DPI adds SUSHI, zkSync raises money and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #68 - 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 second of march 2021. all right everyone let's get into the news from the last 24 hours so actually before dropping into that i did want to talk about this tweet from ryan sean adams today so he basically tweeted out the fastest growing economy this decade won't uh won't be uh you the us china or europe it'll be ethereum now i wrote about this in today's delegate newsletter but i wanted to kind of talk about it on the refuel as well i thought this was interesting because what he's saying here is that um you know ethereum might not become the biggest economy right it might not become like

as big as you know the us china or europe but it's about the rate of growth so you could imagine ethereum as like a small little developing nation at the moment right where you know we've we have these in kind of like in the physical world as well where we have there's a bunch of developing nations and their rate of growth is usually pretty quick because you know not only do they get to kind of leap frog you know through technological advancements but people like to invest in the developing world because they you know they kind of see that there's going to be kind of more developments happening there there's going to be an economy bustling there there's going to be greater kind of um great opportunities for them there as investors or as people kind of moving there to work there and things like that

so i think the same is kind of playing out within the ethereum ecosystem right where we're getting like a flood of people coming into the ecosystem a flood of capital because there's opportunity you know there's opportunity to invest in different d5 protocols or or nfts or anything like that right we have people coming in and issuing their own nfts on the ethereum digital nation essentially right um which is a nation with an economy it has like a unit of account with eth right for example and then it has like all these different currencies like stable coins and stuff like that and then it has all these different you could call them i guess like companies but they're actually protocols that have their own tokens like a like an equity token essentially so you know there's kind of a lot of parallels there between developing nations and ethereum

and you know ethereum's economic activity is is grand but it's still a rounding error when you compare it to like nation states for example right so to the u.s i mean ethereum doesn't hold a candle you know in terms of economic activity uh you know the us has 350 million citizens right has trillions in gdp uh the d5 kind of i guess economy is what 40 billion dollars locked or something like that in terms of decentralized exchange volume uh we're doing i think 70 billion dollars a month now or something like that so i mean the growth there from from you know previous months and years is definitely like nothing to scoff at but it's still tiny right in terms of like actual uses of these things you know i've theorized before it's probably a few hundred thousand or something like that so

you know ethereum has a you know a pretty grand population you know in terms of like how many people are using it relative to other kind of blockchain networks or other kind of crypto networks but it doesn't hold a candle to the populations of different nations like the us and china and europe right but the special thing about ethereum is that it is a global nation right it's a global economy where anyone from any one of these kind of countries can access it you know barring some kind of i guess you know maybe uh blockage at like the internet level where you know there are some countries that shut off the internet or maybe the block access to a lot of different websites and stuff like that you know it's kind of hard to block access to the ethereum network but it can be done

but barring that sort of stuff which doesn't affect most of the world i think um you know you can access the ethereum economy from from anywhere right there's no kyc there's no regulations for the you know because it's all decentralized and things like that as well um and not only can you access it you can build on it right you can build it from anywhere in the world at any time that you want because ethereum is on 24 7 right you can be anyone you want it doesn't even matter you know you could you could even be like an ai and no one would even know right i know we aren't there yet with ai but just imagine like there's we have like full ai or i forgot exactly what they call it now it's like a specific you know set of ai that can

actually act like a human think for itself um i think it's called generalized ai ai or something like that but you could imagine like no matter who you are where you're from it doesn't it doesn't matter right we have projects spinning up within the ethereum ecosystem that have fully anonymous teams now um you know i think alchemics a project that i've been speaking about lately has a mostly or at least fully anonymous team or at least pseudo-anonymous uh pseudonym sorry where you know people don't really know the identities of them but the project has grown so much because it really just doesn't matter who you are what matters is what you build right the quality of your of your product the code that you ship at the end of the day and that's what i think will make ethereum um the most powerful digital nation in kind

of like the decades to come right um and it will be like that one of the fastest growing economies if not the fastest growing economy over the next decade because it's just like it's a green field for experimentation i know right now there's a lot of issues right we're limited by the scalability the high fees are pricing people and use cases out but i've spoken about it tons of times we're going to solve that right i don't think that's going to be a lasting issue that's just growing pains at the end of the day we're going to solve that and we're going to get to a place where you know it's going to be cheap to kind of like build on ethereum it's going to be cheap to transact on it it's going to be um very scalable so you can build you know anything you kind of

want on it as well and it won't just be ethereum i've spoken about how you know i think ethereum sits at the center as like this the kind of economic nexus that kind of like has all this capital flowing into it right um kind of like like a big nation state like the us for example right and then around that you'll have all these smaller kind of i guess you can call them nations or smaller networks that will feed in because you know as a smaller network you want to do trade with the bigger networks right you want to have your assets on that you want to have your economic activity feeding into there so that you can tap into that economy and hopefully bring some of that wealth back to your own kind of network right some of that activity back so i think we're going to see that play

out you know there's not going to be i don't i don't believe there's going to be like millions of blockchains or anything like that or millions of crypto networks i think there will be um you know a handful of like pretty sizable ones like we see in the kind of real world today you know us china europe being the sizable economies here you know south korea being pretty pretty large as well and you know japan all that sort of stuff we're going to see like a handful of these large kind of um economies or at least large networks on kind of i guess like in the crypto sphere i do believe ethereum will be the biggest and i believe it'll be the biggest by by quite a large margin um but yeah there's no denying that you know everything built around ethereum is just going to feed into it

and it's going to have its own kind of network effect there and that doesn't include just crypto networks it's anything in the cryptosphere like centralized exchanges and stuff like that and even centralized centralized kind of chains and things like that as well they you know all feed this kind of economic activity into ethereum so i thought it was a really interesting tweet from ryan i wrote a little bit more about this in the delegate newsletter but i basically covered most of what i wrote um you know just then uh but yeah i always love it when i read a tweet like this and it just gets my brain spinning and then i just kind of want to share it with all of you so hopefully you know it's kind of you know maybe altered your thinking around what ethereum can be and and kind of like it can be so much more

than what it is today there is so much more left to unlock so much more economic activity left to unlock that i mean that's what makes it most exciting right so yeah something something to think about for sure so rac on twitter announced today that uh he he is launching a new kind of initiative initiative called six nft which is a creative agency specializing in nfts now for those who don't know rac has been around for a while he's a grammy award-winning recording artist but he's been around in the ethereum community for quite a while now he did a few different nfts he's done tape uh you might have um remember there was a cassette tape a digital cassette tape that you could buy like as an nft and then you could kind of um

redeem that for a physical cassette tape and i think that ended up being worth a lot um and he did that through zora i think um but he's been very heavily involved with uh i guess because he comes from the music industry with kind of thinking how this technology and specifically nfts can help with the music industry right so this new initiative i think is going to work to kind of as he says brings the best minds in the space together to do this right and basically what he means by do this right is make sure that we harness the power of this technology in the right way and it reaches the right people across you know the music industry and other industries that are going to get disrupted by this which i thought was really cool so if that's something you're interested in as

he says you can reach out to him on this email here nft at six dot digital or um you can go to six nft uh which is the the twitter account here and i'll link this in the youtube description as well for you guys to check out so hudson jameson put out a really cool thread today basically talking about how there are a lot of ethereum projects right now hiring for like a you know multitude of different positions um and obviously a lot of people are reaching out to him about this because he's been in the community for a while and i get this as well i have so many teams reaching out to me about like finding people for them to kind of like hire because they've just got open positions coming out you know coming out every day uh so hudson's tweet thread here basically

describes like you know i guess kind of a high level overview of like how to get more involved you know what to do what not to do you know through the recruiting process and he also had like an open kind of i guess um forum here where he said you know his dams were open and he received over 50 responses in his dms and this is what happened to me too when i put put the call out there you know to kind of um dm me or message me about this and unfortunately it's very hard for me to keep up with everything and keep up with it all so i guess generally you know go read this thread but generally i wanted to give just some surface level advice here on how to get involved kind of with crypto as i said there's so many opportunities happening

you know available right now across every single vertical every single kind of like skill set like marketing community developing business kind of development right um uh you know smart contract development stuff like that uh you know all the financial kind of positions as well that i mean the growth there's there's so much in every single thing so wherever you're coming from i think you know if you're coming from the kind of like traditional tech space or the web 2 space the jump into crypto can be kind of a little bit daunting because there's a lot of specific crypto things that you kind of maybe need to be aware of especially as part of like marketing and community because there's just a different way of doing things you know there are different ways within the crypto ecosystem of kind of

measuring things like if you if you worked in growth at a kind of like web 2 company right your kind of like measurements of success in your kpis would have been looking at like google analytics for example right and seeing click through rates and all that sort of stuff that still plays a part in you know crypto specifically in d5 but in d5 what we measure our kind of success by is total value locked right volumes you know the amount of economic activity within the protocol so that's where you kind of have to like switch a little bit into kind of you know you are a growth person but you're also switching into a bit of an economic uh uh economic analyst too and kind of learning all that sort of stuff so there is a little bit of a learning curve there but i wouldn't be daunted by

that and i wouldn't be kind of like discouraged by that i would take that as an opportunity to learn and there's plenty of places to learn i mean you can just sit on crypto twitter for a little while and get like a feel for for what's going on and get involved with the different communities on discord i mean each of these projects have a discord community that you can go in and just start talking to people straight up you don't even have to beat anyone like you can be anonymous on there just start talking to people like you don't it doesn't even matter who you are or where you're from or whatever as i just explained before um and then you're gonna get you know just spend some time in the community and you're gonna get people responding to you you can ask dumb questions it doesn't

matter right they may you know they may be dumb to the people that have been around for a while but for you you're just learning and obviously you know keeping up to date with all the stuff happening in the ecosystem whether that's through the daily way ecosystem you know ether bankless the defiant d5 that all that sort of stuff and you can get up to speed pretty quickly there's a lot of content out there for you now so i think that's the first thing you should do is definitely get a lay of the land when you come into crypto if you're looking for a job here and then i mentioned the other day you can go to like the cryptocurrency jobs website you can just google cryptocurrency jobs uh and then kind of look on there for what's available you can visit the different projects websites and they'll

have their open positions on there and really the best way to get involved is maybe just like get into the community of a project that you want to be involved with and you know kind of just like talk to people and what's even really cool about this is that there are total like kind of autonomous or like dao organizations right now four different projects like badger dao um harvest finance uh the index cop that will literally pay you kind of like an equivalent of a full-time salary to work for the dow essentially and i'll pay you in the native tokens as well so you can either cash that out or get exposure to the upside right so that's one thing that's uniquely enabled by uh ethereum and defined crypto and all that so something to keep in mind definitely go read hudson's thread because he's got

got great tips here but you know i would say dm me for more advice here but i get so many dms that i can't respond to everyone and it just it just takes up a lot of time to do it but i'm always happy to answer questions uh whether that be in the daily grade discord channel um or anything like that especially because in the discord channel there's other people that can also answer your questions if i'm not there which i think is really cool because you could just start forming that community and we've got a few really good community members in there right now doing some really cool stuff so yeah definitely do that um or you know you can always you know if you really need something specific answered you can definitely dm me i'm okay with that but sometimes it might take me a little

while to get back to you uh unfortunately especially if it gets buried in like my message requests on twitter um you know sometimes i i don't look at those for like a week because it's just full of spam most of the time unfortunately so yeah definitely always keen to help but just uh you know sometimes it's just it's a bit too much like as hudson said he got over 50 dms from this and he he he you know he's just one guy right i'm just one guy we can't reply to all of all of this kind of unfortunately but don't let that discourage you there's plenty of other people in the ecosystem that can help you and it doesn't have to be just one person you can kind of as i said join communities and they'll be able to help you as well so andre put out this uh i guess teaser

teaser tweet really i mean this announcement tweet of this new kind of uh board room that they're calling it which is basically a single portable for multi-governance uh view proposals discussions breakdowns and more basically it's like a portal for governance as you can see here there's a bunch of different projects here uh compound uni swap synthetics blah blah and you can click through to them and you can see all the active kind of uh governance proposals and kind of like how they do governance right and learn how the compound governance process kind of works you can set up delegation you know you can connect your wallet here and things like that which i thought was was really cool so i mean yeah if we go back i mean there's uni swap synthetics all this sort of stuff here you can kind of like just see how their

governance process works at a glance uh i mean if i click through the units up here and go to proposals you know you can see the new proposals or all the proposals kind of like active you can see voters the forum i mean this is really really cool because typically with governance we see kind of low voter turnout i guess you could call it because i mean it's very hard at the end of the day to keep track of if you're part of like five different communities and there's five different kind of like um things you have to kind of stay on top of to govern it's kind of hard to keep on top of it all so i think this works as like a governance aggregator to help you kind of keep on top of it and i i mean i've spoken about this

before and i think the end state for governance within d5 is just going to be like people electing representatives basically by delegating their tokens to them to vote on their behalf because that's the only way it really scales it's very hard to get like voter participation from like a lot of people holding the tokens and things like that so i think that's going to be you know kind of how it scales out here so yeah really cool little tool that andre kind of posted about here i'll link it in the youtube description you can go check it out so matteo leibowitz from uni swap posted this cool little chart here today which he's calling the stairway to heaven which basically shows the uh uni swap unique users so i think this is like unique addresses kind of interacting with uni swap

at any given i guess like month year looks like um or maybe like every every kind of like week here basically february 1st set a new all-time high or at least the month of february i think for almost 400 000 uh uniswap unique users which i thought was really really cool and i think this isn't cumulative this is unique users during that month so you know you can see here that even during the airdrop their uni unique users one is it wasn't even that high right back in i think september is when the the uni airdrop happened so you know this is just really great kind of growth to see and the fact that this is 400 almost 400 000 for just the month of february speaks to how much this kind of stuff is growing i mean you know as i said at the start these

user numbers aren't really kind of like anything to you know write home about right there's not like millions or tens of millions just yet but it's growing right and that's what we're measuring kind of the ethereum economy in the growth not in so much in like the kind of how it compares to other things but just like the growth rate and kind of like extrapolating that out saying okay we're really bullish on this technology and we think it's going to grow like much faster than from from here so let's kind of extrapolate it out and say if this growth trend continues what can we get to and that's what's kind of been happening so really great to see this within uni swap i think unisop's a really great barometer of the overall unique kind of ethereum users because of the fact that like everyone uses unix pop right i mean you know it

is the default app that most you know pretty much everyone uses because it's a swap protocol you know the biggest d5 app is maker but not everyone uses maker because not everyone wants to use their eighth or whatever as collateral to basically leverage it right not everyone wants to do kind of leverage things so but with uni swap everyone you know will want to trade a token at one point or another whether that's trading some stable coins for eth or trading a token for another token or whatever right so yeah really great to see this growth here from uni swap so the d5 pulse index rebalanced again over the last 24 hours and added sushi to its index so i think this is covering most of the quote-unquote d5 blue chips now uh if you go and kind of like look at the the rest of the tokens in there i

mean you can see some of them in my screenshot here but while this loads crc yeah it's loaded now you can see that you know it's covering most of the kind of d5 blue chips you have uni swap you know avail snx sushi now and you know basically all the things that people call blue chips i think and for those of you wondering why you know maybe your favorite token isn't in the default pulse index there's a strict kind of rule that the project has to be live for six months um so that's why sushi was only included now it's because sushi's only six months old uh so there's other projects that are still needing to age and will get added eventually you know i can imagine there's there's plenty i mean even like the um the index co-op who manages the d5 pulse index that that token will be added soon

i think uh there's like uh there's other popular defy tokens like badger as well i mean there's a bunch of others that i i think will be added to this index so fair to say if it hasn't been added yet um it will be at the six month mark but there's also a methodology that you can view here that has the full breakdown of you know what what the actual um the token inclusion criteria is um i i mentioned the the six month rule because that is definitely one of the most strict because it's kind of like something you can't you know force right you have to just wait um and that's what kind of bars a lot of these tokens from being included but yeah i think each month we're going to see a new kind of token one or even two token new tokens at a time

included in in the kind of index here so really cool to see that sushi's finally in here so hermes uh for those who don't know hermes network is another layer two scaling solution using zk roll ups so they went live to their public test net today um they're gonna be this will be the i think the final round of private testing ahead of the launch of the main net in the coming days so more layer 2 coming right i mean i have been speaking about this a lot lately and and i think that it's just going to accelerate from here and what hermes does is basically i think it's like a payments protocol essentially where you can basically um there's a functional mobile and web wallet to interact with the zk uh roll up technology that they're using they've got an explorer for it

and then you can kind of like use this this test net here and to kind of like see how it all works here so yeah really cool to see this going live and on the l2 news as well zk sync announced that they raised a bunch of money i think from a bunch of different kind of leading default projects here so you know projects including if this image loads rv balancer curve loop ring you know even finance which is funny right coinbase ventures you know i mean there's like the who's who of like investors and and ecosystem partners here which i thought was was really cool here but the round was actually led by union square ventures which is a a kind of like a fintech or a traditional tech kind of startup um investor that's been around for quite a

while now um and yeah i mean there's a ton of investors in here so for those of you who aren't familiar with zk sync they're a payments protocol on zk using zk roll up they've been integrated with coin um with git coin so far you may have used it when you're using git coin uh and it works very well and they've actually teased here that they're going to turn their technology into an evm compatible zk roll up now this may um remind you of the kind of i guess like a little bit of a battle going on between optimistic rollups and zk roll-ups right now where optimism has focused their attention on building an optimistic roll-up that could support the evm so that you could just port your contracts from mainnet straight to the optimistic ethereum network and zika roll-up kind of came under a

bit of scrutiny or a bit of i guess like an attack saying you know zk robs are good but they can't do smart contracts or they can't do evm compatible smart contracts and zk sinks out here saying well no we can do it and we're going to show you so the layer two walls are heating up i mean this is beautiful this is what we want we want competition between not only different chains and different scalability solutions but also the different layer two teams as well so really cool to see this and i guess congrats congrats to zk sync on the race here and congrats to hermes network on getting uh the the kind of public test net out here as well so uh the yern v2 ethol is now live so this has been hotly anticipated for quite a while now and you may remember that the the v1 8th

volt actually ended up sucking up like a ton of 8th liquidity back when it launched i think it was had like half a billion dollars worth of ethan there within a few days and you know the v2 ethe volt uh was basically being built over the last few months i think it was being built to be much more secure than v1 and done in a much much better way using the v2 yearn infrastructure so really cool to see that out there but you can go to yeon.finance to view all the vaults they have including the 8th fold to see if that's something that you want to i guess like put your ether into because there's just so many different things you can do with your eat now so you got to kind of like weigh up the benefits right do you want to use your ethan maker or in a money

market as collateral to kind of like draw stable coins against and kind of go you know buy some coins or do you want to use your ether in staking do you want to use your eath in um you know i've spoken about alpha finance having a um eighth kind of like product that you can use to get like a i think it's over ten percent yield on your eighth or do you want to use the the urine finance vault which doesn't give you the apy just yet because it's so new um but i feel like it's going to be high so yeah definitely go check that out and there's actually another product coming from uh the index carbs soon as well called the flav the flexible leveraged index or the fly which may be appealing too but i'll cover that once it's released for sure

so sebastian from uh maker dao put out this interesting tweet today uh basically saying that you know growth continued for maker dow during february doubling the income month on month so the maker protocol is making 6.6 million in net income for mkr holders which means it's going and buying mkr and burning it uh and the the cost of token rewards and lp fees is just 10 which is the dsr being activated what this means is there's no incentives right you don't earn mkr tokens for putting your assets in make a dao right now so it's all kind of i guess like very natural growth here and i've spoken about this before right about how the maker protocol is growing really quickly right the dye supplies are all time high people are loving it people using it

but the mkr price has lagged i mean it's lagged in usd terms right it recently went up a fair bit but you know for i guess like the last two and a half years or something it sat around five six hundred dollars and kind of oscillated around there and against eighth it's actually you know not performed very well at all and you know i think this is actually like the market being very inefficient because if you think about it uh maker as a protocol is generating so much money for token holders but the problem is is that the token holders aren't directly getting that revenue right what happens is the protocol goes and buys mkr tokens and burns it right but the the actual token holders are just holding their token hoping that it goes up in value because of the buy and burn mechanism

which i've long thought wasn't a really it wasn't a great kind of i guess solution here i'm much i'm a much bigger fan of people being able to stake their tokens and earn a the native token denominated return kind of like what sushi swap does right with sushi staking and farm does it as well and stuff like that rather than the buy and burn model i mean i just i don't think that's a good model um and and you know you might think oh well you know it's getting a burning mechanism with eip1559 you know why does that give value to eth and you know you may be right that maybe it doesn't give like that much fundamental value to eth but ethers and asset is used much more than just to pay fees and much more than just to like burn fees in one five five nine

ethers and asset is used as money right this is the story of value uses collateral uses in staking the mkr token there's not much use for it besides you literally just hold it right i think you can use it as collateral in some default protocols but really you're just holding it right you can't stake it to earn fees you just have to hope that the buy there's enough buy and burn pressure to increase the mkr token price over time which seems to be playing out against usd but i always look at this stuff against eth because if you're not performing eth and there was no reason for anyone to hold your token they should have just held eth right so it's kind of like my benchmark index for default tokens but we'll have to see right i think the market isn't as being as efficient as it

could be here um not financial advice but i do think mkr is undervalued i don't hold any right now because i have ptsd from watching the price do nothing for so long and then dropping against eth and i just don't want to hold it um but i actually do think ironically if they change to like a staking model where instead of buying and burning people locked up their mkr tokens and staked and got like a return like that there'd be much more demand for the mkl token much more of the float would be taken off the market right the circulating supply and there would be a better narrative around it but long term i don't think maybe that doesn't matter right maybe long term the mcadam protocol just keeps growing and growing and growing and holding mkr tokens for over the long term was probably

you know maybe it was a good idea i don't know but it's good to see them growing you know it's it's good to see uh the die supply at all-time highs because maker is still a brilliant protocol it's one of the only that i trust with my eighth when i want to take leverage so definitely kudos to them i'm just pushing forward regardless of sentiment about the token or about the project or whatever i think that they've just pushed forward and it's worked really well for them all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching if you haven't done so yet be sure to give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the channel join the discord server subscribe to the newsletter and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone