2020 recaps, 2021 predictions, Fuel v1 live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #27 - 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 cesano and today is the first of january 2021 that's right everyone it is a new year so happy new years to all of you i hope you had a great new year's eve and obviously today is news day so i hope you're watching this relaxing with a cup of coffee or something you know i'm looking forward to a day off work hopefully but yeah so basically i put out this tweet today that i'm giving a kind of like a new year's gift to everyone and i announced that the daily great ecosystem so the newsletter the youtube channel and kind of anything else that i launch in the future is going to remain

free forever so that means no sponsors no ads no subscription fees for any of the kind of newsletters or anything like that no premium groups none of that stuff um i'm a firm believer in education being free and i you know i don't i don't like blame anyone for monetizing it i mean i me uh myself and eric do it with ethub um but for me personally through the daily way i just wanted to remain free i think that you know i can reach a much wider audience like that i can educate a lot more people it's easier for people to share the content as well without it being gated or whatever uh but as i said don't blame anyone for for doing that um people are gonna make a living right so yeah and as i say said here um i'll

keep producing free ethereum content until i drop dead or go crazy uh maybe i'll go crazy first but i don't think so i i enjoy doing this too much i enjoy kind of the feedback that you all give me um and you know the the really great conversations i have with some of you that dm me on twitter and things like that it's really great to to talk to you so feel free to do that at any time as well you know join the discord channel too we've got some good discussions going on in there from time to time um and yeah feel free to ask me any questions you want like in that channel or dm me or whatever i will always reply um as long as it's not like you know pure questions about like what should i invest in and stuff like that i'm not

going to respond to those sorts of things but you know edu kind of like questions about you know stuff about ethereum and like the stuff you're confused about like how-to guides things like that i'm always happy to answer so yeah enjoy the free content going forward um tomorrow actually i'm putting out the so there won't be a daily great refuel as it's the weekend but i'll be putting out a yearly recap for 2020. so definitely look forward to that as well i mean i was getting all the content together over the past couple days and i'm like wow a lot of stuff happened and i kind of had to cut back on you know the non-major things happening because the video would be way too long uh but yeah it's safe to say ethereum had a pretty incredible year uh in 2020 uh and it's specifically d5

right um but just coming off i guess like the bear market in 2018 and 2019 into 2020 uh and seeing how much growth kind of happened it's just incredible uh but yeah i'll go over more of that in tomorrow's video so definitely look out for that one all right so as it's the end of the year was the end of the year we had a bunch of projects put out their recaps so zappa put out one of theirs um they basically hit 1 billion dollars in transaction volume in 2020 i think 2020 was also a breakout year for zappa given that they were great uh huge beneficiaries of the deficano summer and the i guess like yield farming movement uh they offered a lot of tools

to help people get into and out of that you know monitor their positions and things like that so they obviously had like a really big year there so they recap it here i won't go into into everything that they're saying here basically they're recapped every month and they get we get down to the bottom here and i think they have 2021 um yeah what they're going to be doing in 2021 so they're teasing a mobile app they've got a btc bridge into d5 directly from the dashboard and they're gearing zapper towards community efforts from streamlining protocol integrations to simple token editions and kind of stuff like that so yeah a lot to look forward to a lot that's already happened uh disclaimer here i am an investor in zappa so i just want to

make sure that i get that out there um but i basically invest in things that i use all the time right for me it's a no-brainer i i used zappa and still use zappa so much it's just insane like the zapify dashboard basically i use it pretty much every day and you know during d5 summer as i had a lot of things to monitor you know through different addresses and stuff like that i i was just living on it so for me it was like kind of a no-brainer to support the team there uh really really great team you know they they're building something that i think you know we need this sort of stuff right we need this stuff for newer people especially that you know and not just i guess newer people into the ecosystem but everyone wants to keep track of what they're doing

you know ether scans great but it doesn't offer you like all the portfolio features it'll just show you like you know what tokens you have your transactions stuff like that i mean obviously i love ether scan but it's you know zappo goes beyond that and there's other tools as well you know it's not just zap by right there's de bank or de bank um xerion there's a bunch of others out there so i think that you know it's not going to be a winner takes all thing i think that people will use what they kind of want to use and what they what what they feel comfortable using but for me that's definitely zappa so you know congrats to them on a great 2020.

another team that had a really great 2020 was optimism so uh optimism is the ethereum scaling team building optimistic roll-ups you've probably heard of them i think they're the most well-known ethereum scaling team uh so basically they had like a really really busy year uh they did they detail it here a lot of like in the weeds development going on within optimism to basically get their product to a test net version with synthetics they'll be doing a kind of test net there and they basically um have announced in this post that uh they're going to be rolling out their main net i think in q1 or yeah january 15th they've got a mainnet soft launch going live with synthetics so that's huge right i mean i've said

uh a few times now on this on the refuel and i continue to believe that 2021 is the year of adoption for layer 2 ethereum 2020 was the year of kind of you know getting these things to mainnet putting them out there so developers could play around with them and get comfortable with them right and that takes up quite a while but i do think 2021 is when we're going to see a lot more projects adopt it we already have projects like loopring diversify you know poly market all these sorts of things they're on layer 2 already but we need to have a flourishing layer to ecosystem we can't just have a couple of apps on there we need everyone to move to layer two and have their own implementation so that we can have that money legos going on again right um and then we can have that

composability and that and that whole flourishing ecosystem there so optimism is is at the forefront here with a bunch of other teams of course um they're they've been working like super hard for for a long time now i mean they used to be called plasma group so they were working on plasma for the longest time and i think optimistic roll-offs was like the spiritual successor to plasma so that's why they rename themselves to optimism uh which is a fitting name right but yeah they're one of my favorite teams in the space they have they have killed it this year with with their technical progress they've made a lot of breakthroughs and i can't wait to see what they do in 2021 some more predictions from twitter so eric connor um i guess my co-founder at ethub uh long

time friend he put out some predictions for 2021 here so basically he says that eth2 phase one will go live which is sharding in in 2021. i i mean i agree with this i think it does unless there's some sort of delay for some reason um i think that we can get phase one live in 2021 uh and this brings just so it doesn't bring i guess quote-unquote full sharding where the shards will have uh execution so they won't be running smart contracts on their own or anything like that they won't be doing like transactions and stuff what they will be doing is acting as like data available availability layers what that means is that layer 2 technology can actually use the shards as uh data stores so the data that's on the

on the shards can be used by layer 2 to do all the execution right all the smart contract stuff all the transactions so that's what phase one is um he he doesn't mention in any of these predictions about the eth one to eth2 merger that can still happen in 2021 in theory i don't expect it to i expect it to happen in 2022 but it can happen if i like as far as i know from the people i've spoken to there's been a lot of work done there to get it to a point where you know the only thing that they're really waiting for um i mean in terms of like critical thing that they have to wait for is basically for the beacon chain to be to be live for at least six months ideally 12 months to make sure that it's stable right

because once the merger goes through if there's a a critical error on the beacon chain with within proof of stake then that affects eth1 as well right um which is which is obviously a very big concern for these teams so or for i guess like the whole ecosystem so yeah i expect to see the merger in 2022 but i see no reason why you know phase one sharding can't go live in 2021 uh he also says he'll he expects to see eight million each staked i don't know about that one we have two million right now you know that would require another 4x i know that there are some centralized exchanges like coinbase that still haven't rolled out their uh their implementation yet there's rocker pool the decentralized solution as well

but there's other solutions already live and i don't know i mean the fact that it's locked still for a year plus from here um and and you know the the apy is uh what's the yield right now i don't even know i think it's less than 15 percent right now um given how much either staked i don't know if we'll get to eight million i mean i hope he's right i mean locking up eight million eight would be really cool but we don't even have eight million eight in d5 right and d5 offers the higher higher yields it offers you know more that you can do with your eth and things like that but maybe with the um the the kind of more centralized exchanges coming on board rockapoor and things like that we see more eat steak but yeah i think he's very optimistic about eight million

eat steak there but we'll see maybe i'm wrong hopefully i'm wrong but yeah we'll see we'll see about that one he goes on to say eip1559 will be implemented i i pretty much agree with that i'd say there's like a 90 plus percent chance that 1559 goes live this year it might be the end of the year so don't think it's going to come like any time soon um but i think you know we could see it in q4 of this year right uh because the test nets are going well the implementations are kind of done it's just not on main net right we have to wait for a few different things to go through on eth1 eth1 moves quite slowly uh you've probably noticed that the protocol work at least moves slowly there but it is happening and yeah i agree with him

i think this year will be the year of one five five nine which is the most highly anticipated uh ethereum upgrade in history i think uh besides eth2 of course but in terms of like singular kind of um upgrades to the eth1 network this is definitely up uh you know number one i can't think of anything else that wasn't as anticipated as this uh in terms of like impact in terms of community support and things like that just yeah uh he goes on to say new eighth all-time high i mean i 100 agree with that i i see there's a zero percent chance that doesn't happen and i'll even go as far as to say is that i think it's happening you know high chance it happens this month in january and pretty much 100 100 chance it happens by

february you think about it right now the price of 80s bots seven i can see it here 737 all-time high is basically 2x from here think about what bitcoin did within a matter of you know a few weeks or a couple months later they went from 10k to 30k essentially so when these things want to move they will move um so i have i i mean i have no doubts we'll see all-time high this year and i think we'll see it in either this month or next month for sure he says two major d fly applications will be on layer two i actually think he's conservative here i think we'll see more than two i mean i already know for a fact that synthetics and uniform are going to be on layer two in terms of major d5 protocols um so that's two or right there i think

we're gonna get at least five um you know obviously other projects like compound um you know doing their own thing where they're going to essentially a side chain to ethereum which is fine but yeah i think we're going to see more than two on at layer two this year for sure he says we'll see five d fight apps in the top ten on uh on by market cap so they're they're tokens um i mean i heard i hope this is true but i just i don't know if i see it i the the market seems to have a fascination with these other layer one protocols still for some reason like it has been you know so many years have gone by and every single attempt to kind of kill ethereum or take on ethereum has failed at this point and that's not to

say it'll always fail i mean i believe that ethereum will always remain dominant but the market still loves their layer one protocols you can look at the top ten and it's basically from memory there's like cardano still in there there's polka dot in there um you know even outside of the top ten there's a bunch of other layer ones there i hope that we see a re-rating and that the d5 tokens the actual things that are being used and producing cash flows go into the top ten i don't think we'll see five in there unfortunately and you know even though xrp has been targeted by the sec and it's dumped so much i mean i still think xrp is gonna remain in the top ten unfortunately um ltc i mean there's these you know bitcoin cash and stuff

there's these zombie kind of chains as well that are just there and it just puzzles me i just don't get what the market's fascination is with these things at all um but i do think that and this is an investment advice but i do think that that the d5 tokens i mean if you look at the top 30 i think only synthetics is in the top 30 by um circulating market cap which is insane it's like what what like the the rest of the top 30 is just complete garbage well most of it not all of it of course um so i think that we're going to see a lot more d5 tokens enter the top 30. i don't think we're going to see five enter the top ten unfortunately not this year um the market still has an extreme fascination with layer one protocols i mean i'm seeing a

lot of buzz around polkadot lately not to say it's a bad project or anything like that but um i yeah i i mean i i'd argue that some of the d5 apps on ethereum have way more traction than poker does as an entire ecosystem at this point but i guess when you invest you know you're betting on like the future you know you're investing based on narratives like this market loves narratives um since it's primarily a retail driven market um you know people love to latch on to narratives and you know everyone does it i mean i do it as well right narrative investing is a huge thing so that's why i think we see a lot of that stuff in the top 10 still but we'll see what it looks like if you go back and look at the top 10 from you know prior cycles it was completely

different to what it is today so we could see a complete change in there but you know uh i i you know i thought something like litecoin would have been out of the top 10 long ago it's still there it's like i'm pretty sure it's like just behind xrp i was like four it's this is crazy what i don't even know anyone who uses litecoin so you know it just uh you know it's just puzzling but it is what it is so we'll see how that plays out this year and the last prediction he gives is that we're going to see one regulatory crackdown on a d5 app i mean i agree with this i think we're going to see more than one um these things are starting to grow so big and you know seep into the traditional system that regulators are coming and

i've spoken about this before on the refuel regulators are coming they're going to try and crack down on these things they're going to try and uh you know regulate it in a way where it's really bad i guess for the ecosystem because they don't understand it so it's on us to educate them there but i think it's also on us to make sure that these things are resistant to regulations right this is i mean let's not screw around here this is exactly what we're building we're not building defy and decentralizing our finance to be you know for these apps to be able to be cracked down by regulatory bodies no we're building this thing to be outside of that system and that for better or worse right i mean i'm not going to give an opinion on what i think about

kind of regulations in general and like whether that's that's that's good or bad but the whole point of decentralized finance is to be outside of this system so you know in my mind you're not a true defy app if you can be kind of like approached by regulators and forced to do something that you know harms your app or like there's an admin key or anything like that and i understand the the kind of um the the progressive decentralization that a lot of teams want to do by holding an admin key and that's fine but you can't expect to be basically you know i guess like a true d5 app unless you're actually fully decentralized right so i mean it is a spectrum too so we'll see what happens but uh yeah it's uh these predictions i mean

as as i said i agree with most of them there are some they're a bit optimistic but that's what these predictions are for right you want to be optimistic about certain things so i guess we'll revisit all this sort of stuff at the end of the year another another big year ahead of us for sure so another uh kind of thing that had a big year in 2020 was uni swap i actually would argue that 2020 was the year of d5 but the biggest beneficiary of the entire default movement was uni swap i wrote about this more in the daily grain newsletter so if you want to go read more of my thoughts there go check that out but um and i won't talk too much about it here but basically the most striking thing for me when i was writing the newsletter and looking at the stats was that in

january of this year uni swap did 60 million dollars a volume for the entire month right for the entire month of january in december it's i think from memory it's done over 10 billion dollars of volume in december um that's you know an incredible amount of growth right um and their their total value locked in january was 30 million it's now 2 billion plus i think you know unisop has become like a household name it's basically mainstream you know it's the biggest app on ethereum i think but you know within d5 and outside of it so yeah i would say that 2020 was uni swaps year and not only its year in terms of growth but also you know they launched the v2

of their protocol they launched the uni token which was the greatest airdrop of all time right if i if i had to say um you know if you had used swap with multiple addresses you got more tokens you know and the token was trading at a really high valuation you just got like a really great early christmas present basically um so yeah and then in this review they also say what's coming for 2021 so they have v3 coming which uh you know people have been hyping up v3 like it's going to basically be the best thing since slight spread we'll see i mean i have faith that it will be really really amazing but we'll see what it's like uh governance improvements which i think is solely needed for uni swap i mean i don't know

how much you guys have followed it but union swaps governance is a bit of a mess right now um but i think you know we'll see them kind of tackle it in 2021 and improve it uh and then lastly is a layer two implementation of uni swap they've hinted towards which i think is going to be a game changer for the space i mean i just said how i believe that 2021 is going to be a year where uh slayer two gets kind of adopted uh by these teams and i think uniontom's gonna uniform is gonna lead the charge here um for sure because they're one of the biggest apps uh you know obviously synthetics as well has been trialling out layer two but i think unisop's gonna be just as big if not bigger uh just purely because you know so many people use uni swap right i mean

i'm sure all of you have used uni swap at least once um in in your in your kind of ethereum career i guess you could call it uh and i think you know the team that they have is stellar they know exactly what they're doing they have such a great uh you know spirit within uniswop the community loves them i think they're gonna think they're gonna do good things in 2021. so we'll see we'll see how they go i i'm curious to see if their growth in 2021 is as explosive as it is as it has been in 2020 or another app kind of like grows more or something we don't know right i mean if you told me that that yield funding was going to be as big as it was uh in 2020 i would not have believed you because you'd you'll find me wasn't even a thing at

the start of the year so yeah we'll see we'll see how that plays out uh so fuel labs have uh released v1 of onto mainnet of their optimistic roll-up technology so for those who don't know fuel labs is another scaling company basically working on optimistic roll-ups like optimism is um and they're claiming to be the first ever optimistic roll-up uh and it brings true scalability to ethereum for a range of payments focused applications so yeah they're focused i mean optimism and optimist their optimistic rollups is focused on i guess like the more smart contract side of things i'm you know and trading within d5 sort of like with synthetics and uni swap whereas fuel has decided to focus

their scalability on just payments right and they're doing this by using a uh utxo based model which is basically the model that bitcoin uses so for those who don't know bitcoins blockchain uses a utxo model for for i guess like sending and receiving bitcoin whereas ethereum uses an account model uh where you have like an ethereum account and you can have tokens in there you can have your ether in there you know you can do certain things with it you can have like your nfts and your ens name and stuff like that whereas because bitcoins basically just the payments network um it has a utxo based model which actually is better for payments than an account model uh for a number of technical reasons so that's what they've released today uh they're claiming that fuel v1 can

support up to 500 transactions per second today i think they're going to try and scale that up it costs less than 2000 gas per transaction which is i think one tenth of the amount that it costs to send eth on mainnet you can pay fees in eath or die with others coming soon uh so yeah that's that's really great uh if you want to go play with this i'm sure you can go to fuel dot sh here this website play around with it but as i said 2021 big year for layer 2 ethereum coming uh eth global over the last couple days they put out this tweet they did a survey of ethereum developers a massive survey i mean i talked to the person who was involved here and they said it took them a lot of

a lot of time to do this but basically what this is i mean it's a comprehensive a very comprehensive report of the ethereum kind of developer ecosystem and you can it's a 20 minute read right it's huge you can go and read the full post for yourself obviously i'm not going to read it here but they have got some highlights here from the results so basically ethereum devs placed higher value on the impact of their work compared to the general dev community i mean i that that like rings true with what i kind of have you know heard and the devs that i've spoken to they feel like they're building something that's going to change the world right they don't feel like they're just building something for the sake of it and that's yeah that's exactly why ethereum is so is so great i think one of the reasons

is that developers actually organically come here they haven't been bought or paid for right they're not mercenaries they actually want to build something that changes the world so that you know that that kind of result was no surprise to me uh the barriers to entry for developers unfortunately include poor documentation and devs believing they did not know enough to contribute i guess that's impostor syndrome right the second part uh we all suffer from that for sure and i think developers suffer from it like one of one of the groups that suffer from it the most unfortunately um but poor documentation so this is this is the thing with programming languages and and coding and developing on new platforms is that documentation yet can be scarce can be hard to find can be like split up between different places

i think the etherium.org website has a really great developer section now but still you know we need to obviously improve that and really interesting was that 68 of respondents also hold 8th right and that just kind of like aligns the incentives as well they're building on ethereum they're developing apps and all of that will hopefully lead to obviously a high eighth price and they'll benefit economically from that as well so really really cool to see this i mean i highly recommend going and giving the entire survey a read over here there is heaps of information you know i'm just scrolling through it now really quickly go give that a read it's very very interesting highly recommend it all right to end off the video today i just wanted to go over this tweet that i put out

i think it was yesterday uh so basically what i said was comparison is the thief of joy remember that during this bull market now i kind of wanted to expand on this basically what i mean by this is that during a bull market you will see people on you know twitter you'll see your friends you'll see people you know making lots of money right that's just this is what's going to happen you might have gotten a taste from this in d5 summer now you might think that they're making more money than you or they have more money than you or you know they've made better decisions than you or whatever and you might start comparing yourself to them and then even though you've made a lot of money right or you've made some gains and you've done a lot of great things just by virtue of you comparing yourself

to them it's kind of like stealing your happiness away from you it's making you feel inferior because you haven't you know maybe done as good as them or you're assuming that they've done better than you and i think it's important to remember that that you need to stop yourself from doing that right because it's just going to leave you in a worse off position especially you know if you're if you're trying to trade or invest you might actually end up screwing yourself even further by trading at a position trying to chase another pump or you know investing in something that um you know you're just chasing because someone else invested in that sort of thing i i mean i've personally done this i did this in 2017.

i was mostly eighth in 2017 and obviously being mostly eighth was was still very good but you know there were times when heath was sitting at like i mean i think he sat at 300 for two months or something in 2017 and during that time a lot of the other coins were going up right going up very fast i remember there was a coin called nano it was called ray blocks before nano that went like a hundred times in in like a few weeks uh and i was like wow that's that's insane and i felt really like i knew a couple of people that had rode that up and i felt really kind of depressed about it i was like wow you know i mean even though obviously i had made money during the eighth bull market i was like wow i could have made so much

more money if i just bought this right just followed them and i had to really stop myself from like you know fomoing into this sort of stuff and chasing pumps and from then obviously over the past couple years in the bear market and during this bull market kind of you know basically train that muscle and it's something that i think that if you're newer to the space you really need to make sure that you you train because if you don't you know there's nothing worse than i guess like not only comparing yourself to other people and like feeling depressed about it but then trying to either copy them or trying to to be better than them or trying to you know make more money and then putting yourself in an even worse off position so that's just something i think that everyone should remember a bit of i guess like life

advice i guess you could call it but at the same time you don't have to listen to me if you don't want to do what you need to do this isn't investment advice but just some advice from someone who's been around for quite a while uh seen people you know try and chase pumps seeing people compare themselves to others gets really sad about you know not making as much money or whatever uh it eats away at people and it's not healthy and i i hope to you know that that you guys don't fall into something like that so yeah just something to keep in mind for the coming 2021 and maybe 2022 bull market we'll see how we go there all right everyone that's it for today thank you for watching and listening if you haven't yet be sure to subscribe to the youtube channel give the video a

thumbs up uh join the discord subscribe to the delegate newsletter and yeah tomorrow i guess it's saturday but i'll have the yearly recap out tomorrow and then after that i guess i'll see you all on monday so have a great weekend everyone thanks