dYdX Raises $65 million, EIP-1559 narratives & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #144 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 16th of june 2021 all right everyone you're probably shocked right now seeing me on camera here if you're watching on youtube uh first time that i have been clean shaven since january 2019 and before that i i hadn't been clean-shaven for many many years but i kind of put this picture on on on twitter and i said uh i've made a sacrifice to the beard gods and you know if eighth may resume up only now and that's just like a bit of a joke a bit of a meme there i guess people may be wondering why i actually shaved the beard off it really was just because i wanted to see uh what i look like with just a

moustache on um and just just try a new look at a look out the beard's obviously going to grow back it's not like my hair uh that doesn't grow back in my beard definitely grows back it'll take me about probably three months to get back to what i was uh i guess like on previous refuels and things like that but it generally grows pretty quickly um but yeah i don't know i i kind of like it i i'm i'm not i don't really kind of do things and present myself to other people it's more for myself and i kind of just wanted to see how it looked so yeah sorry if it's a bit of a shock to to anyone who hasn't seen my tweet yet um but you know i'm sure you'll get used to it as we progress through the refuels and at the end of the day

you're not here for my beautiful face you're here to learn about ethereum and kind of stay updated on it so on that note let's dive into all the updates from the last 24 hours so this was really interesting uh coinbase had listed three new tokens on coinbase pro yesterday uh chile's keep network and shib now i don't have a problem with the other two chili's in keep network um as far as i'm aware they're part of legit projects but shib shib is one of the dog tokens that everyone kind of like knows and loves i think besides dogecoin shib and akira are the only other two that people know of there's actually a lot more than that and the reason is because i think shib was one of the ones that went up the most and pumped the hardest and akita was

one of the ones that vitalik sent to get coin and git coin owns like a a lot of akita tokens so um i wrote about this in the delegate newsletter today but i thought this was quite weird because coinbase kind of listed you know okay maybe i should give a history lesson here actually so coinbase back in the day i had uh two different exchanges coinbase uh the normal exchange and gdax which is now known as coinbase pro and back in like 2017 they had this thing called the digital listing asset framework which was basically a framework full of information that kind of i guess stipulated what criteria tokens and coins had to meet to be listed on coinbase now since then they have completely

thrown that out the window i think i remember um you know considering that framework dead when they listed xrp then they listed ethereum classic then they just thought you know they kept listing more and more stuff over time now i i i don't fault coinbase for this i think it's just them responding to competition because if you think about it like binance ftx kucoin huabi okex you know every single offshore exchange you can think of uh doesn't have to put up with what coinbase has to put up with and that's the harsh regulations of the us environment now because of that they their volumes have exploded i mean the number one reason why binance's volumes are so high uh actually there's two major reasons the first one is that they list basically everything right like anything that's popular

they'll list and they'll also add leverage products to it so you're able to kind of get leverage on a multitude of different tokens for better or worse whereas coinbase actually doesn't have leverage for retail users they used to really early on but they had to remove that because of regulatory pressures i believe but they also used to not really list many things now you know these days over the past few months especially they've been listing more and more kind of tokens and coins and um i i think that's fine but at the end of the day they are a source of legitimacy for this industry they are the front door for a lot of people so them listing something like shib just borders on kind of like listing scams to me now i'm not saying shib is a scam or whatever but it's like it's completely pointless

it is it is definitely um not something that people buy as an investment as far as i know they're buying it to gamble on it and that's all well and good and i'm not here to moralize and say oh people should and shouldn't invest in or put their money into but i don't know i just thought this was weird and that's why i kind of said here that the timeline where coinbase is lists shibb is both amazing and horrifying amazing because it's just absolutely crazy right it's just funny you think about it's just so different to what coinbase was just a few years ago and horrifying because it's basically lending legitimacy to these meme coins and tokens that really at the end of the day uh have have no company behind them have no project behind them have no relevance um to anything they're just random

tokens it's very different to those meme stocks like gamestop and and kind of amc and stuff like that yes they may get like way ahead of where they should be in terms of valuation but at least there's a company behind it at least there's a company with real products behind it amc has their movie theaters gme has obviously gamestop with the video game kind of products uh but when you kind of look at shib it's it really is just like there's nothing attached to it as far as i know maybe they added stuff to it maybe they're trying to do stuff with it i haven't kept up with that but it was created a while ago actually it wasn't even created recently i believe it's it's it's over a year old at this point and i i'm pretty sure the original point of it was just to create this like

meme token that had kind of like no points um at the end of the day so yeah again not here to moralize but i think that in a world where essentially centralized exchanges are losing out or to decentralize exchanges in terms of volumes uh trading volumes uh they have to list these assets and it's kind of like it's got it's kind of like this domino effect or this i guess maybe domino effect isn't the right analogy here but it's kind of like this thing where you know these tokens will show up on uni swap there's literally thousands of these things only a few will kind of succeed uh in terms of like going up in price and things like that and those are usually ones that are shield on tick-tock and youtube and all that sort of stuff so those will that will happen and then

you know they'll they'll start getting like a a a market cap in the hundreds of millions their trading volumes will go up and then their centralized exchanges will see this so the smaller ones will start listing it first normally so you know your smaller centralized exchanges then you'll see the binances and the ftx's of the world list that then finally you know you'll see gemini cracking coinbase all the us domiciled ones start listing it so it's kind of funny because like coinbase is really late to the party here shib as a the ship mania is pretty much over at this point in time i mean at one point ship had over a billion dollars of trading volume on uh uniswap but that's like long gone i mean that's gone with retail because the people trading that with retail investors and they've all been flushed out by the recent kind of crab market

that we've been having so um yeah that's going my general views on this i as i said not moralizing i don't think that anyone should be should be able to tell anyone what they should and shouldn't kind of put their money into or trade and i also think that everyone was responsible for their own financial decisions but in saying that by coinbase listing these kind of like meme tokens they're inviting more regulatory pressure in my mind and obviously they went through their lawyers before they did this and stuff like that but at the end of the day they would weigh it up and say okay well you know how much volume and how many new users could we get if we listed this thing versus you know the regulatory pressures that we're going to face it it probably ends up being worth it for them because they have a huge legal team

on retainer anyway so at the end of the day even if the you know the government comes after them their legal team is just going to be there ready and waiting um and meanwhile they can kind of profit off of this so from that point of view i guess for coinbase it's a it's it's a win-win situation regardless and i think uh we're just going to keep seeing more and more of this happen so definitely be prepared for that be ready for it don't be surprised when coinbase starts listing you know really random stuff i there's there's obviously other kind of like tokens like this like safe moon and there was one called come rocket which was the most brazen thing ever but i i don't know if coinbase is going to list rocket i mean if they did then i would be like okay something's going on here what the

hell um but she like you know if you if you compare shib to come rocket i think ship is a bit better but uh just in terms of like i guess branding because that's all these are at the end of the day they're just the branding and the memes um so yeah we'll we'll see i mean i'm not gonna say there's a zero percent chance of coinbase kind of not listing those things but we'll see we'll see what happens there so dydx announced a massive fundraise uh yesterday their series c 65 million dollars led by paradigm this is the second i believe massive fundraise that paradigm has led they led the uh starkware 75 million dollar series a or series b recently um and you know they've led this one from diy dx this is

this is quite crazy actually because the idx it's funny because dydexa's um platform is powered by uh starquest technology so paradigm basically has exposure to both these uh kind of companies here but um um uh paradigm wasn't the only one that that were were part of this round there was a bunch of other kind of like people that you all know of like cms holdings who seems to be in everything uh qcp capital these are liquidity providers some other crypto vc's like hash key electric capital delphi digital uh and their partners like starkware being investors as well um the besides the fundraise the key thing here is that dydx is going to be more than just a perpetual trading exchange they want to be in exchange for d5 in

general uh from my reading of this post here which is really cool uh they're saying that they're going to use the capital uh to decentralize the protocol which means that a token is coming sooner rather than later i you know i i don't know if they do they'll do a series d fundraiser maybe sirius c is it and they'll launch a token um that token is going to be uh i mean that'll be one of the biggest token launches um i think it'll be on like coinbase relatively quickly because the idx is founded by coinbase alum uh and also uh the uh the investors uh are like you know have have ties to coinbase and stuff like that so you know not investment advice but just just some speculation there um but they also say they're going to be adding new assets and new features to

the perpetual contracts launch a mobile application which you know that's really cool uh partnered with infrastructure players bridging the gap between centralized and decentralized finance and a bunch of other things like growing in asia and continuing to hire and things like that um for those who don't know the ua decks is a layer 2x uh perpetual exchange right now and that's why that's that's so interesting because of the fact that their their product is amazing i don't know i don't know if you guys have used it i've used it before i mean i'm not a trader and i'm not using in any big way because i'll end up getting wrecked but i've used that just to try it out and see kind of like you know if it's living up to the high pr and it really is starkware has built an amazing system uh that dydx have tapped into and and it

built this amazing product so highly recommend going and checking out that out but yeah i guess congrats on this 65 million dollar raise that is that is huge um you know i don't think capital is scarce anymore i think talent is so i'm wondering how uh you know successful dydx and other teams that have raised this like kind of money recently are going to be in recruiting people because i know from speaking to various people that right now there's a pretty big shortage in solidity developers and they're charging a lot of money to switch teams because at the end of the day solidity developers because of they're such a shortage they have the option to go wherever they want so i guess that's an alpha league learn solidity become a solidity developer because you're going to be in high demand for years to come so i mentioned the other day that

alchemix launched their al eth product well today the they they basically um announced that the al-8 farm is now live so you can basically go deposit your ar ethan to the saddle liquidity provider pool here and earn a quite a high apr on your eat now this 132 ap apr is not going to stay like this for very long it's definitely going to come down but i still think this is going to be one of the best ways uh or at least one of the highest yielding ways to kind of like get a return on your eth so definitely go check this out now as a related thing here i do want to talk about some drama that i saw happen overnight with regards to alchemics and curve and saddle so for those who don't know saddle is pretty much like a

an amm uh for um similar assets like uh like what curve is like for like for like assets and i believe saddle copied and or forked most of curves code and a lot of people think that there's just really no point to saddle saddle finance it doesn't really um need to exist because we already have curve now i'm not going to make any kind of like assertions on that i don't really have any strong opinions on that but uh what i do have have an opinion on is curves kind of mafia tactics so a bit of backstory here what they what alchemics tried to do is that they tried to go to uh to curve and do this lp pull on curve instead of saddle now curve basically said no because they didn't want um alchemics farming crv tokens just to dump them uh and and that would hurt obviously to

hurt the price of crv and things like that so alcomix was like okay well if you're not going to have us with our al-eth product we're going to go to saddle now the curve people didn't take kindly to this because of the fact that saddle is a competitor saddle copied their code and all this sort of stuff there so in retaliation curve you know started some drama on twitter and then they also put up a proposal to take the rewards away from uh from the al usd pool on curve which to me was just like extremely petty i really don't like what i'm seeing from from kind of curve here and honestly the last time i checked their governance process is kind of a sham because the most of the tokens are kind of sorry most of the voting power is owned by the team anyway so if the

team really wanted to i'm pretty sure they could just swing the vote whichever way they they're kind of uh pleased here so yeah that there's a bit of drama there um and that that's why you see a leaf on saddle and not curve whereas al-usd is on curve and and not saddle now but what i mean by on these platforms in in i mean that you know getting rewards so al-8 is still going to be on curve i believe but it's just not going to get crv rewards um whereas uh al-usd currently does but if that proposal goes through they're not going to get those rewards anymore either which is kind of shitty but anyway um if you want to go earn a yield on your ale this is the best way to do so right now so definitely go check this out so muhammad here announced that because

eip1559 is coming very soon himself and marius are building a portal to visual visualize eighth fees being burned here so the test net uh has around 700 eighth burned uh the test that the eip1559 is on uh so you can see here the little dashboard so um it's on github of course uh all open source and you know you can kind of like set it up in your own environment and kind of contribute to it if you want to uh but this is really cool i mean i i do think that when one five five nine goes live you're gonna be seeing a lot of dashboards and a lot of tweets around how much each is being burned each day because even though gas fees are quite kind of cheap right now i believe the ethereum network is still doing on average over five million dollars worth

of uh uh fifa fever fee um revenue per day which means that if like 70 of that is burned that's still millions of dollars in eat being burned each day now at current kind of like gas fees and current uh issuance under proof of work the uh it wouldn't lead to a deflationary eth i think i did the math on this or someone i i was talking to did the math on this um and if you take proof of work issuance um and kind of like add in the fee burn uh to make east deflationary guay would have to be over 100 in proof of work but under proof of stake guay only needs to be 10 which is really cool and this is that current eth prices of course so that's really cool um but yeah the heath is not going to be deflationary if gas prices stay this low

but i think that that's fine because really the the point is that eighth is going to be deflationary uh in uh post-merge and like not not during now because right now we have four point five percent issuance on the proof of work which is huge in proof of stake once the merge goes through we're gonna have less than one percent um probably closer to zero point five percent depending on how much eat this staked so that is definitely going to mean that we can uh you know just have to have ten gray average gas prices and be able to go deflationary so just something to keep in mind i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check out the code and this dashboard so the rv grants dao had announced their first set of grantees so there's a bunch of projects that they've funded

some of them you may be aware of like gelato network flipside crypto rabbit hole i'm just going through the ones that i'm aware of here and a bunch of others that i hadn't heard of before but this is really cool i mean i've spoken plenty of times about all these projects like uni swap and and pull together and rv i mean there's so many of them i'm not gonna list them all off but they all have grants programs now where they basically put up requests for products or requests for like research or whatever and they'll pay out uh in kind of like ave tokens or pool tokens or whatever tokens or uni tokens to people um to build these things to do this work now this is i think what the future of funding open source is going to look like on ethereum at least one part of it the other part

of it of course is bitcoin and git coin grants and all that sort of stuff so these grants dows coupled with git coin is going to lead to a really really awesome open source funding uh ecosystem here i believe because we haven't had this before if you think about all the other open source software in i guess the non-crypto world there were really most of it really had no way to monetize and you know it didn't have a token attached to it or anything like that uh and and a lot of it was just like because it was open source people could just download it for free there was there was no kind of restrictions on it um you know generally no restrictions on it sometimes there was licenses for commercial use and things like that but you know just personal use and stuff like that it was normally free to use

so from that point of view we have all these crypto protocols now that have tokens attached to them and they have massive treasuries the uni treasury is billions of dollars so that treasury's not just going to sit there and do nothing that's going to be paid out to contributors to the protocol whether that be teams uh i guess like uh building things that were requested by the grants they all or whether that be contributors to the core protocol itself or whether that be just people working for the dow as full time like in marketing and bd or whatever so that's really really cool to see so yeah i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check out all the kind of projects that other grants dao has funded here but it's just really cool to see more projects getting kind of funded here

so mahalo from polygon uh quote tweeted this tweet from paul brody from ey where um he said ernst young blockchain suit is now integrated with polygon and paul brody made the original announcement where he said that blockchain.ey.com is now delivering tokens on the polygon network here so for their first individual user peroni i don't know if that's the right account that he's tagged here but anyway uh and what this means is that you can seamlessly interface with blockchain.ey.com into ethereum polygon uh fisco because which is uh open consortium chain here and a bunch of other things like consensus quorum and um explore the bitcoin blockchain so i

guess this is just more um uh i guess enterprise adoption happening for crypto for ethereum for polygon which is really really cool to see i mean this is awesome i i think i've i've discussed this plenty of times before where i've said that we're in the kind of like really early phase now where we have the individual users kind of like playing around with d5 with crypto with ethereum with all these kind of products and we haven't taken it to the next level yet of inviting these enterprises in in a big way and that's because of two main things scalability and privacy now polygon obviously kind of like fixes the scalability thing here or at least makes it better than ethereum does but it does not fix the privacy issues surrounding these blockchains

that's the next step but the fact that these enterprises and and are kind of like being the dipping their toes in and doing like proof of concepts and stuff like that already is really really cool and for those who don't know i mean paul brody has been doing a lot of work at ey for many years now in terms of like getting them to adopt blockchain and specifically getting them to adopt ethereum and ethereum uh kind of aligned products here like polygon and other scalability solutions and things like that so this is just super cool to see so uh yeah i mean i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check it out for yourself on etherscan since it's linked here i'm hoping to to see more about this in the near future so another really awesome thing that happened uh that i saw happen overnight

was that alexandra brotes the uh chess player um championship chess player uh some of you may know her when she versed vitalik live on twitch a few months ago but she started a new podcast uh with uh someone from the theme community topher benson here called bite-sized eat now this podcast is all about making learning about ethereum really accessible for everyone so it's definitely for uh beginners which i think is really really cool because you know as i've said in the past uh the refuel is not uh sorry the refill the deadly quake ecosystem is definitely not for beginners uh pretty much like most of the stuff that i put out is definitely for people that are already in the ecosystem i just want to keep up with everything um and i you know i don't think i'm going to do uh things that are for beginners um uh too

too much i'll probably do things like every now and again i do want to do it but generally i just like i don't have enough time to do everything so i'm really glad to see someone else taking it up here like bankless does a lot too don't get me wrong with the defiant and stuff like that but the the difference is with alexandra is that she has a completely different audience to myself and the other ones that i just mentioned because she is not a quote-unquote crypto native she didn't start in crypto she has a massive following and massive fan base in the chess world in the kind of like outside of crypto world and she's going to work to bring in more people more new people than than even like that even someone like me or even someone like bankless can i believe so that's why i'm really excited about

this so in saying that you can go check this out it will link to in the youtube description their first episode was just basically describing what is ethereum and going through all that i had to listen to it it was really really cool i think that um they're going to do more of these obviously and i i just can't wait to see what they come up with and what how they explain things because as i said at the end of the day we need more beginner friendly stuff for ethereum um and i think we need it not only from crypto navies but people outside of crypto as well so yeah go check this out if you haven't already so trent van epps uh put out some uh i guess resources about one five five nine uh for developers essentially so

i guess if you're involved with any kind of middleware or user-facing implement uh user-facing kind of like tools within ethereum and you need to kind of like update those tools for eip1559 these resources are going to be your bibles essentially so if that mean if you're if you're that person or or you you're part of a team or whatever and you need these resources this will be linked in the youtube description i just wanted to give a quick shout out here but i also wanted to talk about one other thing when it comes to one five five nine this poll is just hilarious to me because when i okay i'll just read out this poll for those listening because you probably um you know don't know what i'm talking about yet but philippi from uh horizon games here put out a poll where he said what's the

main oh he asked what's the main benefit of the ip1559 now the four options were reducing each supply lower gas prices mev tax or better transaction inclusion user experience now when i voted on this poll i uh it was basically had like no votes to it it had like maybe 10 votes or something like that and i voted for better transaction inclusion user experience because in my mind that is the main benefit of one five five nine but i also made a comment here saying that i was retweeting it for visibility but i already know which option is going to win now of course the reducing heat supply option one why did it win i mean it should be obvious that part of erp 1559 is what got the most attention and got the most marketing

pretty much whenever you spoke about i saw people talking about 1559 unless it was people like me who were really in the weeds they were only focusing on the burn aspect and that's fine i think i i don't have a problem with that but because of that it has led to people thinking that uh and i've seen some prominent developers in this ecosystem thinking that that was the whole point of one five five nine when in reality that wasn't the point of this and i and i went through this like a few weeks ago when i was responding to taylor monahan's threat on this but really the main benefit has always been better transaction inclusion user experience essentially a better fee market a user experience for end users and these end users are not just me and you these are developers too like and people

building smart contracts that need uh to be able to kind of like get good uh estimations on gas prices and easy estimations and also be able to do things around uh the fee market and things like that so from that point of view i don't i kind of like i'm not surprised that the reducing heat supplies or people most know and you can kind of look at the other options i mean third place was lower gas prices which again was never a benefit of 1.559 it was never sold as lower gas prices but that was another thing that i saw people talking about and then the third the fourth thing is mev taxia which i believe most people just don't know what this means so uh that's why i guess like it wasn't voted for but yeah i mean as as kind of like unsurprising it is

as it is to see um i still think it's a little bit sad because it means that essentially i mean maybe not sat maybe sad is the wrong word but it just essentially means that people think that just because most people uh i think that um the main benefit is that it reduces its supply um that that makes it true i don't think it makes it true because the crowd is wrong here the main benefit is the the user experience um upgrades not the reducing eat supply but i i don't think that one takes away from the other because i've gone through all of one five five nines benefits before but it has like four or five key benefits to it and just because uh reducing eat supplies what most people know about doesn't take away from the other benefits so why are we even like really why are

we even focusing on this i know i'm talking about it right now but generally why are people so kind of like focused on this it's absolutely absurd really i just don't get it it's like someone people are trying to win a narrative war here that there shouldn't even be a war over this really at the end of the day 1559 was not included in the network because it reduced the east supply that is not the main reason it was included for i mean that was one kind of reason and that was one thing that people latched on to but a big reason it was included was because of the fact that it had these other benefits to it as well like the better user experience um you know potentially uh making gas fees lower by smoothing out the gas fee mechanism um and and the mav tax which is

basically just referencing the fact that um with kind of like mev with flashbots right now miners don't have to pay eth on to the network to base in fees they can just take a fee outside of the network whereas with erp-1559 they can't do that for the base fee which is the portion that's burned uh and then and then the the other benefit is that uh developers smart contract developers and and layer 2 developers get better kind of like estimations and better uncertainty on when the transactions are going to be included into a block because of this new fee market mechanism here so yeah hopefully that kind of like i just gives more context to this maybe you saw this poll because i did retweet it so i'm assuming that that a lot of you saw this

but um i think it's just important to go over where i guess like the narratives and the actual truth diverge here because we're in a i hate this term but we're in a post-truth world where essentially the truth and facts come secondary to the narratives and the marketing and the um and the everything like that because at the end of the day most people only care about uh what's sold to them the marketing and things like that most people only hear about that and that's what happened with uh 1559 and the reducing e supply here but anyway i'll leave it at that for now thank you all 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 i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone