Web3 not web2, Transak L2 fiat on-ramps and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #278 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 22nd of december 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so another crazy day in the crypto markets it was dominated by well not so much the market book i guess like the crypto twitter sphere it was dominated by conversations around web 3 and about how people like uh jack the c the former ceo of twitter elon musk obviously everyone knows who elon musk is kind of uh i guess being bearish on webtrail making fun of it now this is really funny because of the fact that it's just in their best interest to make fun of web 3 i think especially jack dorsey who you know he made his fortune off centralized web two

companies like twitter like square and obviously he's stepped down from twitter and he's focusing on some bitcoin related things but i think he's misguided in thinking that bitcoin is the only thing in crypto worth talking about i mean there's so much more obviously worth talking about uh and you know i put out this tweet today where i basically said web3 has given people five six and even seven figure airdrops web 2 has given people personalized ads because a lot of the rhetoric has also focused around vcs and how vcs are the ones that are kind of like dominating the web 3 space and it may be true for some projects but a lot of projects aren't dominated by vcs but if even still if you contrast web 2 companies with web 3 i guess like ecosystems dows whatever you want to

call it the balance between vcs and community ownership or kind of like retail ownership is very very different let's take twitter as an example here i saw a kind of like um a breakdown before that i think jpmorgan chase owns like nine percent of twitter right i can't think of any project within crypto right now um in a legitimate project that has any one entity that owns nine percent of the total supply yes there are projects that have heavy kind of like vc presence but no single vc owns nine percent of the supply of the token as far as i know um and on top of that there are also opportunities for you know regular retail investors to get in

on these tokens much earlier than they would on something like twitter stock for example twitter didn't go public for a very long time by the time it went public it was already worth tens of billions of dollars so really retail became kind of like the um which investors became the people that got dumped on and i've had this theory for quite a while that the existing kind of like financial system is set up in such a way that the early investors get to extract as much value as they can out of uh out of kind of like these investments and then they need someone to kind of like sell to later now when you really dig deep into it a lot of the buyers of stocks and things like that are pension funds right and pension funds are what they're retail investors money i mean

they're everyone's money right but like their money that that is kind of like sitting there and sits there for a long time that kind of like pours in from the everyday person because uh most of it is just everyday people adding to their uh kind of like retirement funds there um and i think it's called the 401k or something in in the us and it's probably different where depending where you are but when you kind of like look at the i guess life cycle of a kind of like startup to ipo you have a startup raisers from vcs angel investors whatever else right those early insider investors this is the web 2 world right it does a seed or a precede does a series a series b series c series d sometimes series e sometimes series f like they can go you know as late as they want it to go to

till but then eventually they'll they'll ipo right and by the time this company gets to an ipo given that you know even if it's not you know a lot of time it has to be a successful company or at least have some traction but by the time it gets to the ipo stage it's already worth billions if not tens of billions of dollars in terms of market cap and then that's the only opportunity at ipo that retail investors have to invest in these sorts of things most of the time there are some services that allow retail investors to invest earlier in these stages but generally it's kind of like it's kind of like that contrast that with the web 3 world with the crypto world and how many opportunities has been afforded to people to get in on the ground floor of so many different investments and whether they

be kind of like layer one investments layer twos nfts d5 no matter what it is there's always been plenty of opportunity for the average retail investor to get in on the ground floor uh or at least near the ground floor and ride the wave up to you know to riches essentially um and that's exactly what so many people have done through obviously bitcoin they've done it through eighth they've done it through things like d5 and nfts like being early and stuff of course like you have to sell right like um and then other like other layer one ecosystems as well people have made a lot of money there and then you know i'm sure when the layer 2 tokens come out it's going to be a similar thing but you could even count like matic as a layer 2 token and that's done quite well

whereas you just don't get that in the web 2 world so for people like jack and elon and maybe any other kind of like people to imply that web 3 is just a vc playground um especially given the context of them coming from like the web 2 world is just really laughable to me because at the end of the day web 3 is much more empowering web 3 has given people these six five six and even seven figure air drops web 2 hasn't given air drops to anyone like i never got a twitter stock airdrop right like no one no one did right no one ever got a twitter uh stock edge up like we didn't get an uber air drop right when they went public um we didn't get an airbnb airdrop or anything like that so when you kind of like take all that

into consideration it just becomes a thing of well i i think they're pushing back because they actually see that web 3 can be something really big right if it works like obviously there's still a long journey ahead of us but the magic of web 3 is that i mean i think there's two parts of web 3 that that um that are going to work really well the first part is community ownership right true community ownership of these things even if they have vc investors right and things like that it's usually a much smaller part of the overall kind of like token pie uh as opposed to kind of like um what it's like in the web 2 world so and also in the web 2 world there's no there's no community kind of like ownership there's no community kind of participation they're not dows or

anything like that and then the the second thing um if i remember what i was going to say here because i yeah there's the community ownership and then the second thing is they open kind of like apis and open data where you can basically keep your data to yourself you don't have to kind of like share it with anyone that you don't want to and you can take it where you want where you want to go so let's take a decentralized twitter for example like a truly decentralized twitter that actually kind of like uh works and makes sense it would be just a dumb protocol that allows users to bring their own data and supply it and revoke it at any time with something like an ethereum wallet they'd be able to sign in with their ethereum wallet they've able to use different interfaces to access twitter no one

could stop people from accessing it because it would be an open api on something like ethereum uh whereas you know centralized twitter doesn't have that centralized twitter has complete control over everything and it has all your data it farms it it kind of um harvests it it sells it to advertising companies and then at the end of the day you get personalized ads you don't get to be early or you don't get to kind of like uh participate in in twitter and you don't get to have like an air drop of their stock or anything like that so so yeah i just i mean it's funny because like i think i could rant about this for quite a while because it really gets me upset that there just the hypocrisy is just like intense when i really think about it but at the same time

i think that there's a little bit of fear there as well from these incumbents thinking wow okay you know if they really thought about it they would know that web 3 is kind of like the next evolution of the internet makes a lot of sense it's very empowering it actually helps people rather than uh uh rather than kind of like harvest your information and just sells them kind of pointless through point personalized ads i don't know about you guys but the ads i get are just like stupid like they're not even that personalized to be honest um i'm just scrolling through on my phone and i see these ads i'm like why would i even want to buy this and and i just really generally hate the web 2 model of monetizing via ads now i know that it was down like that because people like

having things quote unquote for free but i think that there are much better models out there especially given um the web 3 context with tokens and stuff like that so yeah i'm looking forward to seeing how that evolves over time of course but i'm going to leave it there because like as i said i could rant about this for a long time but i think that web 3 is inevitable it's going to happen whether these people want it to or not that's the beauty of it because it's decentralized uh jack elon whoever else cannot stop this from happening they can and moan all they want but web 3 is coming i mean it's already here but it's coming in in a really big way over the next few years it's going to disrupt the internet as we know it and it's going to change how people interact with the web so i'm

very much looking forward to all of that but i'm going to leave it at that for today so tranzact has announced a fiat on-ramps for arbitrary optimism today so this is pretty pretty huge right direct on-ramp uh to l2s via the tranzact app i think this is similar to uh ramp network that i covered last week or the week before i'm not sure if this has kyc transact it it might um you know unfortunately i think that's just the reality that we have to deal with is that a lot of these things are going to have kyc but it's the same thing as a centralized exchange i guess so really at the end of the day it's kind of like what we're all used to even though it's not ideal but yeah really really great to see this on both arbitrary and optimism's network simultaneously i'm very very happy that

they didn't just support one of them they supported both of them simultaneously and i'm sure that they're going to be uh be supporting more uh the more l twos as time goes on here so uh who do they support today so they don't they they support everyone globally except the usa which is coming soon man every time i see this every time i see the u.s excluded from things or taking longer to get like a new feature or being you know missing out on airdrops it's just so insane to me like the us is supposed to be at least for me like looking in is supposed to be literally the land of the free right land of liberty land of kind of like um making it so to speak right but they've

they just it's so bad when you look at kind of what's happening within crypto just i mean missing out on airdrops is one thing um that's obviously a major thing but other things such as not being able to invest in early stage projects going back to what i was saying before about i like the web 2 web 3 thing getting kind of like the short end of the stick when it comes to new integrations like this having all of their financial privacy basically del you know completely eroded like when you do kyc on these uh centralized us exchanges they're basically forced to give over a lot of that data to certain parties i know that coinbase actually fought the irs on this back in the day but they ended up having to give up still a fair amount of people's data to the irs because i mean

the irs said that they suspect people of um avoiding tax now whether that was true or not we will obviously never know but still i mean the amount of private not even just financial privacy but the amount of privacy you give up in general because you're just giving them all your kind of like um personal identifiable identifiable information they're able to track all of your transactions just like a bank account it's just insane i know this doesn't just happen in the u.s it happens in a lot of places but the u.s is particularly heavy-handed when it comes to financial regulations and this goes back to what i was saying before about how in the web 2 world everyday investors or retail investors cannot access these early stage investment deals in in large part due to the fact that there's a wealth requirement right there is a accredited investor laws which

requires you to have at least a one million dollar net worth excluding your primary residence or you have to have earned i think over 250 000 us dollars for two years in a row so that is obviously unobtainable for a lot of people and again i think it's geared just to favor vcs favor these kind of like big centralized institutions they get to invest early and then get it all the way to the ipo stage where they can finally offload their you know 1000x bags onto just retail investors i i and it's just it's really really bad so i hope the us gets their together here to be honest not just for these kind of like fiat on-ramps but just in general because when i see this sort of stuff and i see that you know a lot of my friends in the u.s are just getting kind

of like shafted on this and not being able to participate in kind of like the bankless revolution uh and i kind of participate in kind of like the uh the future of france as we like to call it uh i just get really really sad to be honest because at the end of the day as i said uh a lot of people view the us and a lot of people you know in and outside of the us are viewed as kind of like the land of the free the land of liberty land of do whatever you want um you know kind of like the land of making it but it's becoming the land of kind of not gonna make it right or have fun staying poor those those kind of like memes out there which is really bad because at the end of the day it shouldn't be like a

handful of of um old guys in suits that gets to kind of dictate how people interact with this new technology and that's what it really is when we saw this play out with the infrastructure bill there were so many people who have absolutely no idea what crypto is what it enables you know the fact that it's much more than just kind of like criminals using it much more than the scams and you know how they're going to lose out on economic growth by dragging their feet on this sort of stuff so i hope it gets better i think i think it will there was a hearing the other day and a lot of politicians had a really good grasp on crypto so i think they're learning but uh you know trying to legislate on it when you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about is

always super annoying and it's not exclusive to the us it's obviously uh with a lot of countries that they act like this um but unfortunately in the u.s it seems much more prevalent and much more heavy-handed than other jurisdictions but anyway end of the little mini rant they're still cool to see tranzact uh supporting optimism and arbitrary here so definitely go check it out if it's supported in your region so aztec announced aztec grants today so their goal with aztec is to create an open permissionless privacy ecosystem uh that's why they developed as tech connect uh and obviously with aztec grants it's going to fund development of bridge contracts for aztec connect at inception so a bridge contract is a simple 50 to 100 line interface allowing aztecs roll up to interact with any

with a given l1 smart contract so if you're interested in i guess um kind of like uh building this and applying for these grants be sure to do so uh that you know there's obviously money up for grabs people who do that so if you're a developer this is the kind of like process you you review the requested bridge contracts that are already at this link here choose one or propose your own apply for a grant get funding and face time with the aztec core team and then deploy pretty simple process i really do like that you get face time with the aztec call team as well there are a lot of smart smart cookies over there so that'd be really cool as well but yeah if you're a developer interested in kind of tackling these kind of things definitely go check this out i'll link it in the youtube

description uh and you know it might be a cool little holiday project as well i mean i know it's three days before christmas so maybe you can work on this over christmas and new year's as a as a kind of little holiday project to learn all about aztec and you know the broader zk space so speaking of zk uh starkware announced that that they have formed a strategic partnership with okx so they describe the partnership as reflecting their team's uh mutual commitment to make cryptocurrency and d5 strategies accessible to all ok excuses starting with an easy direct onboarding to starknet so this is just another kind of like centralized exchange on ramp to an l2 really really awesome to see that okay okay x is already supporting stark

net even though it's still at a very early stage in its life cycle here um but it's good that we get this sooner rather than later and again i really hate how coinbase is dragging their feet here it's i mean they still haven't even enabled polygons pos chain let alone l2s on ethereum it's from my understanding it really isn't something that should take very long i mean you know and same with binance i mean they did deposits from arbitrary but they haven't done withdrawals yet as far as i know unless i missed that but i don't think they've enabled withdrawals yet i i don't think they're dragging their feet on purpose i just think that either their organizations are so big that it just takes forever to do something or it's just not a priority for them so i think that maybe if it's not a priority

for them it means not enough people are asking for it and i think that's in part due to the fact that these l2s don't have tokens yet and i really think that these l2s need to issue their tokens sooner rather than later because a token is such a great kind of like shelling point for a community to rally around and it also acts as an incentive to go shield these things right to get them to get them adopted and to get them kind of like integrated with with different places i mean i'm sure you've all seen uh uh people kind of like bugging through bugging exchanges about l1 integrations or bugging apps to move over to these other kind of like evm compatible l1 and that's because they have a token right people hold this token they're motivated to do this it's all about incentives at the end of the

day so i really do hope these l2s come out with a token sooner rather than later and as i've said before i think once one of them do it uh the rest will follow i think matic is a special case you know you may be wondering well matic is an l2 token i think it's a special case and that matic has been around for quite a while already so it i mean from what i've seen people don't consider it to be kind of like uh uh in the same kind of i guess uh uh i guess reason same reasoning as as the other kind of like l2s out there like something like an arbor trimmer on optimism or a zk single start net something new i guess but the thing is the funny thing is is that matic has performed so well this year and

continues to perform so well that i don't get why people kind of like not bearish on it but at the same time they're kind of like leaving it out of the conversation a little bit there and the funny thing is the polygon pos train actually has an incredible amount of adoption and it's growing at an incredible pace as well so i think that's definitely in part due to the due to the token but also in part due to the fact that uh there's a token for the community rally around and the community just goes and bugs projects to deploy to polygon because of that so yeah power of a token guys you cannot underestimate it but still cool to see that ok x is supporting starkware and with starknet i hope that other centralized exchanges follow suit for stocknet as well so speaking of polygon they put out a

tweet yesterday uh basically uh linking to a blog post i think titled polygon cares which is basically a guide of how you can onboard your project in a quick and effortless manner to the polygon pos chain so it's basically a starter kit here not a blog post i should say so you can see all the links here there's a ecosystem day application a polygon starter kit links to different programs and and bounty forms and all that's good stuff there this is the kind of stuff that i think polygon does so much better than every other ecosystem they i mean their business development and marketing teams are just like next level and i'm not just saying this because i'm an advisor seriously like i follow every project in this space uh every ethereum based project in this

space um and all these other kind of like things especially the l2s and i i think it's safe to say that polygon has the best bd and marketing departments out of all of them right now uh and have they've had it for quite a while and not only do they do good marketing and business development but they also do good outreach to developers so stuff like this is exactly what's needed and this isn't to say that kind of like the other ecosystems the other l2 ecosystems aren't doing this either they do it they have really great documentation and they really do uh make it easy for people to onboard onto them but but at the same time polygon has just been doing it for a very long time they go above and beyond they don't just do kind of like the the standard stuff they try to think of ways

of ways to kind of like improve it over time and make it even better for developers which is really important because without developers and ecosystem doesn't really have any anything to do there's no apps and stuff i i know people like um have been complaining about some of the l2s being like oh there's not much to do on there like i'm just gonna wait around because uh these these apps haven't been deployed there yet and it just kind of strengthens my thesis is that the users are always gonna follow the developers and it's why the evm ecosystem i guess the evm standard is going to continue to be dominant because developers don't want to spend so much like a lot of time or most developers don't want to spend a lot of time learning a new language um deploy and getting their code reordered deploying

to a whole new ecosystem when there's not really much demand for it in the first place where whereas deploying to an evm compatible or avm equivalent network is super easy for them to do and one of those networks obviously is the polygon pos chain so yeah just great to see this kind of thing here again if you're a developer definitely go check this out um but even if you're not you can check this out you can definitely see what goes on behind the scenes of getting a project on to polygon so hashflow announced their token today at cashflow.com token so hft will be the token ticker and it will be cash flows governance token and will be available to claim at the end of january 20 2002.

so again uh just to disclaim here i'm going to invest through flow just to kind of like get that out there but uh i think you know it's funny because like we all know that everything's gonna have a token right and it's pretty much gonna be a governance token um but essentially in this in this twitter thread here they detail what the token is what it's gonna do what the kind of supply looks like you can see here that uh most of the supply is going to ecosystem development uh and then core team and investors are i guess like forty five percent of the supply together so core team twenty percent investors twenty five percent uh ecosystem development at fifty five percent um and 31.25 goes to the community treasury 5.25 to early community contributors and 14 to the lifeblood of the hash flow

protocol it's a market makers you can see uh the kind of like breakdown here 45 of the supply will go to the core team after 10 years wait so over time these will be diluted by token inflation that will mean an additional five percent each year into the community treasury after 10 years the ecosystem development allocation will increase to 68 so there is some inflation here as time goes on as well but anyway you can go read i guess like the whole uh twitter thread here for essentially the breakdown of it um i think you can already see what you're eligible for in terms of an airdrop if you go to to the website um so that's really cool to see but uh yeah i spoke about cash flow the other day about how it's kind of like a i guess a cross-chain um mev resistant

exchange with that gives you kind of like zero slippage similar to what xerox is trying to do where it's got like a network of market makers instead of being an amm it's just kind of like market makers filling and fulfilling orders i should say so a really cool project but again i am an investor in it so maybe a bit biased here but yeah very very cool to see that they've announced their token here and again guys i keep reminding you that every project is going to have a token pretty much all of them are going to do air drops it's worth your time to go out there and farm these air drops because even if it is only on the low end even if it is only and i say this it's just funny only a four-figure airdrop right which is still a lot of

money but like it's funny that i'm saying that it's still very much worth it and a lot you know many much of the time for a lot of these projects they are four figure drops five figure ones sometimes people get six figures it depends on kind of like what you did for the project if you did more than just kind of like use the protocol you help them out you're an early contributor all that good stuff there and some people even get like kind of seven figure air drops as well which is which has been crazy in the past i mean at one point my gtc airdrop was worth um seven figures i believe so yeah not not trying to kind of like brag or anything there but like just i mean when i saw that i was just kind of like in disbelief i'm like what the hell like i

just kind of like donated on this platform over the years and and kind of like now i have like all these gtc tokens and it's and obviously it's not just me there's a lot of other people that got um a lot of tokens from other projects i know that there are a few kind of like big ans air droppers that got six or seven finger air drops as well there so yeah i mean it pays to be an active ethereum web 3 user so definitely go out there and do that as i mentioned before there is a channel in the discord server called uh airdrop hunting so if you want to kind of like go in there and see what people are hunting and seeing people kind of like suggest playing around with definitely do so because at the end of the day this is free money guys like you

know i know a lot of you will just sell the air drop that's fine i mean a lot of the air jobs i've sold too uh i'm i'm going to be totally honest here i'm not interested in participating in governance in most of these kind of like protocols out there uh and you know if i'm getting an air drop which is free money one i do have to sell half of half of it anyway for taxes and then uh you know the other i'm just like well why am i going to kind of like keep this i'll just sell it i'll just buy some more eth with it right it's like i'm going to fear why would i go to dirty fit but like you know buying more ether that is always a good thing but but yeah definitely check out that channel in the

discord server all right so last up we here we have ethereum.org have announced that the ethereum.org homepage is now live in over 20 languages this is really cool so obviously it's been in english before and i think they supported a few other languages i don't know if it's going to oh there we go it's loaded here so you can click up the top right to look at what languages are supported um i'm not sure i think this is very slow i'm actually so i don't have internet in my new place right now i'm using my phone's hotspot so it might be a little bit uh kind of like laggy here uh to load but but yeah i don't think it's loading correctly but anyway you can click the top right here to kind of go to languages and see what's supported i don't think they

actually list which languages are supported here but i'm sure it's probably the 20 most popular okay it's loading now so yeah you can see here languages like arabic chinese simplified and traditional czech dutch german lithuanian korean norwegian i mean you can see the whole list here right vietnamese really really cool because the ethereum home page has a lot of great info on it already and then they're doing translations for each uh one of the pages that they've got as well there's a lot of pages on the ethereum website now and as i've said before because ethereum is a global kind of network and a global movement it doesn't make sense for it just to be available in english maybe one or two other languages it needs to be available in as many languages as possible to cover as much as the world as we can

because we shouldn't just be targeting the english speaking people we should be targeting everyone ethereum as a protocol allows you to build on it in any language that you want to uh as long as kind of like your code follows the rules of the protocol and everything like that so very very cool to see this the ethereum.org team is absolutely awesome like i i have a group with them because of um ether and we sometimes collaborate on things together and they just stellar they they really do kill it and i mean i've i've spoken about the website before and how it's just amazing how much this has changed in a few short years if for those of you who are around a few years ago the ethereum website had remained basically static from 2014 or 2015 until i think 2019 or something like that um

or maybe even 2020 where it got completely revamped after the community asking for it for a very long time and that was a dedicated team taking care of it as well so very very cool to see that very cool to see them supporting additional languages here but i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone