Uniswap growth, Ribbon Finance introduced and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #58 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 16th of february 2021 all right everyone let's get into the news from the last 24 hours or so so just a tweet here that i wanted to kick off today's episode with it's from santiago i've spoken about him a few times on the refuel so i'll just read out the tweet here he said basically paradigm shifting tech like the internet gets adopted because it is a plus 10 times improvement faster better cheaper dial up internet was prohibitively expensive so too is ethereum at times both breakthroughs no less cheaper is the last piece to resolve leading to mainstream adoption uh and and tweet there so i mean i've

spoken about this a lot on the refuel obviously over the past few weeks you know the ethereum high gas fees has a lot of people kind of i guess you know feeling crappy about ethereum right they kind of can't use it it's become too expensive for them and we have all these kind of other chains now talking about being you know i guess better more scalable all this stuff blah blah i'm not going to rehash what i've spoken about before with regards to that but i did want to hit on the note here that you know if you go back through throughout history in general and look at kind of like all the technological advances they always started out like this they always started out like super expensive and then got cheaper over time and i've spoken about that on the refill before but i think this tweet just kind

of encapsulated that pretty pretty well i think um you know when you're living in the moment right now you kind of like lose sight of i guess like the long term picture because you can imagine like if if you ever experienced dial up internet um you know how annoying that was right and you thought to yourself wow this is you know yes i can access the internet internet's really cool but doing so is like super annoying because dial up you know you had to die it's a dial up literally manually dial up um and then you know you'd lose your connection if the phone rang or something and you couldn't use the phone line at the same time as as kind of the internet and there wasn't really widespread adoption of mobile phones kind of in that in that kind of era there wasn't smartphones or anything

like that so uh you know that was super annoying and everyone was complaining about it right you'd always complain about it and that's the same thing with gas fees today everyone's complaining about them you know it makes things you know kind of shitty to use right for lack of a better term there uh you know it's not unusable but it's like it's definitely not the best user experience right now uh of course right so i think we're gonna see the same kind of thing happen where you know ethereum scaling via layer 2 and and with eth2 as well and with kind of some layer 1 improvements like possibly increasing the um the gas limit if we have some if we implement some of the technology that's been that's been talked about um i think that will be our broadband moment where you know the end users won't really feel

the gas fees anymore they'll still pay like small fees on layer two but they'll be tiny right they're absolutely tiny i think on loop ring it's like two cents for for a kind of a loopering trade or something which is obviously much less than i think you know 30 or 40 dollars for uni swap these days so i think that's where we're going to get to so yeah i just thought santiago's tweet here was a great way of encapsulating that and it's you know it's something that i think about pretty much every day now and you know not just because of um it's something that like i deal with every day being in d5 but also because you know given that i have like a pretty large following on twitter every time i tweet anything i always get some reply guys i like to call them you know talking about

ethereum killers and you can actually see on one of my tweets here i tweeted kind of like thank you to uh santiago here and someone replied with lol and that's why ethel will never inevitably pass the baton to other chains and it's just you know i mean it's just frustrating right it's like super frustrating i do so much educational kind of work through the newsletter you know through the youtube channel um you know on twitter i like to post things there and you know i talk to so many people in dms and stuff and then i just get these like really random nothing burger comments all the time and it's kind of like disheartening so if i sound like a broken record talking about this stuff on the refuel and i know i'm preaching to the choir here but the reason is because i want to kind

of like build a i guess a community of people who can go and educate people themselves like you know everything that i'm teaching you on the refuel through my newsletter through whatever i want you to kind of take that on board and kind of educate other people with i don't you know i'm only one person i can only do so much right i've got the same 24 hours in a day that everyone else has but i think the more we educate people and and the kind of the the more we do that in a constructive way the better it is and unfortunately like i'm i'm getting to the point where i just like stop replying to these people now especially if they're going to be like really kind of i guess basically be a smart ass about it because it's just not worth my time

anymore to do that and you know a lot of them aren't even open to being educated they just straight up come to me and go you know xyz chain is going to kill ethereum and i'm like okay well obviously you don't care to to know you know why ethereum has these issues or why it has high fees you don't care to know about anything else there um you just want to i don't know promote your your kind of ethereum killer so from that perspective i i've pretty much like uh kind of stopped replying to those people um but in general you know there are some sometimes people that will come up to you they come to me and they they genuinely want to know why the fees are so high and then when you explain to them you know exactly why basically ethereum is very

decentralized we don't want to kind of uh compromise on that to achieve scale they they tend to understand and i think the the learning curve is still very steep in crypto especially around these subjects because it's very easy for someone to go on to say like binance smart chain right that's centralized and kind of experience you know the same sort of things that they would experience on ethereum whether that be an amm like you know i think it's called pancake swap that's like a straight copy of uni swap um and they might think it's like equivalent when you know they don't see below the surface level they don't see that you know binance my chain is just centralized right it's not decentralized it doesn't have what ethereum has um it is just like a straight up centralized clone

so not to pick on on that but i thought that was just like an obvious example uh so yeah they need to be educated here and to be fair like i was a noob as well when i first got into this stuff especially when i first got into ethereum in 2017 you know i was i wasn't saying i wouldn't say i'm a fan i was a fan of other chains um but i like i kind of like bought into them you know i invested in polka dots kind of ico in 2017 um because uh well i mean one reason because like i wanted to make money but i mean the tokens were locked for like three years but the second reason was um because of gavin wood like i bought into his vision like he's a great kind of presenter and speaker but then as i progressed through the

bear market and i learned more about ethereum and i came at it from like a a different approach i kind of realized that um these other chains like just didn't make much sense a lot of them and ethereum made the most sense ethereum had the most kind of network effect and that wasn't going to change anytime soon and that thesis has played out essentially right it hasn't changed yet maybe it will change in the future i don't know i'm betting that it won't change too much um but yeah and i guess like enough on that topic i don't want to bore you with another kind of rant about uh you know theorem killers and stuff but i think it's very important for it to be top of mind because it's definitely something that you know i i assume that you're all seeing in your day to day especially on

twitter and i've had a few people message me and they're really frustrated too they're like they're kind of like i don't know what to say like i don't know how to hit back at these people you know i don't know how to do this i'm going to do that and really i mean at the end of the day if someone's not willing to learn and then they're just going to be like really annoying about it then it's not worth your time to educate them so something like that to keep in mind as well for sure so uh i saw this on twitter today emiliano released this new website called the reviews dow so uh this was based on and he says here the recent events uh i guess like events being the economic exploits and hacks within defy has shown us just how important security

is there's a lack of supply for kind of audits and things like that compared to demand and i spoke about how auditors are pretty much backlogged to i think you know april or may right now um so basically uh this is this website's supposed to be a peer-to-peer review kind of space so you can go there and you can kind of get like peer review on your code and on your smart contracts and things like that and you know i spoke about this yesterday right where i said that uh we're seeing a lot more teams now just do peer review rather than go to an auditor because they want to get their kind of app to main net and they don't have time to wait three or four months for it to be audited um so yeah i'm really glad to see this i mean i tried

to go to the site before but it wasn't working maybe it will load in the background here if i open it up here um but there's a thread here explaining exactly what it is and how it's going to work and everything like that uh you know tasha from alpha finance kind of like replied and said this is great um she would like to join which is which is really cool to see here and a bunch of other people replied as well um so yeah great little initiative here um for those who don't know emiliano is like a white hat kind of hacker he does a lot of security related stuff and he kind of knows his stuff yeah he's also doing a bunch of other things you can see in his profile here he's the co-founder of of marquee exchange uh d-phy italy uh you know synthetics link i mean there's

a bunch of different projects here so he's obviously very deep within the ecosystem so it's great to see him putting this kind of community initiative together so yeah great great going there so synthetics tweeted out today that they've partnered with elluvium which is a new kind of game that's actually being built by synthetics founder kane warwick's brother called kieran warwick uh and they pretty much like look like twins but they're not like it's it's it's funny when i go to kieran's profile i look at the picture and i'm like wow like it's just it looks exactly like kane but i mean that makes sense because they're brothers but anyway aside from that uh elluvium has a token of course that they're bringing out called the ilv token um and you can actually get some of these if you join the elluvium discord and

and if you're already part of the synthetic discord so being part of both of those you'll get airdrops some tokens here but for those who don't know alluvium is a essentially a new i guess you could call it blockchain game coming out they've been teasing it for a while it's launching on uh immutable x in q3 of 2021 uh immutable x is um this scaling solution coming from uh immutable uh the builders of gods unchained so that's coming out soon and and it's like an nft kind of scaling solution so elluvium is basically a collection and auto battler game so they're designing all these different like unique monsters and things like that as you can see here the synthetics one limited edition here um to like kind of battle in in i don't know i'm assuming it's going

to be like an online battle sort of thing so i'm looking forward to it but yeah they're kind of slowly leaking out information here which i thought was really cool so definitely go check this out you know if you're already part of synthetics discord there's no harm in joining the eluvian one and then getting some of these uh ilv tokens because i mean given like it's close the close relationship between synthetics and alluvium and given the hype behind this that i'm seeing right now i think these tokens could end up being worth something so you know there's no harm in getting an airdrop that's for sure so this i think was the biggest news of the last 24 hours so uh this youtuber called mk mkbhd or marquez brownlee he's a very very popular youtuber he's got 13.6 million subscribers and he's a tech youtuber so

he does a lot a lot of mobile phone reviews and stuff like that he's been around for quite a while i watch him pretty pretty regularly on youtube he's pretty good at what he does but basically today he put out a video on dogecoin now he basically explained what dogecoin kind of was and how it works and you know touched on cryptocurrency in general like bitcoin and like um you know altcoins he even used the term altcoins which i thought was was pretty wild he didn't really talk about ethereum unfortunately but halfway through the video he actually calls out tron now you would have seen and i spoke about on the refuel there were a bunch of kind of like c grade celebrities putting out tweets about tron recently and everyone knew that there were paid tweets and um they weren't disclosed that they were

paid tweets at the time by these celebrities which is actually illegal uh in the us and the sec is probably gonna go after these people now but what ended up happening was uh marquez revealed that he was actually contacted by someone i don't think he said who it was uh and justin's son actually denied that it was anyone in the tron foundation but basically marquez was was was contacted about promoting tron via his twitter account right paid promotions there he went through the email that he received and basically called it out and you know this was a pretty big deal right because this is a huge audience that's not only kind of learning about crypto for the first time but also kind of getting a taste of some of the scams that are going on right and some of the scammy stuff that goes on

and i think you know marquez showing this sort of stuff and going to catch the eyes of the regulators and the regulators are going to see this and be like well okay we have to look into this now because they did end up finding some of the other celebrities that used to kind of promote icos and things like that a lot of money um and you know i think they should do the same thing for these these celebrities who are promoting this stuff like this is some of the the grossest stuff out there especially when it's not disclosed that it's a paid tweet uh and i really hope that we can clean up the messiah but you know outside of that i just thought it was wild that um someone like marquez was covering cryptocurrencies he has a i think he has a close relationship with

elon musk and obviously elon has been tweeting about dogecoin a lot so that caught everyone's attention but yeah he basically went over what dogecoin was what bitcoin was what the altcoins were and and very briefly touched on ethereum didn't even really touch on ethereum which was which was a bit sad but i think you know as i as i said here on twitter this just shows that we're mainstream now right and i wrote about this a bit more in the daily grain newsletter but crypto is mainstream and and you know i i say this a lot but like at this point you know you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in the developed country uh you know sorry in the developed world or in a developed country that hasn't heard of bitcoin by now right and a lot of them would have heard of ethereum by now a lot of them would have

heard of nfts and and d5 but you know not i mean probably a lot less than would have heard about bitcoin for example but yeah i don't think uh you know pretty much anyone that i ever talked to about cryptocurrency you know they might ask me like what do you do for a living blah blah i i always start with you know do you know what bitcoin is like i don't start with ethereum because you know if i if i suspect that they're like total noobs and actually aren't in the scene at all i'm just going to assume that they know bitcoin and you know pretty much 10 times out of 10 like 100 of the time they will have heard of bitcoin before um and you know these people come from all walks of life they're not just like tech people or like finance people they

come from all different kind of industries and they've heard of bitcoin because it's been in the news for so long now right it's been in the news multiple times it was in the news in 1314 bubble in the 17 bubble in in this current bubble so yeah most people have heard of it and of course people have heard of it because of these billion dollar companies like tesla putting it on their knowing their balance sheets and stuff as well so yeah cryptos mainstream now embrace it i mean i've said on the refuel before how i think social signals aren't really going to work anymore as top signals you know celebrities shilling random coins is not going to work anymore and i think you know a lot of the top signals have already gone off for me and we're still going up and i'm still very

bullish so yeah in general that's something to keep in mind too but i mean go check out this video as well i'll link it in the youtube description um it's a it's a good little video to watch and if you're into like uh you know tech and mobile phones and stuff like that definitely go check out marquez's channel it's actually really really good and i i've enjoyed it over the years for sure so hayden adams from uni swap put out a tweet today saying that uni swap had uh processed over 100 billion dollars in cumulative volume since it launched with as you can see on the chart here the majority of that volume happening you know from i guess like june 2020 the start of d5 summer to today uh this growth has been absolutely insane right like 100 billion dollars in cumulative volume

which is really really great to see here um i i like to see like how the growth kind of started i guess in d5 summer but it's just gone exponential since it hasn't slowed down now given that this is cumulative volume this isn't going to go down right but it can kind of like go go flat right if it wasn't growing anymore you would see like a flat trend but it's just growing exponentially here which is really really crazy to see so i don't expect this to slow down at all given the rate of growth here given we're in a bull market and given you know the timing uh i guess i could see us getting to potentially one trillion dollars of cumulative volume for unisop by the end of this year even right depending on how hot the market gets now of course unusual

unisop's going to be coming out with v3 they're going to come out with a layer 2 solution so that's going to be even better you know they're layered their volume is actually like even though it's really impressive it's still limited by the the the kind of scalability on layer one especially with the gas phase and stuff right because a lot of small traders are now priced out and a lot of this activities is just like i guess traders who want to pay those fees and kind of like whales and stuff like that so very very interested to see how quickly we get to 1 trillion from here especially with v3 coming out and layer two kind of coming out for unisop as well so yeah very very uh interested um to see how fast this grows so charged particles announced their pre-seed round

led by the layout coin gecko uh sorry led by the layout with participation from coingecko parify capital for uh for revolution capital and a bunch of other investors here for those who don't know charged particles is building a standard that allows nfts to do more now what this means is that they're trying to make nfts more productive right to do more within i guess uh d5 especially right using it as collateral or generating yield on your nfts and stuff like that or just doing more interesting stuff with it uh so yeah if that's something that you're interesting definitely go check out the project um you know i haven't really looked into it too deeply myself yet it's on my backlog for sure but you know they've they've raised some money from uh some

uh some pretty good investors here and some good angels as well like leighton cusack from pool together tyler ward from barnbridge stani from ave of course there's no cane that i can see here remember how i was saying yesterday how kane and stani are in pretty much like every single kind of uh fundraising round these days um kane isn't here so uh stein is going at it alone but still i think that's pretty cool to see uh so yeah definitely go check this out if this is something that you're interested in so a really cool tool came out from instadap today called defy simulation so what this tool allows you to do and it's in and they kind of partnered with tenderly to do this is that you can simulate different kind of defy actions gas free so it's basically a fully

simulated kind of environment it doesn't do any main net transactions but it gives you a playground or a sandbox to kind of play in to get a feel for the different kind of apps on ethereum right without having to spend gas so i thought this was really really cool and you can simply go to d5.instadap.io here and you can kind of like load up your wallet and everything like that with like i guess play money essentially and then play around with apps like maker compound rv uni swap you know do swaps and things like that and just like basically do everything you would do on mainnet in a simulated kind of sandbox environment so if this is something that you kind of interested in because you're maybe newer to the ecosystem and you don't want to have to experiment by spending money on gas fees which

obviously is not cheap right now then this is something for you and i think this is a really great tool to onboard uh more people into the ecosystem right uh we're we're gonna have trouble on boarding people when they have to pay 50 in fees to do a uni swap trade so this is just like letting them do that you know without the fee so kudos to the instadap and tenderly teams here for putting this together i think it's going to be a huge value add to all of d5 so ribbon finance kind of came out of i guess kind of stealth today uh and they kind of announced themselves and there and it's kind of like on on main net i think uh but basically what this is it's a new project focused on creating structured products within d5 now structured products are some of the

most exotic products you'll find in finance they are not typically products that retail investors will ever kind of play with uh so stuff like perpetual swaps zero coupon bonds uh options and stuff like that um these these kind of fall into uh i guess like what what a structured product is so what's i guess the tldr instruction structured products is that they package multiple derivatives into a single product so they will package like you know perpetual swaps and options or whatever into a single product that anyone can kind of like trade with uh without worrying about the underlying complexities here now obviously this is not a product that you as a retail investor probably ever kind of touched these are products that are typically traded by people who do this for a living right

finance professionals traders banks institutions but this is defy and in d5 we bring these products to retail investors right we bring these products to the everyday person and this is what ribbon finance is trying to do so really really cool to see this here uh you can definitely go check this out in the youtube description for a full breakdown of what this is if you want to learn more about it but again this is just more kind of democratization of finance coming to d5 because you would never in your life touch these products if you weren't one of those kind of people like a trader or an institution or someone in finance because you one i mean like one you could argue that i guess regular people don't need access to this but at the same time who needs access to it right like you should

be able to trade whatever you want wherever you want from whenever from wherever in the world that you want right so and that's i guess like why we're all such big believers in d5 because it lets us do all this stuff in a non-custodial way and there's no gatekeepers here and there's no one telling us what you know what can and can't be done and no one can kind of like blocking us from accessing these products so yeah kudos to ribbon finance for kind of coming out of stealth here and i think coming onto mainnet as they say here i'm excited to see them and and how they grow from here so alpha finance put out their kind of like recap a road map and looking forward piece here so obviously there was an exploit that happened with alfa homora v2 with the iron bank with cream and

everything like that which i covered yesterday so i won't go into that now but they've released a blog post basically uh recapping what happened you know going through a road map of what's going forward now and kind of looking forward and this was a very very professional kind of uh a response i think across the board from alpha finance here and you know this is one of the reasons why i have alpha tokens and i'm invested in this project is because i am very very impressed with their execution not only on the product side but how they handle the community stuff how they've handled this kind of exploit and and what they're doing to kind of remedy this going forward so for a full kind of breakdown you can read the piece here but i guess the trdr is that they're going to uh they haven't

uh come up with how they're going to kind of make users i guess like make the debt whole just yet i think they're still coming up with that but they're promising to do more kind of internal reviews peer reviews and audits on v2 of their protocol which means that v2 is i think not really operational now from the borrowing side of things um until they've done all this so yeah it's kind of like in limited functionality right now but you can still use v1 to do a bunch of different things here and stuff like that and they also kind of go on about how they think that you know d5 is kind of at an inflection point here and it needs to shift towards a much more secure and robust ecosystem and alpha kind of wants to lead that here so yeah very very awesome to see this go give this a

read if you haven't yet so awoke from get coin put out these stats saying that uh git coin just passed their q4 2020 numbers only with only halfway through q1 in 2021 so this number has been growing quite fast here and for those who remember we haven't had a i haven't had the next get coin grants round yet so grounds grants around nine is scheduled to start in march and as uh as a wiki notes here uh he reckons this number is going to explode once uh that round starts and i think it will as well i think you know so many people and so many companies and defa apps have made so much money over the past few months that that money is getting fed right back into the ecosystem through bitcoin here and not only from that from individuals

as well donating to projects that they like i mean i've spoken about how i'm going to be bugging you guys almost every day to go donate to projects once the matching round starts because it's the best way to give back at the end of the day there's no better way on ethereum to give back to people and i think a lot of people wait until the the matching round starts because they want to get their donations matched from these sponsors which is only logical right uh you know i i as a as a beneficiary of get coin grants over the years as part of the daily gray and ethub it definitely you know helps a lot and it makes it makes you know me feel really awesome that people value my work and what i'm doing and that is a reason why so many people

love it because a lot of it is open source work a lot of it is not monetized um you know not just within i guess like the tech side but the media side as well you know as you guys know the daily way across all of its channels is completely free i don't charge you know substitution fees there's no ads or anything like that and that's the same for a lot of this open source software where you know it's open source so it's free for anyone to use and it provides a lot of value to different people but typically the teams building it don't extract any kind of value from it themselves uh they might make money from doing kind of like other things like they may be auditing um you know they may run a a business on the side for auditing and stuff like

that right or they may be doing other work like bug bounties and all that sort of stuff so for them to kind of like get money kind of donated to them and giving back from the ecosystem for things that actually drive a lot of value and kind of like hold up these billion dollar protocols that we're building feels really really good so yeah anyway i'll be ranting more about that you know i'm sure over the over the next few weeks and especially when the the grand surround starts for you to all go donate here so yeah congrats to the get coin on this growth it's really awesome to see all right that's it for today's episode everyone thank you again for listening and watching if you haven't done so give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the youtube channel join the daily grade discord and

subscribe to that newsletter and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone