Elon mentions DeFi, StarkWare raises $75mil and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #85 - 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 is the 25th of march 2021 right everyone let's get right into it a lot happened over the last 24 hours or so uh so i think the biggest thing that a lot of people were talking about was um i guess like i put a tweet out here people rugged us like a 2017 ico scam and this was just like a pure joke um but basically the context behind this was that people actually um you know ended up selling i mean this piece a few weeks ago for 69 million dollars right he's nft uh he sold it for eighth and then he basically um you know the proceeds from that like not all of that was proceeds obviously

he had to pay a fee to the christie's the auction website that that he kind of did the the sale on or the auction on um but yeah essentially there was this article from decrypt that basically said uh people immediately sold all of the eighth for usd so 53 million dollars worth um which uh yeah which was kind of disappointing right for a lot of people but i mean i don't blame him right for doing this you know half of that is taxes for sure um since he's in the us but also you know it doesn't make sense for him to keep the the money in like an extremely speculative asset and all that sort of stuff so i get it but i guess in the article there's also you know a bunch of comments that he made as well um about kind of like the nfts in

general and like the crypto kind of like community and stuff like that that kind of rubbed me the wrong way where he basically was just like he obviously he kind of says like you know nfts are in a bubble and i make i mean yeah okay you can argue that for sure and that's that's fine but like there was there was kind of like um you know stuff like this you know he says i'm not a i'm not remotely a crypto purist i was making digital art long before any of this and if it if all this um uh nft stuff went away tomorrow i would still be making digital art so it's kind of like i mean maybe i'm reading too much into it but it's kind of like he doesn't respect the fact that you know people you know he was able to do this

and he was able to do these kind of things because he has a platform to do it with with ethereum um you know with with nfts and stuff like that so yeah i mean i just kind of felt like that was a bit of a kind of like um you know a bit of a thing to do for someone who i guess you know was uh you know i guess like someone who got a lot of money out of people in his ecosystem right and you know people bought it because i was speculating on it too right and i totally get that but i i don't know i just kind of robbed me the wrong right wrong way then i didn't want to harp too much on about this but as i said i totally don't blame him for selling it for usd uh you know half of it for tax half of

it to do whatever he wants with that's obviously you know more than life changing money for for him and his family and everything like that um and and and you know good good on him for that but i think you know it was kind of like biting the fan at the hand that kind of fed you sort of thing and you know that's what rubbed me the wrong way but in general uh you know good on him for for for you know for for being able to do this and you know he did bring a lot of people into the ecosystem as well as a positive note right a lot of people learned about ethereum and nfts and stuff through people he was kind of one of the first people doing this in a really big way at least the art nfts um and he you know he he obviously exposed

ethereum to a lot of people so from that respect it wasn't like i mean i'm not going to say he was a net negative for the ecosystem or anything like that he was definitely a positive force there um but yeah i hope you know i hope that he does more stuff with the ecosystem on a more positive note as well rather than kind of saying stuff like you know it's all in a bubble and you know i mean sure you can argue that but at the same time it's like you know even if you think it's in a bubble you should kind of work to you know put a light on what's not in a bubble and what the value is here and what you know what the lasting value is and and you know i hope he does some something with that money where he gives

back a little bit to the community whether that be dona donating it to charity in general or like giving to git coin grants or something like that that would be cool um but yeah we'll see we'll see how it happens but honestly he can do what he wants with his money right just like all of us can uh but yeah i hope that he definitely um you know sticks around and is more of a positive force in the ecosystem going forward so elon musk did it today he tweeted out about defy so he said don't defy defy which was which was quite uh quite cool to see i mean you know yesterday or the other day um he kind of like announced that tesla would be accepting bitcoin uh for for their cars and stuff like that which is obviously a big deal i think that was yesterday actually um and

then today he's tweeting about d5 he didn't mention ethereum unfortunately i mean i think at this point it's sad but like you know you know d5 isn't doesn't just exist on ethereum and then people kind of just say d5 is like this general term and then you know refers to all of this stuff but obviously if i was born on ethereum um and most of it if not you know pretty much almost all of it happens on ethereum still all the innovation and stuff like that but you know i think we're getting to a point now where people are are just not going to say ethereum when they mention defy and that's i think that's okay because like in the end people going to google d5 they're going to find ethereum anyway so not not a huge deal there but really cool to see him tweeting

about this and i actually went and looked at um the google trends and i saw that you know i i i searched by hourly and i saw that the kind of minute that he tweeted uh the google trend for the term d5 just shot up right which is natural and i actually look at the google results and they weren't that encouraging i mean if you just google defy there's like a forbes article about it which is just not that great um there's like a few coin desk things which are okay and then there's something about like other blockchains that i've never heard of that popped up in the news section so i was just like you know that's just weird uh you know and d5 pulse was one of the top results which is which is nice but you know it was just a bit of a weird

thing to see there because i never like obviously i'm not going to just google the term d5 right like i already know what it is of course but i think you know we we could do a better job at kind of getting these pages ranked there i mean you know google rankings uh work in very specific ways and you know and if any of you have had experience with like seo before you know what i mean but essentially you know i hope that we can kind of like climb up the rankings there with legit things you know i'd love coin gecko's what is defy kind of ebook to be to be ranked highly on on that page like ideally it would be the first link right um but yeah i just think that uh you know that's just the way it is right now and it's

unfortunate but you know elon's doing some pretty good free advertising right now i mean he has as i mentioned yesterday he has 50 million followers pretty much almost 50 million followers um and you know he's tweeted about ethereum before as well i think you know actually quite a while ago it wasn't recent um you know i think a few months if not like years ago at this point uh so you know next thing was deferred he's played about nfts before as well of course so he seems to be pretty plugged in but of course you know he's doing a bunch of other stuff so he's just got like this this surface level understanding right of a lot of this stuff obviously he's tweeted about dogecoin and things like that but i think that's okay lots of new people seeing there's lots of new people coming into the ecosystem

so just a positive note all round i think so sigma prime one of the uh eth2 developers so um for those who don't know sigma prime is building i guess like an eth2 client called uh oh man the name has kind of like uh lighthouse lighthouse that's what it's called sorry the name escaped me for a second there uh but basically they announced today that they produced the first eth one and eth2 merged transaction uh so this eighth transaction that they produced is using only proof of stake validators uh which is a step towards you know dropping ethereum's energy uh consumption now they're saying you know while this is exciting this isn't like ready for production or anything obviously it's it's it's it's done like as a prototype on on testnets and stuff like that

which is which is still really cool i mean the fact that you know i've talked about how the merger is like top priority right now and the eth2 teams are working on them and of course the eth1 teams are working on it too uh and the fact that we already have this kind of stuff going on is just really really cool and really bullish so yeah kudos to sigma prime for doing this and showing their work here um it's really great to see and i mean i i personally just can't wait for this this this future i mean like we can't say technically that we have proof of stake today i mean we do have a proof of stake network but ethereum itself is is kind of like both right now so i i'm really longing for the day that we get rid of the

proof of work um go fully proof of stake drop that issuance by a lot um you know and and drop that energy usage usually usage by by even more here and we can finally say that ethereum is a proof-of-stake network so yeah for those wondering i'm pretty much like all of the smartest people in ethereum and all the the most important kind of core developers are pretty much working on on the merge right now so you know i would say that i don't know if it's going to happen by end of this year i think that's a that's pretty optimistic you know i would say there's a pretty high chance that it could happen q1 next year um as i've mentioned before so we'll see how that goes but yeah really really cool uh update here from sigma prime today so rainbow wallet uh tweeted out this

kind of like teaser here today where they basically put out a picture of of kind of like a wallet and they have like the the op logo next to uh the ether kind of asset and next to the die asset here now what that means is optimism so basically i guess what rainbow's showing here is that they're going to have optimism support uh when optimism goes live on mainnet of course uh which is which is awesome i mean the fact that they've got like a little logo here to show you where your assets are as well is really important because obviously people want to keep track of their assets and you know when they're when they've got like either their wallets or like dashboards like like zappa and stuff like that and you need to know what network your your kind of assets are on

so i think this is really cool here um and you know i'm kind of wondering when optimism is going to launch at this stage like remember they put out a post saying they'd be live in march and as i've said like there's only a few days left of march so maybe there's going to be a delay here um i did do a recap of all the layer 2 stuff happening in today's daily wear newsletter it's actually um you know pretty pretty uh dense so definitely go give that a read you can kind of see what's happening in the layer two ecosystem um because you know sometimes it might feel like not much is happening because we're so we're also glued to our screens and glued to this ecosystem but like as i was writing it and going through everything i was like wow holy crap like so much is happening

right now in the layer two space that you know even though i follow it every day i had kind of forgotten because of the fact that like this space moves so fast so yeah we'll see if optimism goes live this month still if not i'm sure they have like a pretty legit reason for delaying to maybe april uh we we know that um you know unisop v3 is going to go live you know in may or may 5th and then shortly after that they said they're going to have an optimism implementation so maybe we won't see it till may but i don't think so you know synthetics is already working with optimism and has been for a while i'm sure they have some other apps building on them and stuff like that so they could you know still launch either this month or in april still have

usability and then you know the big guns come out in may with univ3 but yeah good to see rainbow supporting uh you know supporting this already um i'm i'm sure this isn't on obviously the the wallet you can access on your on your phone but uh in their own testing environment so yeah really cool and for those of you who haven't yet definitely go check out this this wallet um the rainbow wallet here it's actually really really pretty uh it works really well i mean it lets you track addresses as well you don't have to just um you know create a wallet on it you can actually watch your existing wallets and it's a really cool way to display your nfts as well on your phone so yeah definitely go check it out so loop ring i mean i've talked about loop bring a lot

before of course and they're doing a lot in the layer 2 space so they basically kind of put out a tweet today saying that you know there's a there's a divide between zk roll-ups and optimistic roll-ups right well no not really because what loopering is doing is that they're saying that now that their smart contract wallet is in the process of compiling to optimism as well so you know on l1 on multiple l2s it's it's your choice uh so basically with your existing blueprint wallet you don't just have to use uh i guess loot brings kind of like technology you can also use optimism and i'm sure they're going to add support for other other kind of layer two solutions as well here this is amazing to see i mean i've i've talked about them to know when but loopering is just so ethereum aligned which i really love

and the fact that they're just like not saying oh we're just gonna work on our own solutions right we're just gonna work on our own zk roll up and and screw everyone else is is amazing i'm glad they're adding support for more kind of solutions here because that's critically important it's it's important that we don't have like i guess a time where it's like layer two maximalism right where you know someone's like oh you know i only liked optimism or i only like loop ring or i i only like stock where or whatever right i feel like you know there's never really going to be some tribalism there because you know people have their own favorites and and whatever and there already has been between you know especially the developers working on these solutions saying you know my solution's better no mind's better but at the end of the

day that's all noise right what really matters is the tech and i'm just glad to see luperin kind of supporting the the real tech that's existing today or it will exist in the future as well so yeah kudos to them you can go watch this kind of video here where they give an overview it'll be linked in the youtube description for you to check out so another layer two update here today arbitram uh so for those who don't know arbitrary is basically i guess uh very similar to optimism in that they're in that they're building optimistic roll-ups uh the major difference here is that they don't have their own virtual machine uh whereas optimism does uh they have the um optimism virtual machine whereas arbitrage rim is uh promising just straight evm compatibility out of the box now what they dropped

today was pretty hype and i didn't see any people talking about it but basically they dropped a new test net but it's not just any test net it's their main net release candidate so what this means is that this is the code base that will be going on to mainnet in in a short while because you know they're obviously going on to on to testing at first because they want to test everything make sure everything's okay you know make sure um you know there's no critical bugs or anything like that and just let it kind of stew for a bit uh but you know they say in the post shortly you know after today where they released this um kind of testing that deployment on to covan they're going to be doing their main net release and once that goes live i mean uh you know developers can already build

on this technology because you can do it on the test net but once that goes out live on mainnet that's when it gets real right everyone's going to be you know checking it out if the people are going to be experiencing these kind of like cheap transactions for a bunch of apps like i'm sure arbitrary has a bunch of launch partners that they're going to be launching with uh so yeah i mean another layer two solution coming um you know uh a pretty big one as well because you know as i said arbitrary is uh very similar to optimism uh whereas they they do promise to have like full avm compatibility without the the need for a new virtual machine or at least like a virtual machine that's very similar like the ovm for example which isn't a knock on optimism or anything like that

but it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out and and see what solutions you know kind of like work better than others or what solutions kind of have different trade-offs and who picks what you know right now i think we're at the point where we have like a bunch of solutions you know arbitrarium stockwear uh you know optimism like these kind of generalized solutions where anyone can kind of build on them um and there's more than that of course but basically it's now like a race to kind of get the apps on board right on your solution now and um it's going to be fragmented for quite a while and there's solutions there as well it connects network and hot protocol that i've spoken about before but for the time being i guess you could call it the short to medium term there's

definitely going to be fragmentation which is going to have to be worked through um and you know we will get to a nice point i think especially with those bridging solutions so speaking of starkwear they raised a lot of money so they it was announced that they raised a series b um yesterday and that they raised 75 million dollars in a funding round led by paradigm now funny thing paradigm is actually the you know one of the main investors or at least the lead investor in optimism as well here um so yeah they're funding uh okay i guess like uh uh starkware too which is which is really interesting because i guess starkway isn't i mean you could say it's a competitor to optimism in that they're building layer two tech but they're actually building very different layer two tech they're building zk roll ups right not

optimistic roll-ups and they're going for a bit of a different approach here but yeah i mean this is a massive round right 75 million dollars that gives them a lot of runway a lot of um kind of i guess uh money to to recruit a lot more people onto the team uh and you know other than paradigm they have a bunch of other heavy hitters on board uh i guess oop there's an ad i i guess uh there was a there were some names up here uh here it is um sequoia founders fund pantera and new investors like three rs capital and and alameda research here um you know uh i think you know there's i i i i kind of assume that paradigm kind of took most of the round considering that they have a lot of money now that their unisop investment alone is worth billions of dollars so

they're not strapped for cash and you know paradigm is known for for making big bets on these teams that they think are going to be like critical to to ethereum's kind of um you know future are they very ethereum aligned uh and starkware is obviously one of them right i mean layer 2 is critical to ethereum's future starkware has some of the best tech out there today they are a killer team they're on the bleeding edge of of this sort of stuff with ck rollups at least um so yeah it makes sense for them to to get a big raise here you know obviously a lot of people are thinking the same thing i am when token at this point right i mean you know inevitably i think everything is going to have a token or whether that is like something that looks more like

equity or whether it's like a staking token or something like that i do think that starkware's going down the path of becoming i guess like a layer two kind of like network that looks like a layer one but inhere instead of like obviously um you know pulling its own security it gets a security from ethereum but there's definitely gonna be a token there uh for sure so we'll see how that goes and it's gonna be one of the more hyped launchers i think of of the year i would assume it's gonna launch sometime this year so we'll see but yeah congrats to the stock we're on the raise i mean i've heard literally nothing but good things about um stockwear as a company as a team and they keep shipping right they ship the dydx stuff the other day they're working with immutable x um uh they're working with a bunch of

other teams as well so yeah really really cool to see this in other news a new kind of default protocol called handle finance announced that they had closed their seed rounds so they raised money from a bunch of different investors you might may have heard of them uh you know distributed global lemniscap uh dakum cms holdings one block orthogonal trading apollo capital moon ventures hard fork ventures the layout and double peak uh so yeah i mean for those who don't know handle finance is building a non-usd stablecoin platform uh basically a foreign exchange kind of platform um and the reason why i i guess like i'm very interested in this protocol is that you know i don't like using usd um because of the fact that it exposes

me to um you know risk where the usd slash aud pair can drift and i can either lose money or i can and i'll or or if i gain money i incur like capital gains taxes which is just like super annoying to to account for and all this sort of stuff so you know i'm actually locked out a lot of the of a lot of the yield farming stuff you know any kind of like i guess fiat that i have i have to kind of take to my bank account and um because it's just too much of a risk to keep it in in usd so from that perspective i like what handle finance is building here where there's going to be it's going to be a similar model to kind of like maker where you collateralize the position with uh with eth and or other kind of like

tokens and mint these these kind of like synthetic stable coins um and there's going to be obviously a you know synthetic aud there's going to be like um you know jpy like all the top kind of currencies japanese yen yeah korean one um all that sort of stuff on the platform so yeah congrats to them on i guess the seed round close here and i'm looking forward to seeing them grow because i would love to be able to use a very liquid you know high market cap aud stable coin to do yield farming and you know without exposing myself to to to the massive risk of the you know the usd aud kind of like trading pair and also the the the capital gains tax headache that that comes with that so the block added a new dashboard today which i thought was very interesting

uh so this dashboard tracks ico uh treasuries now the funny thing is about this is that i remember there was a dashboard for this back in the day and i kind of made a comment here about it uh on on dr newsletter here they basically had a dashboard tracking ico treasuries way back in like 2018 and stuff and obviously back then there was still a lot more eth in these treasuries but now you know the blocks dashboard here you can see that most of the i guess um is in i mean my camera is blocking it but basically on the left is the ethereum foundation uh as uh first place gollum second place gnosis third place and then a bunch of others following that as well um it's funny you know looking at the names here you know cosmos which is obviously um i mean i don't know if

they're they're an ethereum competitor but obviously another layer one blockchain still has a bunch of eth you know 10x a literal scam has a bunch of eighth there um you know the other ones i mean are old names like bloom and ripio are like old 2017 kind of icos here um that i haven't heard of from for quite a while but yeah interesting i mean the eighth foundation one is is whatever like we obviously know where that's going you know gollum's still having 300 000 eth in their treasuries is quite insane they were one of the first icos you know i know they've been doing a bunch of stuff lately um especially like with layer two and things like that so you know there are they are still building but you know i think that project was very very early and they have such a large

treasury that they can just keep building forever at this point um and building towards a solution which is which is fine i think um and then you know you have uh i guess gnosis here which is obviously very ethereum aligned uh you can't see it on on the on the video sorry but like they've got almost i think 90 000 eth um kind of i guess in their treasury and they're building a lot of different products as well so yeah definitely uh i guess like um very very cool to see that but yeah not nowhere near as much ethers that was in treasuries uh kind of like back in the day i remember during 2018 and 2019 there was a ton of eighth in these treasuries and they were uh very i guess um what how can you can you call it they were very i guess

like dumpy i guess you could say they they were dumping each like no tomorrow i mean you could see the flows coming and like obviously eos ended up raising like allegedly four billion dollars worth of eighth they dumped every single each they had and they actually put it into bitcoin so if you're wondering why during 2018 and 2019 the price of eth got so brutalized and we hit 80 a big part of that was because icos were jump dumping their eth on uh sorry the treasuries were dumping their eat on the market but on the flip side a big reason why eth went up in 2017 especially like that's omega rise was because it was being used for icos so i guess like if you were to say what the fair market price was for for for eth during 2017 18 and 19 without the

the kind of like extreme buying pressure for eth due to something that was extremely kind of fleeting here um in in kind of like icos you could say that the fair market price was between 100 and 200 at the time right now obviously i think it's a lot higher than that you know we have like the bustling ecosystems like d5 and nfts and you know eth2 is like you know the first phase is live we've got the merge coming we've got one five five nine coming i mean obviously it's a very different time to what it was back then but i think during those three years the fair market price that you know i guess the wider market was willing to pay for eighth was definitely the one to two hundred dollar mark there and that was a great place to scoop up a lot

of eighth right you had a long time to buy ether between that between a hundred and two hundred dollars which was uh you know obviously i i think a lot of um you know a lot of you would have would have scooped some up there especially if you were around back then um you know obviously i i bought as much as i could back then but at the same time it's always hard buying during a bear market right especially when you don't know right you don't like ethereum oh man i've gone through it before i'm not going to rehash what i said but it was just a different time let's put it that way uh very different time but glad that the community kept building and we got over this kind of like hurdle of ico ico treasury is kind of selling here so ether scan dropped a new feature

today basically you can go to this page etherscan.io airdrops and you can actually see which projects have done airdrops and you can actually you can kind of like see all the details about it and you can go to where you need to to claim it as well now i think this is really cool because there are airdrops that people just don't know about right there there are so many of these that you just you look at and you're like okay you know what since when did this happen right well i have money sitting here holy crap like i'm gonna go claim that um so yeah i mean i think we're gonna see a lot more of uh kind of like i mean the page is what you see in front of me right there's a bunch of projects on there but i think there's a lot more that

people just don't know about and they've got like tokens for so yeah kudos to etherscan for putting this out there i think it's this kind of really important to letting people know about what they've got um and you know i guess like maybe you've got some other some some kind of stuck in these projects i mean like just looking at this list here ruler protocol and mask network and mural i guess those three projects are something that i don't see talked about too much on on crypto twitter and the other ones like pull together and for a combo and tornado cash one inch and uni swap i mean obviously everyone knows about the uni supplement one inch and tornado cash airdrop and and maybe not so much about the for a combo airdrop i actually didn't know that they did an airdrop so there you go but you know the other ones

up there i guess pull together people or people also knew about but in general there's a lot of these ones that you just don't know about especially if you're not in the ecosystem every day and there's just free money kind of sitting there for you um for you to claim basically so yeah really really cool feature from etherscan here and i've said it before and i'll say it again we don't deserve either scan they provide such an amazing service across a bunch of different things that they do on their website so yeah thanks to them for putting this out there so last thing here is denny's from kyber network uh put out i guess a new podcast called the eth life podcast that he's launched here so this podcast is dedicated to the countless ethereums passionately building on the best blockchain in the world in in in denis's words here um inspired

by uh bankless and ethub uh they aim to amplify the ethereum community's voice spread awareness and champion the decentralized cause really really cool i mean obviously a lot there's a lot of podcasts now right i mean some of you are probably listening to the kind of this this refuel on on on a podcast version but i i don't think that's a bad thing that we have more and i think there's always stories to be told here unfortunately at ethub we had to kind of pause the guess that we were doing so now we only do the weekly recaps uh and obviously you know bankless in the defiant uh do a lot of stuff as well there uh d5 dad does stuff as well with yield tv but i think there's always room for more here and talking to like the everyday ethereums as well right the people that

you don't necessarily hear from too much uh you know there's the i guess you could say there's like the famous aetherians then there's like the everyday ones that are just grinding building really interesting stuff that aren't like quote-unquote twitter thought leaders and stuff like that uh that that definitely need a spotlight so i think this is what dennis is trying to do here so yeah if you haven't check this out yet be sure to it'll be linked in the youtube description uh like everything else in in today's refuel all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone