Christie's CryptoPunk auction, TCAP launched & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #96 - 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 9th of april 2021 all right everyone let's get right into it so i think the biggest announcement from the last 24 hours was the fact that uh christie's auction house the the kind of uh auction house that ran uh the auction for people's um you know famous five thousand uh days piece which went for uh obviously almost 70 million dollars they announced today that they are going to be auctioning off a set of nine rare crypto punks from lava labs his own collection now for those who don't know lava labs are the original creators of crypto punks and they have their own kind of collection here so you can see them in the picture here which ones

they're going to be auctioning off one of them includes an alien crypto punk so one of the rarest crypto punks out there and then a bunch of other ones with unique traits here which i mean this is huge right like to see some a place like christie's auctioning off crypto punks and kind of like i guess becoming more and more more involved with the nft ecosystem is a huge validation for both i guess the nft space but also um you know specifically with the with the um the auction uh here with crypto punks it just validates crypto punks as something that has lasting kind of um i guess like power here right has has a kind of lasting value and you know after this was announced the the kind of crypto punk floor went from like i think it was thirty two thousand dollars to

forty thousand dollars in like a couple of hours now what the crypto punk floor means is that the cheapest crypto punk you can buy so there's usually like a floor price that moves either up or down depending on kind of people's appetite uh for the most common crypto punks and obviously the least valuable ones so the floor as i said was at 32 000 and last time i checked it was around 40 000. i think it's been at 40 000 before and maybe a bit above that but it's going to be curious to see if it keeps going up right i think these this auction is going to bring a lot of um i guess like a lot of attention to uh to this kind of i guess this ecosystem in terms of like the crypto punks and other kind of crypto collectibles you know outside of i guess things like

people's stuff um and you know i'm actually really curious to see how much this collection goes for it i i mean i'm betting easily 10 million plus here on on this collection and you know that's gonna be obviously not as big as people's kind of um uh people's sale but it's still gonna be a big sale and it's still gonna be a big kind of thing for christie's and you know christie's are now uh signaling that they're going to be doing more and more nft things here so yeah really really cool to see that i think obviously as i said that was the biggest news from the last 24 hours um you know i'm very curious to see kind of what this happens sorry what happens with the sale in may uh so yeah they haven't given a date here i don't think they've just said may uh you know may's

actually turning out to be a pretty big month right we have like unisof v3 going live um in in may we have uh you know hopefully a layer two implementation of unisop going live in may we have this christie's auction there's a few other things that i'm kind of you know i guess like forgetting right now but that i know that is coming in may so yeah i guess the next even just the next two three months four months leading up to eip1559 launch in july seems to be pretty bullish for ethereum right we have obviously the continued growth of nfts all the layer two stuff going on um you know all the all the kind of work going on the protocol layer i mean you know we have obviously uh you know a lot of work happening on on eth2 uh the merger and things like that so

yeah looking to be an exciting next uh few months uh you know uh i guess in the ethereum ecosystem here so the index co-op announced today that there are two vote votes live now for new uh index products so one of them is the bed index which is basically an index product that consists of bitcoin ethereum and d5 and the default polls index and this has been put forward by uh the bankless kind of guys here so if you are an index token holder and you want to vote on that you can go do so and also a synthetics uh debt mirror index as well and i've explained how this works before on the refuel basically what this is is this is a place for people to put their susd to protect themselves against the kind of um the the deadpool volatility if

you're a synthetic staker so if you don't know what that means you're not a synthetic staker then you don't need to worry about that sort of stuff but this debt mirror pool would be you know a very great tool for for kind of um susd borrowers when they're staking their snx to protect against that volatility there so yeah as i said if you're an index token holder you can go vote for and against uh both of these proposals now and they're at basically what what um the index co-op likes to call decision gate one now there's two of these decision gates then there's like a further process to kind of get this to being a product so this is still the early stages here but i'm really excited to see both of these go live i think the bed makes a lot of sense right and

to see bankless kind of leading the charge here makes a lot of sense as well because who doesn't want just like easy exposure to uh bitcoin ethereum and d5 pulse index right that basically covers the main themes of crypto right now so yeah excited to see these kind of um you know go live if they get voted in so a bit of news from the block here there's been a class action lawsuit filed against both ledger and shopify here so obviously this was done due to customer data breaches and you know we're all kind of well aware of the ledger data breach here the one where it basically leaked everyone's personal details that had pretty much bought a ledger before a certain date uh and it was a pretty bad leak uh if you all remember correctly

uh and then there was also uh i i guess like a shopify uh data breach as well here um uh actually i think uh oh wait though if i'm looking at this uh closely here i think this is another leak related to uh ledger customers personal data being exposed due to a rogue shopify employee here so this is actually a separate case so okay that's fine i didn't even know about this one so that's that's bad i guess that there's been multiple kind of leaks here um but yeah i guess like the class action is is uh is is lobbied at shopify here over this kind of uh i guess like ledger ledger leak here um but maybe uh if i'm reading through here further uh maybe they mentioned the ledger leak itself i don't think so

um you know i i do expect class-action lawsuits to come at them uh because of this anyway but it doesn't seem to be in this one but still i mean you know this was kind of inevitable people are going to kind of like put lawsuits forward especially if their personal details have been kind of compromised here and i mean you know so so they should to an extent i mean i'm not i know that like it's funny looking at the different cultures and i know that in the us uh you know there's there's i don't know if it's a culture of it but like people are more prone to i guess like just lodging these lawsuits right and some of them are very frivolous some of them are justified we don't really have that in australia from what i've seen where people just like you know

throw lawsuits at different people um but regardless of that sort of thing i think that this is a case you know um you know this leak and the the ledger data leak itself um is definitely a case to to bring a class-action lawsuit against because people need compensation for this this you know it's it's unacceptable that that much personal information was leaked and and was able to be leaked in such a huge way you know people's home addresses were leaked that's that's obviously not very good um so yeah we'll see we'll kind of see how this goes and progresses here i'm sure that there'll be a settlement or something and ledger will end up paying out some sort of compensation to the affected kind of customers here so we'll have to keep an eye out on that so cryptex finance has announced a new

product called uh the total crypto market cap token which is basically an index that tracks the total crypto market cap now the last time i checked it was at two trillion or just over two trillion dollars the the total crypto market cap which is up from like i think you know one or two hundred billion dollars just a year ago or something like that so it's already up 10x so if you just want kind of i guess um just like passive exposure to the total crypto market so not just like one sector like the d5 pulse index gives you kind of exposure to to d5 obviously um this gives you exposure to everything right all of the crypto tokens that are kind of listed on popular websites like co-market cap and coin gecko um and the way that they track the price here is that they use a chain link

oracle and that pulls i think data from six different um data sources for the total crypto market cap here and the way that um this is minted is that you can collateralize it with with eth or with dye right now i think as well and in the future they're going to add more collateral types as well here so yeah this is really really cool i think uh not a product that we've seen before as far as i know i know there's other indexes on centralized exchanges that track a certain subset of crypto like as i said there's defy indexes there's one on um on ftx called like the coin perp index or something like that that tracks a bunch of i guess like um maybe maybe coins or likes a bunch of other like kind of alts i guess you could call them um but it

doesn't track everything whereas this is aiming to track you know absolutely everything that coin gecko coin market cap you know coin law there's a bunch of other ones uh kind of track here so um and then they made this dope ass video as well for for this launch it's about two minutes long uh definitely go go watch the video it'll be linked in the youtube description but i thought it was a really cool video because it gives it gives a bit of background on ethereum itself it doesn't just talk about the total crypto market cap token here um so yeah that was that was kind of really fun and there's also a liquidity mining program here where you can earn ctx rewards which is the governance token of this platform uh by providing by for minting uh tcap and providing liquidity uh two tcap pairs on sushi swap pr

so really cool to see this release from cryptex finance so uh starkware is uh looking for a community manager here and i wanted to give a shout out here not just for starkwear but i mean this all this got me thinking kind of all these other teams that i know that have just been approaching me lately and i i won't be able to name them all right now but if you're a community person or a marketing person or someone who just wants to be in that area there are so many jobs right now for you it's not even funny like i've had probably 10 15 maybe even 20 kind of like a founders or ceos of different teams contact me about the about positions like this and say hey do you know anyone and really i mean there's a handful of people that i know but they already have jobs in the

ecosystem because this position like a community manager or a marketing position within crypto is very different to a web 2 position there are a lot of kind of i guess you could call them like crypto native kind of um things and nuances that you have to understand to be a good community manager or a good marketing person within the crypto ecosystem and i think that's why it's so hard to find someone because you can get someone from like the non-crypto ecosystem to do marketing or to do community management but the best of the best are the ones that you know essentially spent all their time in this ecosystem know the ins and outs you know know the memes so to speak especially if you're a community manager you need to know the memes right know how things work you know know the lay of the land sort of stuff

and i think that's why it's very hard for uh people teams to find these sorts of people because they're community facing right they're outwards facing you know whereas on the other side if you're looking for like a a developer for example even if it's a smart contract developer those those kind of people don't normally kind of like uh public facing right they work um you know in in i wouldn't call it stealth but they work like quietly in the background they're not like super public they're not putting out tweets they're not in the discord all the time talking to people there are some of them that do this right but it's not like their full-time job so to speak right it's not their mandate whereas as a community manager you need to basically be everywhere right you need to be on twitter discord telegram wherever your community

is you need to be on there and you need to be branching out you need to understand these things and i mean you know i worked at full-time marketing at set for for 18 months and part of that role was community management as well and i'll tell you yeah you have to basically know the ins and outs you have to kind of know the memes you have to know the jokes you you kind of like have to be a d5 or crypto native so to speak uh to to really excel at the role so if that's something that i mean you think that you're you're good at and you ha maybe you haven't been a community manager in the past but you're you think that you could be good at this and you think that you know you kind of like understand how the how

it all works within crypto definitely reach out to to stark where here i mean that they're probably one of the best teams to work for right now considering that they're building layer 2 solutions and they're not just building it for d5 they're building it for kind of nfts and some web 3 stuff as well and starkware is just a rocket ship right now so if you're looking for a company to i guess join that is is still i guess considered early stage but like the growth is just amazing so far i highly recommend getting in touch with starkware here um and in general if you're a community manager or a marketing person there is cryptocurrencyjobs.co website where you can go on and there's tons of roles on there i would encourage you to to check out which roles are available and go apply for them because there's so

much opportunity right now to join kind of like early stage companies potential rocket ships where you can literally change your life by joining some of these companies so yeah highly recommend going and doing that so anti-pro synthesis put out this kind of interesting poll today where he asks of these ethereum layer 2 solutions which would you promote as the canonical solution and why now he lists four options here zk sync optimism starkware and arbitrom now the funny thing about this poll is that i actually think it's a popularity contest i don't think it's actually representative of what people actually think is going to be the canonical solution and what this means is basically which one of these is going to win right which one this is going to be the most

adopted have the most network effects have the most apps have the most users all that sort of stuff now people are voting for zk sync as the winner right now this poll is um you know only a few hours old but you know zk sinks leading optimism in second place arbitram is third starkware is fourth as i said this is a popularity thing i think zk sync and optimism are the two most well-known simply because zk sync is integrated with um a git coin right and a lot of people within the ecosystem especially people who follow anti-pro here uh have used that so one optimism obviously is one of the most well-known if not the most well-known i'm actually a little bit surprised that optimism is in second place here but not by much by about i guess like two percent uh here uh arbitrary and starkware are about

five percent difference between them i'm actually very uh i guess like you know i'm really bullish on arbitram but i wouldn't say arbitrary is more well known than starkware which just confused me like i would have expected starkwear to at least be third here but i guess uh you know more people know about arbitrary than they do about starkwear which which did surprise me for sure so as i said popularity contest not actually uh i guess a um a representation of what is going to win and what is going to kind of like be the the ultimate winner sort of thing and i wrote about this in the daily grade newsletter today i don't think there's just going to be one winner i mean i i i highly doubt we're just going to have like you know optimism for example be kind of like the winner take all sort of

things and these other solutions die out that's already not the reality if you look at kind of uh the way i guess um these things are being adopted as i said zk sync is integrated with bitcoin right now it's getting tons of usage every time there's a bitcoin matching round and people are loving it optimism has integrated synthetics in its early stages already has uniform committed to deploy on there they said that they've got like a dozen projects building on them already that they haven't revealed yet starkware has diversify immutablex and dydx on their platform they've got a ton of other projects in the pipeline i'm sure arbitram isn't on mainnet just yet but they have uh you know they have their main net release candidate on test net right now and they have a bunch of other projects

that they've been working with that if you go on their website you can see like bancor mcdex um i think uh a balancer and stuff like that as well um and you know there might be other apps building on it that just haven't been publicly released yet so yeah we're already seeing this kind of thing where people are not or at least teams and application developers are not choosing just to be on you know uh one particular layer one each of them come with their own trade-offs with their own trust assumptions you know i mean you've probably heard people speak speak about optimistic roll-ups being at a disadvantage to ck roll-ups because they require like a one-week withdrawal delay and i've explained how you know kind of it's different because with with um you know that can be that can kind of be fixed uh

like with uh with the bridges that we've been seeing coming out and also optimistic rollups allow for general kind of evm compatibility right now whereas zk rollups are a bit further away from that so from that perspective i guess like that's that's kind of why we're seeing fragmentation there too uh and then you know there's other solutions that anti-pro didn't mention yeah i won't list them all right other popular solutions include like polygon you know for example there um and and they've kind of got like a bunch of apps on there including you know avail being the most popular one i think on there and there's a bunch of others like sushi swap and things like that you know slingshot finance as well um and yeah and and kind of like outside of that and i guess like as an extension of that the reason why i don't think this

fragmentation is a big deal is because we're going to have bridges between them anyway and i do think that the real winners of this kind of i guess like ecosystem in the long run or at least like the layer 2 ecosystem is going to be the bridges connects and hot protocol are working on it there's some other kind of apps i know uh that that are working on it too which i mean you know i know there's like thought chain and things like that but i guess they're not really doing layer two to layer two they're focusing more on kind of cross chain stuff which is still which is still kind of important right uh so so that gets like a i guess a mention for that too but really you know if if everyone needs to kind of go to different layer twos to i guess interact with different apps

or interact with apps they want to then the most seamless way to do that is to go through a bridge of which conext already has their technology live hop protocol is coming out soon i think they have mainnet coming out in the next few weeks or something like that so yeah i think those are going to be the biggest winners here but that doesn't mean that these other solutions like l2 solutions aren't going to be huge themselves i mean the demand for scalability is insatiable right there is so much demand out there um you know i i believe the ethereum kind of ecosystem of scalability solutions will collectively be doing trillions of transactions uh you know a day um you know one day in the future right and that and that's all going to be secured by ethereum in some in some in some kind of

way here all paying for security from ethereum which is really really bullish so from that perspective i think uh it makes a lot of sense it you know that we're gonna have kind of i guess multiple solutions here and this poll really is just like a popularity kind of contest at this stage maybe we should rerun this poll in a few months when these solutions are more well known and more people are using them and see what the results are i'd be interested to see how that plays out so coinbase announced today that they've joined the d5 alliance which is basically a d5 accelerator working to grow d5 in general so i think this is really cool i mean coinbase has been d5 friendly for quite a while and specifically ethereum d5 friendly

for quite a while here um and you know anti-pro commented here that uh direct on-ramps to to zk sync and optimism would be pretty killer including i guess like um other layer two solutions as well and i've kind of um you know mentioned this a lot before that i think the best thing coinbase can do right now for the ethereum ecosystem is create bridges into different layer two solutions right like obviously we already have loop ring live that coinbase can bridge into dydx is live they can bridge into like i'm pretty sure coinbase is an investor in dydx so it's a no-brainer right they already support optimism on their mobile wallet but they need to support it on their exchange because the mobile wallet doesn't have a fiat on-ramp so i think that having that fiat on ramp is key here um and having that kind of

like on-ramp that people can skip layer one just to go directly to layer two is also key so and you know i reckon coinbase will end up supporting you know all of them and and eventually they'll just support the bridges too like next right imagine being able to just go from coinbase to connex and then connects just route you to whatever app you want to go to sort of thing so that makes a lot of sense too i think so yeah really excited to see kind of coinbase joining the d5 alliance here i you know i think obviously with ethereum and with d5 we're trying i guess to disrupt uh you know as much of the centralization as possible but that doesn't mean companies like coinbase don't have a role to play in the future they're always going to be the fiat on and off ramps right because you just

can't have like a decentralized fiat on an off-ramp that's been tried before with different local exchange sites and and sooner or later the regulators come after you and basically shut you down or require you to do kyc and stuff like that and also um the they can just act as interfaces into d5 apps as well as i've spoken about before where coinbase can sit on top of different default apps and they already do this through their mobile wallet app where they basically allow users to just deposit kind of um you know stable coins into dydx and compound so there is definitely a world where you know centralized exchanges exist and thrive but it is going to be a world where they thrive based on different business models not so much maybe the exchange space i think eventually maybe maybe kind of like i guess a few years into

the future it might even take 10 years i don't know it's going to be to the point where i think defy will win out in the exchange space i mean it already kind of is these days in terms of volumes but you know the space is so big the demand for this stuff is so big that coinbase has still been growing as i discussed in their q1 kind of earnings report yesterday they're still growing and you know i don't expect that to stop anytime soon so yeah rather have them as an ally then as an enemy there are certain exchanges out there that are an enemy of ethereum right now and i would consider them very parasitic so having an exchange like coinbase to fight back against that is a very positive for the ethereum ecosystem so immutable x uh went live yesterday i spoke about it on yesterday's refuel

the uh layer to nft exchange here they tweeted out today that in the first 24 hours of trading the immutablex platform has already saved the gods unchained community over four hundred thousand dollars in gas fees that is huge right this is immediate tangible benefits for real users at layer two and i mean i i spoke about this yesterday so i won't go too deep into it but i did say that layer two is here it's just not evenly distributed and the way we evenly distribute it is that we get all these apps to layer two we get the most popular apps to layer two you know i reckon once unisop goes to layer two it's basically just like that's it that's that's gonna lead to the craziest growth ever ever lots of users are going to move to unisop on layer 2 they're going to do

all their stuff on there i reckon coinbase will have a direct bridge in and out of like optimism because of that uh because they're they're obviously got a vested interest interest in in uni swap as well um and they already list the uni token and things like that so i fully expect to see that happen and you know the fact that it's already saved over 400 thousand dollars of gas fees is incredible and you know it's not like the gas fee revenue on on layer one has gone down either what ends up happening is that the immutable x kind of a layer 2 chain is paying ethereum for security to kind of secure itself so what essentially happens is that instead of individual users or having to pay these high individual fees it becomes the layer 2 itself pays the fees in aggregate so it

basically pays the fees for the users um and you know on immutable x right now there's zero fee trading but eventually they'll kind of institute a kind of uh you know i guess like a small fee like a very small fee but there'll be enough transactional activity that that fee in aggregate will be very large and that will end up going towards paying for ethereum layer 1 security which is what loop ring does today already so yeah really really cool to see this very tangible kind of immediate benefit here from immutable x and i mean i'm so pumped right now for the layout to ecosystem it's finally coming together right all together and we're finally getting to a point where people are getting to experience the magic of of kind of the scalability um that that people have been working on

for years now so yeah super excited about this for sure so steven from the block uh tweeted out this kind of uh chart here that uh saying that cumulative d5 revenue is approaching one billion dollars and added nearly 200 million dollars in march alone that means that the fight apps um i guess like altogether uh basically all dfi apps that the block tracks here have generated one billion dollars of revenue which is absolutely crazy right but still still small because if you look at this cumulative this is measuring it from july 2020 to today so what nine months or something like that so we've done a billion in nine months well coinbase did 1.8 billion dollars in three months right in q1 so that you know i mean if you

take if you kind of like i guess like do um nine months and take it from three months and kind of like i guess adjust it um for time there d5 did much lower than that in three months right i think like if you look at q1 here and i'm just eyeing it here 250 million dollars to 750 million so so i guess cumulative d5 did 500 million dollars in the same span that coinbase is 1.8 billion not too far behind but again this is cumulative d5 revenue this includes every default this doesn't just include exchange volume you can't really compare you know it one to one because coinbase obviously doesn't have money markets right it just has um you know most of its revenue comes from its exchange model so you would be better off um kind of comparing just dex volumes and

probably just better off comparing one to one like uni swap to coinbase because you'd have to compare dex volumes to like all centralized exchange volumes to kind of get the picture there so yeah i thought this was really cool to see and this is just going to keep growing i mean d5 is not slowing down right d5 is not going anywhere d5 is i mean with layer 2 d5 is going to explode in in usage and and the the kind of like user base right now as i mentioned before is still only a few hundred thousand people there's there's barely anyone using this stuff and and that's in part due to just how early we are in part due to the gas fees being being high still right a lot of new users are priced out i would actually wager that the ethereum kind of

ecosystem is not getting that many new users at this point i actually think that a lot of new users are going to the cheaper alternatives like bsc right because at the end of the day during a bull market most people just want to make money and that's fine so you know they're just going to go to to bsc because they can make money there and not have to spend kind of like lots of money on gas fees and you know that's if i'm being honest that's a little bit of a failure on ethereum's part for not getting our layer 2 scaling out out quicker we gave like a window of opportunity to to be a c to take some market share but i think we're going to go into a kind of i guess you could call it empire strikes back phase where ethereum is going to basically

scale via layer 2 and offer a better uh more kind of i guess like profitable and more innovative experience uh at layer two then something like bsc can offer for sure i think uh you know there's only a short window there um i think short term it it's just gonna be kind of like a stop gap and then eventually we're gonna see kind of stuff move back to layer two though in saying that binance controls the user flow right i would be very very surprised to see binance do a bridge into any of the ethereum layer twos because it is not in their interest to do so it is in their interest to funnel users to bsc of course um which is fine i mean that is what happens in business right you're not just going to get you know binance is is a competitor to

ethereum right so your competitor is not going to do something that that it benefits you right so from that perspective i don't expect binance to to benefit ethereum at all um and and to actually actively work against it so that's why i said before having a partner like coinbase supporting ethereum and supporting d5 is a really great way for us to hit back because coinbase um has i think just as many users as binance has if not more i think binance may have more just because they have more of a selection of tokens than coinbase has so there's like cross pollination going on as i talked about yesterday but yeah i think i mean i'm very confident that layer 2 is going to bring a lot of people back but we need those on-ramps we need those bridges in we can't expect users to go from layer 1

to layer 2 because that is still an expensive transaction and it just it's friction right you know we need just a direct bridge from a centralized exchange into these layer twos just like they have a direct kind of um bridge into the layer ones right it's the same thing just adding these layer twos and i think they're gonna get added there's no way that coinbase doesn't do it um and other exchanges like maybe kraken and gemini do it as well but i do not expect binance to do it if they do i mean kudos and i'll give them credit where it's due but i mean if i was cz i wouldn't do that because why would i do that it would hurt my own business but you know he sometimes says that he cares about growing the whole pie which i don't really i don't really

trust right i mean if you cared about that he wouldn't be doing what he's doing um excuse me sorry uh so from that perspective i believe that we're just gonna have to kind of like rely on on you know getting the exchanges that are kind of like non-hostile on board yeah which is fine anyway i'm not going to rant too much about that i think you know the fact that that bsc exists is incredible competition actually for ethereum right now um you know and kind of like motivates people to to get this this kind of like scaling done because we want people to enjoy a decentralized and secure kind of ecosystem we you know with ethereum security and and kind of like with it within the ethereum ecosystem and kind of keep the value within within ethereum as well so yeah we'll keep an eye on that i will definitely

keep talking about it on pretty much every refuel because layer 2 is the most exciting space right now i think and it's just going to get hotter from here all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and keep an eye out for this weekend i'll be releasing the daily grade data pump number four where i'll be going over all the ethereum and d5 kind of on-chain analytics from the month of march uh so yeah keep keep your eyes peeled for that and subscribe so you you don't miss it uh and on that note uh have a great weekend everyone and i'll catch you next week thanks everyone