Crypto market on fire, Base Grants and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #677 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delu refuel where up the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Andy s the 24th of October 2023 all right everyone let's get into it so I think the first 10 minutes of today's episode is going to be talking about the markets even though on the end of yesterday's episode I said that I don't really talk about the markets too much on the refill which I don't I guess is the this is like like 5% of the time or 1% of the time where I do talk about the markets and it's because it is very relevant today so obviously all of you know by now that uh over the last couple days at least the markets have been really really positive uh especially over the last 24 hours or so now of course you know everyone can point to

things like the ETFs being like a positive Catalyst and uh that bading Bitcoin to go to I think it it went to like 35k today or something like that um and it's around that at time of recording eats up at 18:30 uh a lot of other things are pumping uh and I think today's pumping in particular was due to the fact that the the ETFs the spot BTC ETFs seem to be launching or gearing up to launch a lot earlier than otherwise expected now we can see here there's a tweet here from Eric Banus who shares that the I shares Bitcoin trust has been listed on the depository trust and Clearing Corporation which clears NASDAQ trades now just to break that down for you guys the ey shares Bitcoin trust is black Rock's ETF uh because black rock

is doing it through the subsidiary called I shares uh and the dtcc is a is a clearing house that um you know TR uses Clearing Houses it's basically the settlement layer of trafi um and it's it's the process NASDAQ trades here and there is a ticker called ibtc and he says this is all part of bringing the ETF to Market and then he also tweeted out that um Black Rock stated in their recent uh ETF amendment that they are seeding the ETF in October which means that they're putting their initial kind of capital into the ETF uh in in October in order you know before the ETF starts trading publicly there so that has obviously caused people to basically be like wow okay the ETF seems like they're going to be coming in the

next week or two and they very well could be approved in the next week or two not just black rocks but all of them so of course the Market's not going to wait around for this it's going to front run this and we saw this with the fake ETF approval news from last week how BTC spiked up to 30k then it went back down to like 27k then it's gone you know way beyond that now to 35k because really it showed that the market was completely offside and completely underpricing the impact of these ETFs now I'm not going to give any kind of price predictions here or tell you where things are going to go from here obviously things have pumped a lot already so it's kind of I guess hard to tell exactly where things are going to go over the short term um

and if you could tell that with with any kind of accuracy you'd make a lot of money of course but I do have a chart here and I rarely show charts on the refill but I do have a chart here now this chart is the long-term Bitcoin chart now the reason I like to use the Bitcoin chart over the eth chart is because Bitcoin has a lot more price history than eth now this is the chart that has the most amount of price history on trading view this goes all the way back to 2010 July 2010 it's called the BLX is the ticker or the Bitcoin liquid index it is a chart that will show you uh I guess like the lowest time frame frame is the weekly but it will show you a composite weekly chart going all the way back to July 2010 so

you can see the last few Cycles here I only want want to really focus on the last three Cycles to be honest not anything be before that because I feel like anything before that is noise and this chart will not show you the current BTC price will only show you the closing price each week so it it still says it's BTC is at 30k 33k on this chart whereas it's on it's at 35k or 34.5km months now that there are certain price levels that BTC and eth have to break in order for the bull market to basically or at least in order for like a bull market Trend to be established right and it's not just that they have to break these levels they also have to hold these levels so if we look at BTC

right now and the level that I've been talking about a lot is around 32k on BTC it has obviously broken that and it's obviously up at 35k now but I have said every time that I said that I I I um that level to be broken it also needs to be retested and needs to hold because this is crypto and BTC could easily go back to down to like 30k or even below that and hang around there for a few months before heading up again so that would not in my mind not invalidate the trend so to speak it would mean that the trend is intact and that the trend is still bullish but it would mean that people who are kind of screaming right now for all-time highs by early next year or something like that would be wrong and I don't think we're going to

get alltime highs by early next year I do think we're going to hang around in these kind of like upper zones for for a while because it takes a while to convince the market that the the bull Market's back on basically but we have broken that tra that that kind of crab range on bitcoin and for those of you who keeping track at home this is the highest price that Bitcoin has been since May of last year and that was obviously during the downtrend May of last year because 2022 was the proper bare Market 2023 is obviously being the crab market and it's kind of funny when you call it the crab market in 2023 because if you actually look at what BTC has done in 2023 it started the year at what I if I go to the Chart here it started the year at 16.5k which is

basically its bottom and then since then it's gone up to 35ish K which is up over 100% right but the whole time it's just been trending up so the reason why we I guess call it a crab year is because it's it's it stayed mostly defined within this range that basically started back in May of 2022 but because that range has now been broken it is obviously a very bullish signal to the market saying hey you know the bull market is is probably back on right the the bullish trend is probably back here but I as I've said before plenty of times um I would like to see personally that kind of uh price level held and and retested and kind of I guess like crabbed at for a little while before heading High because markets get overheated very

quickly especially in crypto and if we went to like straight I don't know what whatever these levels are here like straight 40K or something like that I would expect the the dump to be pretty big from there and maybe back to 30k or something like that so I don't know personally after my many years in crypto I would very much like things to move slow slower um you know just a slow uptrend which is as I said what we've been through all year and I know it doesn't feel like it but we have I mean you had I mean you had a few weeks actually last year toy Bitcoin at this level you had from basically the I guess beginning of November until the mid January to buy at around the 16k mark so you didn't just have like a week you had a quite a quite a lengthy period of time

here to do this and then for the rest of this year if you did that during that kind of period there which was what almost uh I guess like or more than a two-month period two and a half month period you've enjoyed those gains all of this year which is possibly leading into a new bull market uh into into next year here now as I as I said this is a longer term chart so the reason I have this up is because as you can see this kind of thing plays out every cycle and I consider 2023 to be like 2015 and 2019 so if we look at 2015 you can see here that the range did break uh it broke around basically I guess you could say the same time that it's broken now October November 2015 but then it went sideways for a while right you can see

here I mean if I zoom in on on what I'm looking at here and kind of circle it you can see it on my screen price went sideways for a little while it was I guess like from the 30th of November to May basically until basically the harving price went sideways for a while there but then it broke up from there and it didn't look back right the bull market basically started in Earnest from there so that was really really healthy generally really healthy price action even though it only went sideways and then we can go and look at what it did in 2019 and see that it's very similar uh into 2020 but we do have that outlier kind of dump here which was the co dump and that kind of screws things up a little bit but you can you can ignore that and basically just you know ignore

this massive dump here but look at this Zone here it's the same thing right it broke out of uh of the kind of like range I'm I'm not counting here by the way I'm not counting these little spikes here CU I've explained before how these are outlier spikes that were uh influenced by the plus token Ponzi in 2019 so I'm not counting those but if you discount those and basically look at kind of what the crab market range was it was at around I guess you could say 8K 8.5k and that broke right that broke here um and then obviously we had the co dump but if you ignore that you can actually see that BTC hung around this level 8.59k for a little while and then it broke up again in about I guess you could say July of 2020 now that was delayed because of the co dump so if you

remove the co dump time which is like 2 to three months that it probably would have broken up in like April or May instead right around the Haring again right and then from there on we had the we had the bull market and it went kind of up only from there so essentially why I'm showing you this and it's not to make price predictions but essentially what you want to see coming out of this kind of bare crab market into a bull market is that we get the initial break then we'll probably get like down but then we'll go sideways for a bit right uh I'm I'm just drawing like a a random line here but then from there you start going up and you're not going to go up that fast right but you start going up kind of gradually uh as time goes on

there so that's kind of how I how I view things generally and I'm not a technical analyst I'm not a Trader I very much look at the long-term trends as you guys know I play the fouryear Cycles that's my jam that's where I sit that's where I like to play things um and I feel like as I said before the fouryear cycle is playing out exactly as it always has uh which is pretty awesome to see honestly I like that it's playing out exactly as it always has because it means that I can pretty much have confidence in timing around around the bull market and around the next bare Market uh and also the fact that it just kind of reinforces upon itself too now before I I kind of like in discussion on the market stuff here I do want to say that when it comes

to eth the eth has been lagging the move obviously you can see eth BTC is has gone down a lot over the last few months you can see that eth is still you know not not at 2K or not above its crab market range or anything like that but this is completely normal BTC usually leads at in early bull market stages but also BTC has a very good reason for leading right now and that's the ETFs that's a very powerful narrative trade so really if you are someone who believes or at least wants to capture kind of like the trade here you essentially believe that there's going to be like a a rotation out of BTC into other things and we've already seen some of this right there's other things pumping but you believe that the there'll be a rotation out of BTC into like eth and other assets out there

during that kind of sideways action that will probably happen uh happen from here on out for the next few months and then everything else will catch up and and then it just becomes during the bull market the same thing things kind of like rotate between different things and it's very messy and I wouldn't try and trade it but that's kind of what usually happens and that's why and as I said like the the the narrative that BTC has right now and the fact that it's an early stage or probably the early stage of of the bull market um it's makes total sense for BTC to lead I still strongly believe that eth is going to outperform BTC in the ball Market uh and then you know even into the bare into the next bare market and Beyond and over the long term as I've said plenty of

times on the refi before but I wouldn't you know I just just kind of put that kind of um I guess like energy out there that there's nothing to be surprised here this is totally expected I did not expect eth to perform well against BTC when BTC has the narrative juice of the ETFs as well as of the fact that we're just now getting out of the bare Market or at least trying to and trying to start a new bull market which is where BTC usually shines but if you go back and actually look at uh I mean there's not that much price action because eth eth only came out in 2015 but if you look at the the last two cycles um e eth lagged BTC out out of it and but then it caught up and and I mean I can show you

on the chart actually I can show you e BTC what it looks like you can see here on this chart uh this is 2016 right um where eth just tanked against BTC but then in 2017 obviously the bull market went up in the bare Market in 2018 2019 tanked in 2020 went up right and then since then we've been rather sideways which is pretty positive but you can see here that we're basically at long-term support which could break you know there's no there's no you know I guess a guarantee that that's going to hold or anything like that but this to me all of these kind of this downtrend especially from here June uh which is when Black Rock filed for their ETF by the way is all ETF related like if you actually look at when the the the downtrend started in Earnest it really is in June

and since June eth has gone down what like 25% against BTC so it's not that bad of a dump but you can actually clearly see that this is the narrative trade here so when the ETFs get approved there's no more narrative trade left for BTC there so you would expect logically e to you know start performing not not not go like this maybe go backwards in time no not go like this but essentially to start performing and and catch back up and that's that's kind of how these things play out uh there and you would also expect the eighth ATF narrative trade to start which is a perfect segue into just last bit of market news here which is that the SEC has acknowledged grayscales spot e ETF filing which would convert their existing e product into an ETF here so I mean yeah it's pretty

obvious at this point that the spot e ETF narrative is going to really kick into highya as soon as the BTC ETFs are approved because narratives rule this Market they basically rule every market and the bull markets do live and and die based on narratives and narratives bring in new money bring in new excitement get people kind of like trading again get people investing again so we're just going to shift to that narrative and you're going to see it over the next few months as soon as the BTC ETFs get approved it's going to shift rapidly to the eth ones you can already see it here and there but I think that especially Traders they want to see that narrative trade play out and they want to be positioned into E when that starts happening and then they'll start

chilling at themselves and stuff like that but that's basically how I foresee all of that happening there um but yeah don't I guess like the last thing I'll say on this is that don't get ahead of yourself guys don't blow yourselves up I know it's very exciting right now I know that uh it really does feel like the early stages of a bull market but you need to remember that even in Bull markets things can dump like really hard and can catch you off guard so my advice is always the same and this is not investment advice this is just general kind of advice to not blow yourself up you know stay away from Leverage if you can and I'm not saying some people take this the wrong way when I say stay away from Leverage I'm not saying don't do leverage if you want to do it I'm saying

that if you don't actually understand leverage if you uh if you aren't an experienced Trader or if you aren't an experienced investor and if you're someone who's very emotional with these things and you're a first or even second cycler I wouldn't really uh say that leverage was a good thing for you to take on because as I've said before the worst thing that can happen is you blow yourself up at the start of the bull market and then you miss the the entire move and you then you have to wait another four years for the bull market to come back no one wants to do that so that's like the the the number one piece of kind of like general advice I would give is just to avoid leverage um but also I've been giving these bull market Pro tips for a little while on Twitter

now which you can find on my on my Twitter if you just search uh my my username and then search bull market Pro tip um and a lot of them center around this just not like this this concept of not blowing yourself up and not missing the move because of that but anyway enough of the market talk I went for 15 minutes there but hopefully that gives you guys something to be bullish about besides just the prices because I know you know there is a bit of disbelief there it's like is this it is this it but as I said like temper expectations a bit it could be it it's you know in my mind it's highly likely that it is it but it's still going to take a you know longer than people think it's not like we're going to be at all-time Highs at

the end of the year or anything like that um and I still maintain that we're probably going to not see all-time high until the second half of next year but this is the wall of worry this is what we climb and the higher we get the less worry there is and the more we accelerate and then yeah we get a full-blown kind of bull market that we all love and enjoy and as always do not forget to take profits guys I hope you uh spent the bare Market thinking about where you would take profits on assets that you're invested in at what price points in DCA out things like that because In the Heat of the bull market you can get very caught up in it and you can start believing in things like the super cycle and stuff like that you don't want to fall into that trap so so

yeah anyway moving on from the market talk so for those of you who aren't aware this was kind of news floating around over the last few days but you can you can claim a pup if you participated in the kzg some ing ceremony so you can check out the link here I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to go um for you to go claim this P here but also there is a hackmd document that Trent has shared here that you can that allows anyone to run checks on the kzg ceremony final output so that you know that everything is is working functionally and everything is is working as intended so I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out and on that page you'll be able to uh claim the pup as well so yeah just will

link this in the YouTube description below for you guys to check out uh so there's some devet 10 launch updates uh I mentioned yesterday that devet 10 was going live yesterday I don't think it went live the ethereum cat herter account tweeted about this but yeah I don't think that devet 10 actually uh went live yesterday I'm not entirely sure cuz I didn't see it pop up on my feet or anything like that um but yeah I don't think it's live just yet it may be live it should be going live very very soon but I didn't see it going go live yet and you know what actually I'm going to check quickly just so I got the latest information here if it did go live on the kind of um uh the eth R&D Discord here let's just see no I'm not really seeing anything here I'm just

seeing some some other kind of like testing going on I don't know yeah don't take my word for it but I don't know if Dev I don't think devet 10 is live just yet if it's not live just yet it means that it's going live today but yeah correct me if I'm wrong uh feel free to to correct me in the daily Discord Channel or in the YouTube comments but yeah anyway moving on from that one all right so there's been a bit of uh I guess like chatter about Dev connect um lately because obviously of the uh the the tensions uh in the Middle East generally after the war broke out between Israel and and Hamas here but uh the reason why Dev connect is involved is because as you all probably know Dev connect is being hosted in istambul which is a a city in Turkey of course

now people have been wondering you know is it safe to travel to Turkey is it uh you know is turkey going to get involved in the war like how close is turkey to the war zone mean if you look at a map Instanbul isn't very close to the war zone right um so from that point of view it is relatively safe but the ethereum foundation put out an advisory today basically saying that um the the threat to the dev connect event uh is low there is still going to be a lot of protests happening in turkey and Istanbul around the Israel and Gaza kind of um conflict and there are also so certain certain people that are going to be targeted more than others uh you know the the obvious ones uh such as people of with Jewish faith or descent as they kind of

list here so you know there's obviously a severe risk to Israelis and and and and and Jewish in Israeli Nationals and people of Jewish faith of course um as should be obvious to everyone uh so I wouldn't blame anyone for not going um not just people that identify as that or or a part of that group but also just anyone generally I know a few few friends who have basically said that they're not going because it's just not worth the risk because of the protest as well even if you aren't going to be targeted right even if you aren't part of that group they're going to be a lot of protests and they there currently are and they may turn violent you may get caught up in it and you may just not want to be around that you may want to to make sure that that uh you're not

kind of like um putting yourself in danger or anything like that but as far as I know the dev connect event is still going ahead uh uh I don't know if it's going to be canceled but I feel like it's still going ahead right now it's kind of hard because I feel like it I don't know I I don't want to say that it's going to get canceled but I feel like they put this advisory out um and they said that you know if you're part of the high-risk group you should obviously not come to Dev connect but then you know if if if they kind of if if the organizers kind of get win that a lot of people are are not coming to Istanbul for Dev connect are they just going to cancel the event because there's no point hosting it but it is

very close to the event I mean the events happening in like mid November right so we're very close to it I don't know I feel like they're in a rocking a hard place unfortunately because I mean number one Istanbul is an amazing City from what I've heard from people I haven't been myself but it's an amazing City from what I've heard from people and people really looking forward to it Dev connect is the second largest ethereum conference after Devcon so yeah it would have been a fun time for people I mean I didn't plan to go originally but honestly I probably would have uh uh chosen not to go uh due to this conflict uh because just my personal choice there not that I'm part of any of the highrisk groups obviously but still I just personally wouldn't feel comfortable going uh and as I said I've got friends

that have said that there's people on Twitter that have said that and I don't think we should be shaming anyone for that especially not people who are part of the highrisk groups definitely shouldn't be shaming anyone for this um and everyone should be looking out for their own personal safety obviously above all else um and the safety of their friends and and kind of our colleagues as well there but anyway you can read the full advisory for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so Bas has introduced something called Builder grants so they say here we're constantly working to make the Bas ecosystem a great place for Builders and one of the ways we're doing this is through grants now we're introducing a new type of grant for those with early ideas or initial prototypes so they continue what we'll

consider when looking to give out Builder grants is the Builder creating something unique and fun is the Builder bringing more users on chain uh and then you can kind of check out this blog post here uh talking about uh the base grants I don't think there's been any dollar value attached to this uh no here we go uh grants currently range from 1 to 5 e this is an experiment we may adjust or change this program as we learn so obviously not like huge amounts of Grants but I think that they're as I said they're running this experiment they're trying to Target uh various different kind of groups and various different people building things on chain and just basically getting them to build things on chain as kind of like even proof of Concepts and just giving some initial very early seed I guess funding so to speak here and then

obviously if that thing gets usage and it brings more people on chain and takes off maybe they get additional grants or maybe they can go get funding stuff like that so I think it's a pretty cool initiative just to get more and more people on chain here uh generally with with these kind of Base grants but on top of this there are so many other places to get grants as well and then you can also do things like within guess the Bas ecosystem because it extends into the optimism ecosystem you can obviously do things like uh retroactive public goods funding as well like building build something and then apply for the retroactive public goods uh uh funding kind of uh grants there but there are other grants you can get from like the ethereum foundation and other groups out there so and then I mean you

can always raise money from from VCS and Angel Investors too if you think you've got something that that will be able to got an idea or something that can that can raise money there but this is just another way to get a bit of funding here to work on that thing that you've been wanting to work on so yeah if you're a builder you can definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below and there's also a bit more information I guess on the Tweet thread here which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right this is put on my radar a few times today in the daily way Discord channel uh and I think I've I've kind of mentioned this before on the refuel but I didn't directly mention uh uh this part of it so there are a bunch of

proposed tax regulations that are threatening um I guess like blockchain access in the U us right now and this was from back in August so you can see here that the IRS proposed new Crypt broker reporting regulations and if finalized in their current form the regulations would require websites like those for UNIS swop openc and it scan and many block Builders to geoblock us people so obviously some very nefarious regulations here I think Elizabeth Warren is champion championing this bill and as you guys know and as I've talked about plenty of times before Elizabeth Warren really is Public Enemy Number One for crypto in the US uh because she has the most power out of anyone that's targeting crypto uh or is like in in terms of like in government that is

targeting crypto in a negative way here uh but the reason why I'm bringing this up today even though this was announced in August is that you if you're a US citizen you can actually submit comments and I think there is a link here uh and there and I think the comment period ends at the end of this month I I think um and so you can submit comments I don't know if there's a there's a link anywhere here for for you to do that but I think you can find it if you just kind of um if you just kind of Google this here uh but if you're a US citizen you can submit comments to basically get these regulations amended or basically say that you're not happy with them and they make no sense and you should do it you should definitely do it if you're a

US person or citizen because obviously crypto in the US is at stake here if these things become actual kind of regulations or become law uh and you know this is just another push from these politicians especially obviously Elizabeth Warren to kind of kill crypto because they've got an agenda against it I mean I spoke the other day about how she was trying to paint crypto as like one of the main funding sources for the Hamas terrorists which was just insane to me because straight away everyone jumped on this and said this makes absolutely no sense you know Chan analysis came out and said this makes zero sense this is not true and a bunch of other groups as well and a bunch of other people um but obviously the agenda is clear she hates crypto she knows that her base um you know votes for her

because she goes after the quote unquote criminals in the financial ecosystem and crypto is a really easy Target still right now I mean it's it's kind of funny because crypto will probably become less of an easy target as the prices pump because what ends up happening is that you end up getting a lot of people coming in uh that are on side with crypto because they're making money from it because maybe they bought some kind of tokens or what whatever uh because it's a bull market and it becomes an unpopular thing to attack but we shouldn't just rely on that because crypto isn't always in a bull market and the people that come in during the bull market are usually tourists so the people that are around right now people have been around for you know in the bare Market in the crab market we're the

True Believers right we're the ones who are actually in this stuff for more than money we're actually in this stuff for the long term so we should be the one having the having a voice here and we should be the one kind of giving feedback here and as I said we shouldn't just r on a few green candles to save us we should definitely be making our voices heard and I think we have been over the last I guess year or so especially post FTX where essentially every regulator in the US uh wanted to destroy crypto because of FTX but as I've said over the last few months or last couple months at least the SEC seems to have changed their tune or at least kind of like weakened their stance against crypto um and they also have obviously lost in court a bunch of times

which just helped a lot with that uh but there are other organizations within the US other regulatory bodies that can still go on the attack uh and and and do some damage here so anyway you can go leave these comments I'll link this tweet thread in the YouTube description below for you to check out some more context around what I've been talking about but I think on that note it's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone