uh the connected ecosystem grants program funds promising individuals and projects to build and contribute to growing the connex network so more details is here for how to uh

submit for wave one so if this sounds like something that you want to be interested in definitely go check out this blog post and apply um i i think like uh where what do they got here what what does knex look for so they're looking for projects that meaningfully improve connects in some way are passionate about the tech and community have a track record of of producing high quality outputs uh embody connectors values and ethos and ideally have a path to long-term financial sustainability so if you're interested in building something on connect something like what coin hippo built which was a connex explorer or what one i've built which i built like an interface called xpollinate for for the uh the connex network anything like that if you're interested in that definitely go check this out and i put

through an application i'll link it in the youtube description for you all right so i know i'm talking about my my tweets a lot today but i i think it's important they stop it i think these topics just more generally are very important um so what i've been seeing lately is not i i'm seeing something that is kind of like making me a little bit concerned and i'll read out the tweet here so i tweeted out saying the biggest risk for web3 crypto is that it gets hijacked and we end up recreating web 2 with the same old centralized gatekeepers the scary thing is is that is that this can easily happen even if people are building with good intentions we need to fight to keep crypto decentralized now i want to focus on the second part where i said the scary thing is that

this can easily happen if even if people are building with good intentions because what what i'm seeing right now play out in the ecosystem is that we're actually go a lot of these other ecosystems are going down the path of recreating the centralized web 2 space that we have today just with different uh we're just with kind of like new bosses that are the same as the old bosses and the thing is is that there's a lot of people building these sorts of things and they're doing them with good intentions they're not actually building these things thinking yes i'm building something super centralized i want to suck all the value out of users and i want to be in total control most of the people building are not thinking like that at all but they are either naive to or being misled into building on platforms and building

things and thinking that they actually are building something that's decentralized or that is long-term sustainable or is that or is actually revolutionary when in reality they're not really doing that at all they're building the same thing that already exists but it's harder for them to kind of see that because there's so much kind of like marketing in this industry that people kind of fall for now i'm not going to call out any particular networks but i'm sure you can understand which ones i have in mind here and and it is kind of like concerning for me and you know i didn't want to expand on it and call out any networks in my tweet because people just call me ethmax not that i read the replies anymore but like this is exactly why i stopped reading the replies because i can't even like i'm sure if i

scroll down here i haven't read them and i'm sure if i scroll down here i'm going to find tons of replies kind of like i'm talking about you know being being an 8th max you're coping or whatever but it seems to be a popular tweet anyway so that was nice that a lot of people agreed with me um but you know in terms of like what i'm talking about here i'm talking about the networks that basically say oh we're decentralized enough or we tr you know they traded centralization for more scalability look if you i'm not saying that these people have bad intentions but the thing is even if they have good intentions they're building something that is not the is not decentralized is not in the kind of like web 3 ethos and community values it is not something that is actually going to add good to the world it is

going to be a net negative in the long term and and the thing is if these things get network effects and moats what's going to end up happening is that we're going to get stuck with them and we're just literally as i said we're going to recreate the same web 2 kind of world that we have today just with different uh different bosses but they're gonna be the same thing right there's gonna be new and different in that they're gonna be different faces but they're gonna be exactly the same as the old ones and i really like this that's my biggest fear out of uh for everything in crypto like bigger than any of the technical stuff or whatever or any of kind of like the um the risks of kind of like ethereum network upgrades or any of the risks around layer 2 adoption or anything like that

my biggest fear has always been that we get psyops into essentially just recreating the old system because of our naivety or because we weren't paying enough attention and that's why i always push back on things that i don't consider to be truly decentralized or have an actual path towards decentralization and and the people building them uh are either kind of like malicious because some people are malicious or they're just like naive to the fact that what they're building is not actually decentralized and and they're actually kind of like marching us down a path that we shouldn't be going down so i'm going to keep fighting that fight of course i believe that decentralization is the most important thing in crypto by far there's literally i'm sorry but there's nothing more important than that if you don't have

decentralization you don't have a crypto network to me all you have is like a database like just why are you even bothering with a crypto network you have aws with a token essentially that's just my strongly held belief um there is obviously a spectrum to decentralization but i think that the base layer that everything gets built on like the layer one needs to be decentralized you cannot compromise on that there is there is no there is no room for compromise in my mind on that so hopefully you all feel the same way if you don't i'd love to hear about it of course i'm not just kind of like trying to to stay in my little bubble and say that what i'm saying is right but if you want to debate this with me be sure you can join the discord channel and i'll reply to

you there which is much easier to debate there don't don't do it in youtube comments because it's just like it's a mess um but uh you know i think that you guys watch your reefy all the time you know exactly what my stance is on this sort of stuff and if you spend any time in the discord channel we have these discussions all the time um we just really need to fight to make sure that we don't devolve into what web 2 is because it may not seem like it but web 2 is really really bad right now like it's so bad that like i mean you guys know like these kind of like there's these mega corps that harvest all that information sell it all profit off of us without us even knowing about it have all these kind of like centralized repositories de-platform people kill

developer ecosystems it's so absolutely terrible and it's it's kind of like it gets more dystopian by the day i my number one kind of like goal in this ecosystem is to make sure that doesn't happen right i just i if that does happen we've failed completely like there's nothing else matters if that happens because i will literally leave the ecosystem if it gets to that point where um crypto reaches maturity in that it gets mass adoption but we get mass adoption on something that is not decentralized as a base layer i i cannot stand by and support that if we get to that point so i will keep fighting but i it's an uphill battle for sure because centralization is just easier than decentralization it always has been always will be and you need to you need to kind of like fight to preserve it so

yeah anyway last thing to talk about because i'm going over time here which is related to this which was paulina uh you know polly now everyone knows playing i put out another tweet today where they said on five top criteria that matter matter for a settlement layer culture of users running nodes wide token distribution credible neutrality lindy and liquidity bitcoin is still arguably the leader so so it's frustrating to see there's no concerted effort to support roll-ups there and then polly now goes on to say ethereum has a percent potential to surpass bitcoin on all of these and it's already at par on economic security but there's still work to be done and we're still years away i'd love to see some competition in the sediment layer space because no one is even trying now no one is trying it really is just ethereum and

bitcoin and bitcoin isn't even trying because i don't have uh support for like things like roll ups which i've discussed before but just a quick mention of all these points culture of users running nodes really it that only exists in ethereum and bitcoin no other network can claim this i don't know any other network that takes running nodes as seriously as ethereum and bitcoin does and i would actually say that bitcoin has ethereum beat here you know as much that as i give bitcoin and bitcoin is they really have a strong kind of culture of running nodes and they do run more nodes and ethereum does why token distribution bitcoin's been around longer it's had more market cycles it was distributed uh you know in a way when it was kind of like worthless it has better distribution than than eighth which is fine is not far behind

but btc has better distribution credible neutrality i would say that ethereum and bitcoin are on par here i wouldn't actually say that that bitcoin's a leader lindy obviously bitcoin's been around longer so it has more lindy and liquidity ethan btc on par again so as you can see here the only competitor the only kind of two networks that are competing to be a settlement later layout or ethereum and bitcoin and ethereum is pretty much like beating bitcoin at this point and if bitcoin never gets support for roll-ups ethereum is literally just gonna like leave it in the dust and you know anti-pro synthesis says yeah bitcoin lacks uh f which is which was uh f where's f uh uh i don't know where f is oh so he's he's detailing it but he says bitcoin lacks practical usability and a functional layer zero and then

polynomial goes on to say rollups will give it f which is practical usability but yes a functional layer 0 is the reason why it's not happening so because they're layer 0 their social lay is so broken they can't actually integrate things like roll ups because the community doesn't want it which is dumb because like just adding support for roll-ups would be a massive boon to bitcoin but you know maybe they do it far into the future they're not doing it now but yeah just related to what i was talking about before but i think that's going to be it for today i've gone over time 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